Abusing tempo automation when scoring to picture?

[Syneast]

When scoring to picture, do you guys abuse tempo automation like a maniac to make the music fit to the movie?

Like, "ok, I'll put a bar of 6/4 here with a tempo of 103.12083 bpm and then I'll change the next bar to 3/4 with a tempo of 98.232, because then it will line up with my hit points."

I know that this is all well and good with samples, but I'm worried that if I ever get good enough to record something with a live orchestra, the musicians are going to absolutely hate me for these weirdly specific tempo changes.

How do you do it?

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[fan455]

Yeah, that's why I don't want to use tempo automation. Either fixed tempo + slightly shifted notes or simply recording at 120bpm forgetting the tempo makes me feel better.

 

[Cletus McBone]

Are you trying to hit too many things? Are your sync tolerances too tight? Are you trying to hit everything on a downbeat.

I don't know your method, but, try this if it's different from what you're doing:

• if your cue should be split into separate starts, then do that;
• judiciously choose only the essential hit points of a start (if you're granted that freedom);
• determine if any should be dead hits;
• determine which hits have a ± 0.08 sync tolerance;
• determine if any are loose enough for a ± 0.12 threshold;
• determine which hits should be on a downbeat, on a beat, or on a subdivision;
• place locked markers labeled with shorthand for the sync tolerances and metric placements;
• test your ideal tempo first to see how everything lines up, and continue testing adjacent tempos on either side to find one near enough to your original tempo that aligns most consistently with your marker labels.

From there make the minimal necessary adjustments to meet the missed thresholds as subtly as you can. Remember that Carl Stalling caught everything in sight with fixed click loops and free timing.

Your instinct to want to avoid fussing around too much with a click tempo for live recording is correct, but subtle ritards, accels, and micro tempo changes of around ±1 or 2 BPM can usually work fine as long as they're not all bunched up and do not occur on too regular a basis, generally speaking.

 

[Daniel James]

When scoring to picture, do you guys abuse tempo automation like a maniac to make the music fit to the movie?

Like, "ok, I'll put a bar of 6/4 here with a tempo of 103.12083 bpm and then I'll change the next bar to 3/4 with a tempo of 98.232, because then it will line up with my hit points."

I know that this is all well and good with samples, but I'm worried that if I ever get good enough to record something with a live orchestra, the musicians are going to absolutely hate me for these weirdly specific tempo changes.

How do you do it?

If there is temp music I will use a taptempo BPM calculator because often the picture is edited to the temp so once I know that everything lines up pretty well. Failing that I usually find a general tempo (assuming we are not randomly speeding up and slowing down drastically within a single cue) then get the hit points to the nearest 4th or 8th, then adjust the time signature somewhere before it to make it land on a downbeat. Its not always super tight but sometimes actually hitting on the change makes too much of a statement. Storywise if we are going from something like a build up to the action, so long as the music feels like its changing or building appropriately you don't usually need to hit that change exactly on a cut. Worth remembering also that you can keep the same tempo and change to a triplet grid every now and again to shave a few more ms off.

Not touching the tempo usually works better for sharing projects in a collaboration scenario as well as live recording. Cause if you fuck up setting up that tempo correctly in a session you are gunna be in for a headache.

I only ever really adjust the tempo if its something super important that needs to be hit within a 16th or smaller, everything else seems to usually work fine with a good initial tempo and signature change.

If you need to work out the best tempo to get most of your hits close to a 4th/8th I use this tool occasionally: https://www.fransabsil.nl/htm/eventhit.htm

-DJ

 

[KEM]

This is exactly the kind of discussion I want to be a part of as this is something I’m trying to improve on as well, hopefully there’s a ton of insight to be shared here

 

[Manaberry]

I usually just abduct the director and the video editor to force them to match the video editing to my music.
Works pretty well.

@Daniel James Amazing little tool, thanks for sharing!

 

[José Herring]

I agree with @R.G.. Sounds like you're Mickymousing it. Trying to hit too many things.

In any given scene there's only really about a few really important hit points. The rest are kind of not important or don't need to be addressed at all.

The most important part of scoring to picture is that you get the mood of the movie and the scene correctly. The next important part is that you hit only what you need to when its needed. It's the main reason why HZ can repeat the same rhythm varying it only slightly then phrase the big entrance at the right point in the music without ever breaking a sweat or even changing the tempo or the meter for 7 minutes. He knows how and when to change.

That doesn't mean that you don't ever change the tempo or the meter, it just means that you can't be so obvious about it.

but, I have from time to time been like, Oh this downbeat will hit just perfectly if I ease the tempo down by 2.165bpm. You can do that as long as it is subtle enough and nobody will ever know the difference. It's an art and not a science so you do what is tasteful and sounds good and tells the story.

Many times people make the mistake also of starting a piece of music, it starts out fine then by bar 8 they are so locked into their song that it divorces itself from what's on the screen. It's always a fine line and the best can walk it well.

 

[The Retroblueman]

I'm very new to all this and no expert, but it does raise an interesting point - if you gave pro musicians a click at 98bpm then you would expect them to lock into it. But, if you asked three pro musicians separately to play 98bpm with no reference then they would probably get extremely close, but I suspect it is more likely that you would get (for example) 98.52bpm, 97.2 bpm and 99.1 bpm and that isn't a criticism - I think it's very impressive that they would get that close. But that does then make me wonder if it actually matters whether you give them a click of 98.232 or 98 in the first place...

That being said, I think a click going from 98.232 one bar to 103.12083 the next seems to be pushing it a bit too far. Although is it necessarily different from a click that goes from 98 bpm to 104 bpm bearing in mind the thoughts above? I can see though that a steady 16 bars of 98bpm (or 98.232) is probably going to lead to a less problematic session than 16 bars with eight different tempi!

Be interested in thoughts.

 

[Robin Thompson]

• determine which hits have a ± 0.08 sync tolerance;
• determine if any are loose enough for a ± 0.12 threshold;

Can you elaborate on what you're referring to here? As a relative newbie I'm not familiar with sync tolerance, etc.

 

[Cletus McBone]

Can you elaborate on what you're referring to here? As a relative newbie I'm not familiar with sync tolerance, etc.

At points way past since well before any of us were born, amongst editors of all sorts a consensus formed regarding sync tolerances between picture and sound for different types of alignment requirements routinely encountered. They spoke in frames, half frames, 1/8th frames (using sprocket holes as a guide). A common rule-of-thumb scale emerged that counted frames from 4,3,2,1,0.

4 frames was considered just tolerable for the loosest ("softest") types of broad alignment (4 fr at 24fps being 1/6th of a second, e.g., 16th sextuplets where q=60).

After that was the 3 fr tolerance, 1/8th (0.125) of a second, e.g., 32nds at 60 bpm), then 2 fr, then 1, then 0. A 1 fr tolerance for hard sync was considered to be very difficult to detect even by most editors themselves and generally considered acceptable for all but the deadest of dead hit sync, such as a cut from dark to bright on top of a sharp sound edit.

But for us moderns who don't deal with frames, 3 frames (0.125) became 0.12 (moderately soft sync), 2 frames (0.083) became 0.08 (moderately hard), and 1 frame (0.04167) became 0.04 (hard), and zero is dead sync.

 

[ptram]

and zero is dead sync.

Since the light travels way faster than sound, doesn't dead sync equate to out of sync? If they happen at the same moment in the reel, the sound will arrive later to the audience!

Paolo

 

[JJP]

Since the light travels way faster than sound, doesn't dead sync equate to out of sync? If they happen at the same moment in the reel, the sound will arrive later to the audience!

There is some truth to this, but it has more to do with our expectations and how we perceive sound than the actual physical time for sound to travel from the speakers. We are accustomed to some small delay between images and sound, but also in our reaction to images which is what music helps to shape.

With music we can afford to be a little late (3-4 frames as mentioned above to still be "in sync"), but you never want to be early. This gives the viewer a split-second to process the image and then react emotionally with the music, much as we do in real life. Plus, if there are sound effects like an explosion at the hit point, they will be tightly synched and may conflict with the music.

These reasons are why with good film composers you will often see music build up to a big explosion, then the music will often pause for the blast, then continue.

It's also worth noting that most well-edited scenes will have a natural tempo to them. If you can find that you end up catching all kinds of things. It's incredibly frustrating to score a poorly-edited scene.

 

[timprebble]

If there is temp music I will use a taptempo BPM calculator because often the picture is edited to the

I use an iOS app that listens & identifies & plots tempo:

liveBPM - Beat Detector

Sharpen your sense of time! liveBPM is the tempo monitoring tool for drummers, bands and DJs. It detects music and beats via the microphone and continuously displays the current tempo in beats per minute (BPM). It is easy to use and delivers high-quality results while being energy efficient...

apps.apple.com

also very handy for noting tempos of other music I hear too...