The reason 'big' film scores use an orchestra vs what is called a mock-up is the sense of space in the recorded orchestra as heard in a movie theater. Some, like Danny Elfman, augment the number of say strings which the budget provides for with VSL and much if not most of the percussion is virtual.dellboy wrote: Tue Nov 03, 2020 1:22 pmDid you have a film composer in mind that uses perfect timing to compose film scores ?tooneba wrote: Tue Nov 03, 2020 12:19 pm
Then why film composers are utilizing perfect timing DAW to arrange large project containing midi and expression map data as well as recorded orchestra? It doesn't seem any old DAW with digital recording fits the bill.
For most composing a piano or guitar is good enough to map out chords and melodies. Later on it can be fleshed out in a DAW and quantizing can be used to tighten it up a bit if needed.
But in the end most big film scores end up by being played live by a big orchestra in a studio where absolute perfect timing is not needed or wanted.
The notion of "perfect timing" is a misconstruction there. There is no particular aspiration in real music to have hard quantized time, in fact human timing breathes and flows. The exception promoted there is based in a false impression, not anything real.
If you're going to do realistic music in a DAW - less and less is there a need for a real orchestra given the wane of movie theatres before COVID let alone now - you want control of timing in a way most DAWs do not offer.
(warping the timeline to match the music rather than vice versa; Cubase, S1 [4+], Samplitude does, REAPER with a script extension does, seems like Logic adopted this not too long ago.)
So what is this "absolute perfect timing"? In the world of recorded orchestras (whether it's super-competitive LA or Prague for the low budget) if your time sucks - in an ensemble setting where timing is dynamic and one is sensitive, meaning a very developed sense of time - you don't get the work. It's a distinction with no meaning/no real point. More and more music in films is done in DAW with VE Pro and one imagines the majority of TV series work is. As the tech matures, less and less of the difference is an obstacle.
The big difference, the space, the height, back to front, width etc is more and more obviated in technology (MIR Pro).
"Sample-accurate" is technically supposed to be kinda sorta 'perfect' as a holy grail. Musical timing is this whole other thing. I don't know what DAW has been shown to do perfectly sample-accurate using virtual orchestras via MIDI because first of all it's impossible if you're using round-robin, let alone more detailed humanization parameters. I can easily imagine people in here figuring their modulation has to happen as sample-accurate, it's easier to sort...
It's also true that no one can expect to place a tuba sample at the same point in time as a drum hit and the tuba not seem late, so in an actual orchestration done in DAW you can't rely on simply parts all being on the beat (and another aspect of space is revealed) because reality is they aren't, first of all because of the amount of time it takes the instrument to speak, the attack characteristic; so the tuba player in reality is anticipating the beat for two reasons, second being they're probably at the back of the stage.
Now I have known some composers who are great keyboardists using Logic and giving nary a f**k as to what the bars and beats even are (which is how I approached it for years) with the goal of nailing it in the performance, vs the extreme end of that with a lot of attention to location of beats/the tempo track. You would not have the modi operandi of a clips-launching hard-quantized "electronic" or whatever, starting with 'how many BPM (BPMs vary like crazy in the reality of played music)' as a guess and then conforming.
