Film Scoring Time Signatures-with lines?

Ic. I will look into that later. Sounds kind of fiddly to get it done though. No worries, Finale and Sibelius can't handle this either. Most people have to use a sharpie to put these on their scores after printing with time sigs hidden but lots of space left for scribbling it on.

Overture is the only notational program I know of that has specific support for this (how I produced the example). The built in support makes it possible to move things around in the score and the large sigs and lines always are positioned and sized appropriately. Also makes it so that the extracted parts are using normal time sigs..only the conductor score uses the big ones.

For recording orchestral and ensembles for film, the conductor often has to deal with difficult tempo and meter changes that are designed to sync with the film. They like the large time sigs to be able to follow it while conducting. They don't have time to memorize every score, everyone's on the clock and due to the nature of the medium, complex meter changes are commonplace.

This is a standard way its handled in the film music biz when a conductor is going to be conducting an ensemble or orchestra to timecode for sync to picture.

ps, that other old forum thread had another example of what conductors need to see, though that example was not the prettiest, it was functional:

http://issuu.com/timusic/docs/example_book_7a0b1f7a5fbf4c

that kind of example with numerous meter changes per page, is not uncommon. I've done cues with more than 10 meter changes within a minute of music....and some of them ugly..It amazes me the conductor and musicians can follow it frankly, but they can. The conductor is also usually watching a video feed of the material at the same time, which has streamers and punches and other cues he's using to see upcoming meter or tempo changes.. The large time sigs are needed so he can watch all these different things and try to actually conduct the musicians at the same time. This is just how its expected to be done for recording sessions of this type of stuff.