The Winner
Congratulations to Phil, as he was randomly selected from all the comments to win the T-Shirt! If for some reason he is unable to fulfill his duties as T-Shirt-winner, I'll randomly select someone else to take his place.
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November 21, 2006
November 20, 2006
Soundbooth AutoComposer Results
I've noticed that there hasn't been as much discussion as we expected about Soundbooths AutoComposer feature and I realized that the downloads for the Soundbooth Scores are a little buried on Adobe Labs. We've added some more links (including a sticky post in the forum) to highlight them better, but I thought the best thing to do was to play with it myself and post some of my results.
First, some background: AutoComposer lets you open a special file, called a Soundbooth Score Template, that represents a whole song. The Scores are created and recorded by musicians but include a whole lot of metadata and a lot more audio than a normal, linear song. All that metadata and audio is arranged in a special way so that Soundbooth can adjust the length and some of the feel of the music based on input from you, but without requiring any specific musical knowledge to get good results.
What I did was take a video we've used in some demos and cut it down to about 40 seconds. I then used the AutoComposer to add three different soundtracks, one for each of the Soundbooth Scores we've posted on the Labs site. I also limited myself to spend no more than five minutes playing with each score to see what I could get done very quickly. I've linked to each of the results below. (I decided to link to them in another window so you wouldn't have to download them all if you didn't want to--make sure your pop-up blocker is off before you click.)
First, the original movie with a piece of the original soundtrack:
View Original Video
Now, this is the one I think turned out the best because the music is electronic, which matches the feel of the video:
Video with River of Unreality Score
And the other two scores. First, there's New York Night which is more "atmospheric" or "cinematic." It doesn't match the mood as well, but it still works:
Video with New York Night Score
And then there's Slow Dirty Funk, which is, well, you get the idea.
Video with Slow Dirty Funk Score
Go play around with them yourself and see what you can do! We plan on including dozens of these Soundbooth Scores with Soundbooth. Also, when we nail down the format completely (the Scores are in just as much beta as the software!) we'll release instructions so that anyone who is more comfortable with creating music can create their own for use in Soundbooth.
November 14, 2006
100th Post T-Shirt
A while back I decided that I wanted to make my 100th post into some sort of prize, like the book I gave away a few months ago. Well, my 100th post came and went without me realizing it but I still have this super-cool Audition team T-shirt that I’ve been saving for the occasion so I thought I’d give it away anyway.
Sorry for the horrible picture…the only camera I had handy was an iSight, and I couldn’t get the lighting to work. It’s hard to tell from the picture, but it's quite a cool shirt--I think it was the most popular one we’ve ever made for the team.
To win this lovely piece of design work just leave a comment on this post and describe your favorite thing about Audition in 50 words or less. Make sure to include your email address in that field so I can contact you. I’ll pick one comment at random at the end of this week and then mail the T-shirt out shortly thereafter. Good luck!
November 07, 2006
Bob D. on Soundbooth
Big Bob D. gets two posts in a row for his prolific education attempts. He's just posted some of his perspectives on Soundbooth over at his blog, along with a few tips on what it can do for folks who haven't taken a look at it yet.
November 06, 2006
Video Compression Walkthrough
My esteemed colleague Bob Donlon has posted an outstanding tutorial on video compression over at the Adobe Design Center. If you ever feel baffled by the array of options open to you when doing video compression (I know I do) or just want an overview of the whole compression process, this is a great post to read.
November 03, 2006
More Soundbooth News
With everythign else that's going on I'm days behind in the Soundbooth coverage out there, but here are a bunch more links to articles, posts, and mini-reviews/previews. As always let me know in the comments if you've seen a good post on Soundbooth and I'll include it in my next roundup.
November 02, 2006
Tone Creation in Audition
I just saw that Craig Anderton over at EQ Magazine has put together a nice tutorial on creating sweeps and other test tones using Audition. It's perfect for all you gearheads out there wanting some tones to run your hardware through it's paces.