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The Chicago Tribune James Coates Computers column: Follow directions on Sonicfire Pro 4 to add songs and effects with no copyright fears
(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jul. 16--Here's my plan for making a million bucks with a homemade video:
As the film starts, I'm wearing a white lab coat, sitting at a table littered with Bunsen burners and test tubes. I peer at my laptop screen, from which I chant, Gregorian-style, the Wikipedia.org entry about how to make LSD.
The background music, of course, will be the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." I will then doctor the video file of my performance using all of the special effects to create psychedelic whirls, flashes of color, distortions, explosions into dozens of identical screen displays and other hallucinogenic fillips.
My performance and video editing will be so brilliant that fame will be a slam-dunk when I upload it to YouTube, Google Video, Blip TV and a few other of the burgeoning collection of video sharing sites where millions of amateur performances now are being posted. Every now and then one of these clips gets picked up by the binary buzz and rises to the top, making people all over the world tune in. Can a gig on American Idol be far behind?
Like a great many other computer hobbyists, I've got the gear.
I found a white lab coat at the Rush Medical College bookstore. My son's first chemistry set will provide the props. My $300 Panasonic digital camcorder resting on my tripod will turn my solo performance into MPEG format video files for uploading to YouTube, et al. It will be no problem at all ripping "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" from a CD and inserting it as the soundtrack using my home movie editing software.
Whoops. I've just crossed the line between artists and lawyers. There is no way that the Beatles' law firms will let me get away with stealing their performance in my drive to get onto the world stage via Google Video, et al. The copyright on Beatles music won't be in the public domain until well after 2030.
And so we finally reach the topic of today's column, which is a review of an expensive but perhaps essential tool for the hordes of home video dabblers who dream of producing stuff on their PCs and Macs that will be suitable for mass distribution.
You cannot get on MTV by using "We Are the Champions" for your kids' soccer game films. Ditto for "We Will Rock You." Forget about "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for introducing your garage band.
You can't even play "Happy Birthday" while filming your tot's cake and cookies if you hope to put the clip before a mass audience. The copyright to "Happy Birthday" reportedly brings in $1 million per year to its owner, Time Warner Inc. Get details at UnhappyBirthday.com.
So what's an amateur auteur to do about acoustics? Start by logging on to SmartSound.com.
There you can learn about Sonicfire Pro 4, a $199 program with 2 CDs that deliver easily learned software along with potentially dozens of hours worth of copyright-free music clips that can be pasted with abandon into home videos.
Note that I mentioned learning. This kind of stuff isn't even North Korean rocket science, but it does take a bit of effort to figure out how to use it and then to go through the labor of actually embedding copyright-free soundtracks onto one's video.
Still, the software will even analyze a clip to gauge the speed of motion and changes of colors to create background music tracks that follow the action with the downbeats and upbeats coming in just where they work best.
Beyond that the program includes a Mood Mapping module that draws from a library of musical performances to convey changing emotions as a film progresses. There are tracks for nostalgia and action, for exuberance and dejection and even rousing "Guitar Grooves" that work better than "We Will Rock You" anyhow.
Sonicfire Pro 4 comes out of the box as a stand-alone program that lets users import most video files into the familiar timeline display of clips used in movie editing programs like Magix Movie Edit Pro, Apple iMovie, Roxio VideoWave, Ulead Studio and even the higher-end Adobe Premier and Avid packages. In some cases the Sonicfire engine is built into the editing software, but you still need to pay for the music.
And pay you will. Beyond the included music with the Sonicfire Pro 4 software it can cost up to $19.95 for an additional single copyright-free performance, say of John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever." Most customers who want more music will prefer to buy whole CDs of sound loops that cost as much as $99.95. That's mighty steep for an amateur, but one CD can go a mighty long way.
And that makes Sonicfire Pro 4 the simplest way, short of piracy, for hobbyists to put excellent sound to home movies. And a very Happy unBirthday to you, Time Warner.
Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail jcoates1@aol.com. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.
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