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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Sony Acid Pro and Vegas are crap!

I don't know how many times Acid Pro and Vegas have let us down. Sony are great making hardware but when it comes to software they are pretty weak.
Very unreliable and unstable.
Crashes in the middle of doing very simple audio edits.

And what makes it worse is the fact that it sometimes (more than just 'sometimes' actually!) creates bad backups that will not load!!!!!

Unfortunately there is just so much of "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique" already pieced together in Sony Vegas that we can't start again in another editor.
Our initial aim was to do all the animation and video editing in Blender 3D and the cleanup and sync in Reaper - a shareware product. But Reaper is weak on it's visual capabilities. It simply cannot cope with video playback properly - which is a terrible pity because Reaper is probably the very best audio editor I've ever used. Fast, reliable and well designed.

I really wish Sony could've spent more time creating a competent editor rather than focusing on overloading their software with unnecessary frills and gimmicks.
They should take a long, hard look at Open Source software to appreciate the value of reliability and stability over cosmetics.


Shane

Monday, September 01, 2008

Mr. Humpfninkel - Update Music

We've been real busy lately with composing the score to "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique".

I've mentioned in an earlier posting how much more difficult it is to compose the music for a comedy as opposed to a drama or horror. Those other genre's are more forgiving when it comes to the soundtrack whereas a comedy requires much more thought and effort.
Think abut it - it's easier to play a bunch of random notes on a keyboard/synthesizer and come up with an acceptable horror score. You are more likely to hit minor keys and 'bum notes' that add to a creepy atmosphere.

But comedy needs mostly major keys with playoff minor notes at various intervals to break up and enrich the sound.

Over the weekend we were watching TV and the Leslie Nielsen "Mr. Magoo" live action movie was on. Terrible film but it features a fantastic comedy score. It really gave us a lot of inspiration. If a film that bad can manage to salvage the occasional (very occasional!) laugh purely through the use of clever musical interludes, it just goes to show how incredibly important having good music is.

I always say that a movie is 20% visuals and 80% sound!