Skills Audit: Livetype and Sound- Nahuel

In todays media lesson we used both soundtrack pro and livetype on the mac's to create our own musical composition and titles.

Soundtrack pro
It was a simple process which required for us to listen to the variety of sounds from the choice menu, and then drag them. Once we all individually created our own compositions, we chose which one we thought was most cohesive with our thriller opening. It is a software that allows one to edit music and use a wide range of sound effects and musical instruments to create a composition. The layout of Soundtrack pro is fairly simple; on the left hand side is a section for adding the video so that it can be previewed with sound, and centre of the screen, is the timeline where one drags there desired sound to and can edit the length, time etc. There is a toolbar on the right hand side which has a number of features including the razor tool, which we used often to remove a particular part of the sound, simply by clicking at the start and end of the desired section. There are three different ways to find a sound; search-which has different categories to accurately find the right sound, browser- which allows one to open up a sound found from another programme or software and favourites- which is any sounds saved to favourites.

Livetype pro
Livetype pro is a software created by Apple in which one can create animated title sequences for video projects. The software offers a range of fonts, objects, textures, effects and templates. All attributes of the titles can manipulated and changed such as the size, shadow, glow, outlin, opacity and tracking of the text. Any media file can be imported onto the canvas for the titles to run over. There are many effects to chose from which can be customized or new effects can be created aswell using keyframing. LiveFont is one of the program's key features. It has a range of fonts with animated characters, for example, smoke writing.
Using Livetype was a fairly simple process. To the left is the canvas where you preview your titles and below is the timeline which displays the text and the effects and the length etc. To the right is the editing bars which is where adjustments such as colour, font, size, shape etc are made, and above the editing bars is the section where you enter your text and it will appear on the canvas. Next to the editing bars is the media browser where one searches for all the effects and templates from the different tabs available i.e. 'Livefont'. The tabs in the media browser have sub-catergories to make searching more specific; the tabs available are font, textures, objects and effects, which has sub-categories such as grunge, zooms and caricature. Clicking apply below, will add the effect to the title and appear in the timeline. To export the titles so they are in front of a media file, simply go to 'file', then 'export', then 'for livetype' and save it as a new clip before going back to Livetype pro and going to file and 'placing background move' and then opening the titles which are saved as a file.
I followed this process to create our titles for our completed thriller. After typing what I wanted to be there, using effects and timing, titles were completed. I kept the background of the titles as a blank canvas in order to import the completed thriller opening behind it.