Customer Reviews

Cinescore

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Movie lovers and film makers all know that it takes more than excellent video to make a good movie. Excellent video combined with mediocre sound quality and an average musical score always results in a disappointing movie viewing experience. Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" provides a classic example. Try watching the famous shower scene with the sound turned down. Without terrific music, the scene is transformed from bone-chilling to mundane.

You may not have a composer like Bernard Herrmann to score your video production, but with Cinescore from Sony Creative Software, you have access to thousands of musical possibilities that can be custom-matched to your video.

I recently produced and edited a 52 minute video production using Vegas Pro 8 (another amazing product from Sony, but that's a different review). The visual flow was engaging and appealing. The audio quality was likewise excellent. But a killer score was needed to give the viewing experience emotional impact. The deadline loomed. No time to create and produce the essential musical soundtrack. This is the point where many independent filmmakers take the risk of using someone else's copyrighted material. Cue the "Theme from Dragnet".

Enter Cinescore. After careful (but quick) research, Cinescore was selected. Cinescore ships with 10 primary themes (songs) that can be extrapolated into thousands of musical permutations all with a few mouse clicks. Cinescore is user friendly and intuitive. I was adding high quality customized music to my video within 20 minutes of opening the box.

Here is what is so amazing about Cinescore. You don't have to be a musician to use it. In fact, no musical training is necessary at all. The process is simple. Select the scene you would like to score and consider the emotion you wish to induce in the viewer. Is it funny? Scary? Dramatic? Somber? Inspiring? Then, audition the available themes in Cinescore to find the best match for your scene. You can easily alter the mood, intensity, and tempo of your selection to create unique music for your scene. Then, click on "generate music" and Cinescore creates a musical selection that is precisely matched to the length of the video scene. It's literally that fast and simple.

If you have more time and a creative appetite, Cinescore provides many point-and-click options that enable you to tweak the musical selections into sonic perfection. The resulting audio is commercial CD quality and royalty free!

Although Cinescore can function as a stand-alone score generator, I installed it as a Vegas Pro 8 plug-in. This enables Cinescore to open seamlessly within Vegas. And it was a crash-free experience.

Although I am an amateur, products from Sony Creative Software (Vegas and Cinescore) gave me the tools I needed to create a pro quality video production. The proof? After viewing my video, many people assumed that I hired a professional production house to create the video. That's the ultimate!

If you want to add royalty free background music to you video this is the way to go, especially if you are using Vegas. It is a seamless plugin, and there is a good selection of music on the program CD.

As a professional ventriloquist and magician, I have long struggled with the issues of obtaining rights to use music in my performances. No more! This tool is terrific for creating background music for my magic effects as well as "bumper" tracks that play while I transition ventriloquist characters. And it's all royalty free. It's easy to use, produces final songs with terrific audio quality, and lets you go back and make changes as needed. If only writing jokes were this easy!

I bought this for my son for his birthday. He had done research into the specifics and was pretty sure this would do what he needed. Well, we all know how that goes. You get it and install it only to discover it's not nearly as easy to use or versatile as they claim. Not so with this product. My son has raved about it and shows it to anyone who sits still long enough.

Sony has discontinued ALL support and no longer sells or supports the Theme packs. The use of the package is reliant on the content theme packs. While the package comes with some, Sony previously had a wide selection. Sony Creative Software has not provided existing customers any possible means to continue to get content for this product and no indication of product future direction with regards to a replacement, access to theme packs or upgrade.

I mean, it's a pretty simple tool, and it has a very uniform interface wrt: the other tools, so there aren't many surprises here. It's a little less flexible than I'd expected, but it works well, and it comes with a surprisingly large amount of content, nearly half of which is pretty good, and a rare few of which (particularly The Sound Of Evil) are actually capable of generating music which seems emotional and fits its content.

I expected meh. I got meh plus. This isn't a world changing, game-rewriting tool, but it's well worth the money, better than I expected, and one hell of a timesaver if you don't have a dedicated musician.

It is a fair amount of work to use, though.

I love picking out music for my videos, but hate the copyright infrigement issues. Personally, I think there should be an easier way for a small-time hobby videographer to beable to pay royalties to use original music, but that's another story. I bought Cinescore based on how much I liked working with Vegas Pro, Sony's video production software.

Cinescore is everything that it is cracked up to be, and I was pleasantly suprised that I was able to "plug it in" to Vegas and create a new score for one of my pieces to replace a long passage of original music I had chosen for the score. With the new score, I could post to YouTube without worry or infringement!

Some of the music does sound "canned", to be sure, but if you choose carefully and explore the options (there are many many options) you can come up with some nice, royalty-free scores. The fact that it plugs in to Vegas seemlessly, was the icing for me. Nice package.

So far I've only used it on a few videos, however the comments from viewers (unsolicited) were that the music was very professional and fit the action. Only drawback is that it is not easy to alter the music at a precise point. Have to score smaller scenes to do it. However, for the most part after only a few uses (and I expect to get better with it over time) the product performs as I expected and I'm pleased. Web site has good tutorials as well.

I could only find one category that I would consider good -- the rest were annoying to painfully bad. If you want some soft mellow background music, you are mostly out of luck. Oh, you can order some more packages of terrible music on-line. The only one I could stand was the Wedding Package, but I don't see any weddings on the horizon. And they are expensive. Just go to the Sony web site and listen to the sample music and it is representative of what is in this software. Total waste of money. Pinnacle Studio has far better selections, but obviously they don't work with Sony Vegas Pro 8. Otherwise, it works as advertised. I just do not understand whey they didn't offer more variety for other generations of music lovers.

I recently acquired Cinescore only to find it does not import AVI video from digital cameras (mine are Canons). Sony recommends getting a 3rd party encoder to solve the problem, a solution I find very weak. I have found that if I import the AVI file into Adobe Premiere and re-export it as an AVI file, Cinescore can then import the video. This is also not a very good solution, but one I prefer to installing yet another piece of software.

The other problem I have with Cinescore is that it is very non-intuitive how the music parameters affect the generated music. The parameter descriptions are very general. It is pretty much a trial and error process to see if the modifications produce something interesting.

Beyond these issues, I find the software useful, and easy to apply in laying down audio tracks on video. It would be nice if it had more audio tracks to work with so you could mix and compose. Right now, I use Sound Forge for this.

If you don't plan on tweaking the music a lot, Cinescore is an effective solution to scoring video - at least that coming from a camcorder.