Video in Sibelius

Sibelius is already used for many films and TV shows – from Shrek 2 to The Simpsons. And you can use it yourself to write music to video. This is ideal for everything from student multimedia projects to professional scoring. No other notation program can do this.

Composing to video

As usual, it's very easy to do. You can simply add any video file to a score; Sibelius displays the video in a window, and plays it back in sync with the music. In fact, the video and score are always kept in sync, whether you're writing music, playing back, fast-forwarding or rewinding.

You can play the video at different sizes or even full screen to watch the finished result; and Sibelius's audio export feature makes it easy for you to add your finished music to the video soundtrack.

But that's not all. You can add ‘hit points’ in the score to mark important visual events; these make it easy to write music to fit the action. Hit points automatically move when you alter metronome marks, so you can tweak the tempo to make a hit point fall exactly on a beat.

Watch movie: Working with video »

Videos included!

To get you started, Sibelius 5 comes with a variety of short videos to compose to – ranging from Shackleton's legendary Antarctic expedition to Chalie Chaplin.

And you can get more for free from SibeliusEducation.com. The Internet also has thousands of adverts and trailers to download, which are ideal for students to write for.

Timecode & score duration

Sibelius calculates the time position (timecode) of every bar and the total duration of the score to high precision – useful for film/TV scoring, or for any work which requires timings.

Timecode is written above barlines and shown as a digital clock during playback, taking into account tempo marks, irregular bars and rits/accels. Display formats include seconds, centiseconds and various frame rates.

(This feature does not display or sync to incoming SMPTE or MTC.)

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