Dave's Favorites: Homemade Video Soundtracks

I started making my own home videos back in the dark ages of computing. In 1990 I was on the cutting edge, using a Commodore Amiga with a video overlay gadget to add titles, graphics, and transitions to video I had shot with a camcorder. For a soundtrack, I'd usually just mix some combination of The Call, Peter Himmelman, and Neil Young tunes together to set the mood.

These days I'd rather that my music were a bit more subtle. Instead of using a recognizable commercial song in my home videos, I like to produce movies with instrumental, mood-setting music. Since I've been using SmartSound's Sonicfire Pro, I've been getting compliments from people who were getting really tired of hearing Throwing Muses and Dead Can Dance songs in all my videos.

Sonicfire Pro is a royalty-free music generator, which means you can use the music made by Sonicfire for any project, personal or commercial, and you don't have to worry about getting angry letters from Metallica's lawyers. And unlike music editing software that requires some skill to craft samples into coherent songs, Sonicfire is great even for the musically challenged. Just choose a musical theme (action, inspirational, spiritual, dramatic, and so on), tell the program how long it should run, and Sonicfire automatically builds your soundtrack.

After you finish producing a movie in your favorite video editor, you can load it into Sonicfire to apply the soundtrack. By dragging a timeline control around, you can jump directly to specific scenes and assign musical themes. Sonicfire is very good at smoothly transitioning from one style of music to another, and there are few limitations on length. The same musical theme can be 10 seconds or 5 minutes long, and Sonicfire handles all the technical details of making it sound great. When your soundtrack is done, you can save it as an audio file and re-produce your movie, laying it in an unused audio track.

Sonicfire Pro isn't cheap; it's available from SmartSound for $349 with a small collection of music themes. Additional music CDs in dozens of categories are available for about $60 each. But if you're looking for an easy way to make great-sounding digital movies, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than Sonicfire Pro.

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