Video/Media Player in Musescore

• Feb 11, 2011 - 18:57

I got to say, Musescore is a dream come true for me and many others.
I have tried multiple other programs like Finale and Sibelius (just the demos) but Musescore works just great, especially since it can use soundfonts, so the sound possibilities are endless.

But anyway, I did notice a rather nice feature in Sibelius. A media/video player window, in which you could watch a video file in time with the composed music.

For an aspiring film composer this is an extreamily helpful tool. I haven't done much composing for video yet, though I have done a little, but I needed to switch back and forth between Musescore and my video editing software where I had the audio file on the timeline and I would just overwrite the saved audio and then replace it in the timeline with the newer version of the score. I hope that makes sense.
This method works okay, but it would really speed things up if one could hear the score in real time with the video in the same program that the score is being composed.
Now this may sound a bit beyond that of a simple notation software, but Musescore is definitely able to become more than a simple notation software. There are a lot of composers out there who have there eye on film scoring and this would be a real boost.
As I said, I have yet to do much film scoring, but from what I have done I can say this, you got to try it! Even with something simple, it is a real joy hear your own music playing/accompanying a film. Preferably more than just background music, but timed with the film. That is where a video window comes in.
I don't know much about programing or developing, but if I did I would definitely consider helping out with this great program.
Did you people have to take years of college courses to learn this stuff or is there some way to learn it yourself?
Well let me know what you think and Thanks a Million.
God bless.
Gabriel


Comments

Although I haven't played with it at all, if you can get an invite to use musescore.com, there is a video score capability. You could upload your video to YouTube and sync your MuseScore music file to it. I'm not sure if it's exactly what you want, but if I understand correctly, I think it's pretty similar.

In reply to by newsome

Yes I have seen that as well, but from what I know of it, this is just something that you can combine your pre-composed music with a video.
What I was thinking of, and what I saw in Sibelius, is a plugin or a window that plays video files while you are in the program.
This would be mainly for assisting with the actual composition process, so that you can watch the video in Musescore while editing the music. For timing's sake.
Thanks for the response :)
Gabriel

+1 for a video player, I switched from Sibelius, FL Studio, Cubase, and Windows Movie Maker to MuseScore, LMMS, Ardour, and Kdenlive, and I like to make music to video. Right now I am converting a song I made to a video, and even though I just imported the midi from Sibelius to MuseScore, the timing is slightly off now, and a video player would help me get it in sync.

This is the video where I'm redoing my music (the scores not changing, I'm just using all free and open source instruments/software)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS5jyfhEOBU

And I have to say, so far this is the ONLY feature that MuseScore seems to not have, otherwise ALL of the software I listed above is absolutely amazing. Especially with the latest release of LMMS, I can finally import the midi from MuseScore, and it doesn't mess it up! Score with MuseScore, save as midi, import to LMMS + free soundfonts (and amazing sounding soundfonts if I do say so myself), then export each individual instrument to a lossless wav, then import each of those to Ardour for the final mixdown, and this creates GREAT sounding music.

In reply to by KoRnKloWn

OK, I'm looking through the plugin development documentation, and I can't find any kind of objects or anything that will help with syncing the video. Trying to find anything that has to do with the playback of the score, but I can't find anything. If someone can find it, and post, I'd appreciate it. I'm going to continue to look through the documentation.

maybe it's in the QT documentation?

In reply to by KoRnKloWn

Maybe you should post in the Plugin part of the forum. You might get more assistance there. People who know about this type of stuff would probably gather in that area.
Glad things are advancing. :D Keep me/us informed.
Is there some pre-made (maybe open source) media player that you could link to the cursor, instead of having to build your own video player.
Like I said I don't know much about this, but I'd love to help in any way I can.

In reply to by KoRnKloWn

Unfortunately, I rather doubt what you're proposing would be possible. The plugin architecture is not nearly that powerful. The cursor object has nothing to do with playback; it's just a way of having the plugin loop through notes. I mean, you could possibly use it to write your own playback routine from scratch, but I don't think you'd be able to get at tempo change info.

You can use the cursor object to get the current position in milliseconds, I'm going to see if I can't use that to sync the video

This is absolutely true! A video-player feature would lift Musescore to a level 100% compatible with Sibelius and Dorico. With scoring for film and video you sometimes need timing down to a split second, and this can only be done, if there is a video window in sync with the score. There is a silly workaround, where you need to downgrade to Musescore 3.somenting and install a program, that will sync with yet another program for video editing. This is very awkward, and you will have to let go of a bunch of 4.x features. I really hope, that this is on the todo list of the brilliant Musescore developers team.

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