An experiment in movie soundtracking

The main reason I upgraded to GarageBand 3 was that I wanted to have a go at creating some film music, and GarageBand 3's new Video Track feature allows you to import a QuickTime movie so you can compose to it and ensure your music is synched with the action.

Not being possessed of a million-pound budget, a friendly cast of professional actors, nor even owning a video camera (and as this is strictly for my own fun) I thought I'd try composing to some scenes ripped off DVDs. Silent movies, of course, would be ideal, but anything with no dialogue would suffice (thus avoiding the problem of having to import audio as well, and of course combatting any existing soundtrack music).

Having mucked around with DVD ripping before without really knowing much about it, I know it's a minefield of formats and hacky little conversion utilities, so I sat down with my new copy of GarageBand 3 prepared to spend a few hours (and determined to spend as little money as possible) to come up with a way of importing some DVD-ripped footage into it.

But, as it turned out, it took very little time, and only a little money.

Here's how I did it.

A ripping yarn

First thing to do was to get some footage off the DVD. (Again, I stress that I'm only doing this for fun, and not intending to distribute the footage, so it's perfectly legal.) The scene I'd chosen to experiment on was the emergence of the cybermen from their tombs in the Doctor Who classic The Tombs of the Cybermen.

To get this off the DVD, I used YadeX, a basic (and free) piece of software that allows you to browse the content of a DVD's titles and chapters, then export the various streams (video, audio, subtitle information, even individual frames) separately. As I'm going to be creating my own audio, I chose to export only the video stream, which comes out in m2v (MPEG-2) format.

A clipping yarn

The next step was to edit this clip to the right length and convert it to a QuickTime format so it could be imported into GarageBand. Some web searching revealed an app called MPEG Streamclip, which did exactly what I wanted (it allows you to edit and convert MPEG-2 video) for a price I was willing to pay (it's free). The one thing was it required the QuickTime MPEG-2 component, which is only available from Apple, but at £14.99 ($19.99), I figured this was worth the expense for the sake of ease.

So, having bought the required QuickTime component I imported my DVD clip, edited it down, and exported it. Not knowing much about video formats, I just stuck with the defaults and ended up with a 135MB mov file for about one and a half minutes' worth of video.

The next thing to do was to see if GarageBand would accept it.

A drag-and-dropping yarn

I started up GarageBand 3 with my usual music template, rather than GarageBand's iMovie Project template, then dragged the mov file into GarageBand's window. A moment later, GarageBand had created a Video Track, populated with stills from the movie:

And it had slid in its right-hand-side Track Info window, this time with a Video Preview area at the top:

Now all that was required was to plug in my Evolution MK-425C USB keyboard, create a new Software Instrument track, click record and watch the movie in the preview window while playing the keys...

And it really was that simple! The preview playback did get a little jerky, but I didn't mind that, and GarageBand's response to controls such as the Stop Recording button was a little slow, coming in at a few seconds' delay, but again I didn't mind that. In the end, I added four Software Instrument tracks and recorded to all of them without overtaxing my 1.25GHz G4 too much.

A toe-dipping yarn

Having finished my first movie soundtrack, I chose Export as QuickTime Movie from that irritatingly-named Share menu and after a minute or two had a 4.4MB QuickTime file that combined my soundtrack with the ripped film clip.

I'm aware that, with my one and a half minute movie and four-track soundtrack, I was really only dipping my toe into this new feature of GarageBand, but I have to say I'm very pleased with how smoothly it went. It remains to be seen how well my eMac will stand up to longer movies and more tracks, but I know I'm working at hobby-level, both in terms of budget and expectations. I'm certainly not going to import a whole DVD into GarageBand. Well, not in one go, anyway...