Audio Support in Studio Artist

[Synthetik]

We're providing some limited audio support for movie processing in Studio Artist in the upcoming 3.5.3 release. That release will provide audio pass-through when processing a source movie that has an audio track associated with it. This works for the Process Movie menu commands as well as Movie Streams. This also opens up the ability to do better keyframing to match audio hit-point cues in your source movie when building a keyframed PASeq. You can do hit points based on audio now by essentially making a quicktime movie that consists of an audio track and then bringing it into Studio Artist as the source movie. You can then play the source movie of the audio track in the source area, stopping playback at hit points in the audio and then adding key frames at those hit points. I think there are a lot of opportunities for people to use Studio Artist to create animations to music that haven't been heavily explored up until this point. Embedded bezier frames in paint action steps being one of the really big features that is relatively unused that could really be taken advantage of in this context. One of our users Chuck Floading also suggested an audio synch technique using iMovie i wanted to pass along. Basically ,the idea is to build a movie in iMovie that consists of different source images at the different desired audio synch points. So you start a new movie in iMovie, then add an audio track, then place different images at the different frame times you want to use as hit points. Then you export that movie and then use it as a source movie in studio artist. The locations of the different source images in the movie are your visual references for the various hit point keyframe times. So there are some creative ways to do audio synch today in existing Studio Artist 3.5.2. With upcoming 3.5.3 you will also have the ability to pass through the source movie audio which will make this whole process even easier. We're looking at additional audio features for version 4. Feel free to suggest additional audio features we should be looking at for future versions of Studio Artist.

[Donna Kuhn]

I have enjoyed using some vj applications and visualizers where the visuals are driven by the music, are reacting to the music. Since they are usually made for live performances or to zone out while listening to Itunes there is usually no way to capture the video except for screen recording. Visual Music. That would be wonderful.

[keith Ingersoll]

Ahhhh, yes this is what my original thoughts were. As Donna Kuhn mentioned Visual music. Then when my noobie knowledge kicked in I found myself lost and mired. The update 3.5.3a3 osx you sent me was a large help (didn't know it at the time)
Just wanted to acknowledge your personal concern.
To my knowledge now, the release you sent me works fine.
Whattanicebunchofpeople!

[Thorrific]

Hooray!!! Anything you can do with audio in SA would be great
Maybe something where you can "paint with sound" ?? Assign different colors to notes, positon to pitch, or vary it all up

[Synthetik]

Quicktime actually has something build in that provides graphic eq style modulators for octave bands you could use as control modulators based on the frequency content of the audio. the issue is that they only work for quicktime movies playing back. There is no way i'm aware of to access this function for a specific frame or audio track time, so it kind of precludes using it for paseq frame processing. To bad because that would make it a lot easier to add frequency style modulation.

Of course i could write my own octave band filters and pre-process the audio track into a control track and then use that. But i think i need to finish version 4 development before we get into anything like that.

Anything additional with audio will be in version 4, but i did want to drop the pass through functionality into 3.5.3 because i'd really like to see people get more into animating to sound, especially doing abstract animations to sound. I just feel like there is a lot of potential that people aren't really exploring. The Boston Visual Marathon was what really got me thinking about this.

[Thorrific]

I am so excited just about the audio pass-through!!

[Michael Theodore]

It would be great to be able to break up the audio spectrum into different bands and use those as control sources for various parameters. However, even just the ability to get the overall rms-loudness (i.e., some kind of envelope following) from the audio signal taken as a whole and use that as a control stream would be great.

Another thing that would be cool is some kind of gating. If loudness (or whatever) exceeds a certain threshold, then allow a certain event to happen. For example: loud drum hits triggering paint strokes, while silence triggers nothing.

More thoughts about it later, m