Digital Performer for Film Scoring

From Hollywood blockbusters to indie classics, Digital Performer's film-friendly features make it the choice of film composers worldwide.

When I was scoring The Matrix Trilogy it would have been unthinkable to attempt to meet those challenges without the support of the most powerful weapon in my arsenal, Digital Performer.

—Don Davis
(film composer, The Matrix Trilogy)

Film scoring features

Digital Performer is packed with numerous enhancements for writing music for picture, including enhancements to Find Tempo, multiple QuickTime movies, multiple QuickScribe windows and exporting audio to a QuickTime movie.

Find tempo

To score a film effectively, you need to hit cue points accurately. Digital Performer's Find Tempo feature lets you find the right tempo in seconds. Set up your master list or import a cue sheet. Choose the type of hit for various markers and assign weight according to the importance of the hit. Then let Digital Performer search your markers and suggest a tempo that hits critical cue points. If you write music to picture, whether its film, video, animation, jingles or Quicktime, Digital Performer's Find Tempo feature will be a huge time saver for you.

Insert measures

Have you ever wanted to add more time to the beginning of the sequence without moving any existing material? Insert Measures is a feature that film composers will really appreciate. Let's say you have a SMPTE sync point that starts a piece of music you have composed. This music is perfect, but the director wants to add some lead-in music to build some tension. Simply drop in as much space as you need and Insert Measures preserves all times including SMPTE hit points following the insertion point.

Track grouping

Digital Performer's track grouping feature allows you to create an unlimited number of track groups, and tracks that can be linked for mixing, editing, both or for a customized set of operations that you specify. Tracks can be a member of more than one group. Groups can also be "nested" within each other. Track grouping allows you to apply operations to the tracks in the group as a single unit. For example, for a mix group, moving the volume fader for one track in the group moves the faders in all tracks in the group.

FireWire QuickTime video playback

The Movie window has the ability to output a DV-formatted QuickTime movie via FireWire. You can then use a standard DV camera or FireWire conversion box to convert the FireWire video into composite video to view it as full screen video on a standard TV or video monitor—even on iMacs or laptops.

More frame rates

Digital Performer supports 23.976 fps and 30-drop fps as the project frame rate.