setting the painting to a tempo

[Donna Kuhn]

is there a way to get studio artist to match the beat of the music i'm using? 

[Synthetik]

You could keyframe specific things to frame times that corresponded to beat boundaries in a music track. Assuming what you want to match corresponds to something you could keyframe.I've seen people load a source movie that is basically just a static image with an audio track, and then use that to manually define frame times for hit events in the audio.

I've also seen people retime rendered video after the fact in final cut or after effects to synch things up to audio.