Separating Music from a DVD

billgers · Post by **billgers** » Thu Nov 17, 2011 1:58 pm

After taking a hiatus from the scoring business for several years, I am considering getting back into it. Although I have several projects from my past that I could use, I am also thinking of augmenting my marketing with some sample scoring of major releases and/or tv shows, especially since some of the samples from the older stuff are a bit dated compared with what people are using these days.

My question is: is there some way to get rid of the existing music from a commercial DVD so that I can re-score it with the dialogue and sfx in place? My guess is that it is not possible, but I would be interested in any ways of making this happen. In lieu of that, does anyone know if it would be possible to do the same with a commercial VHS tape if I could round one up? I'm guessing that with VHS I could lose one half of the stereo field and replace it with music and then merge the two back together.

Thanks in advance for any help with this matter.

-Bill

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 7:45 am

Probably not possible. Melodyne (sp?) claims to be able to isolate such elements in theory, but in practice I doubt you would be successful.

There are also copyright issues which are even harder to overcome. You won't be able to post or distribute your work (legally) anywhere unless you are working with PD material. Sounds like you are talking about major releases, so the quick answer is "no" and the slow answer is also "no."

Even if you could do this, it leaves a bad impression, IMO. It reeks of "I have no work of my own, but look how much better than (fill in the name of a famous film composer here) I am."

IMO you'd be better off finding a filmmaker or student to work with and get some original material on its feet.

bdr · Post by **bdr** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 2:22 pm

Not possible as far as I know (sorry, 'AFAIK'). Audacity supposedly has a method of removing vocals from songs, I haven't tried it but maybe it would be worth looking into. Otherwise get some music light films like Castaway, Patton, Duel, Kiss or Kill and score them as is.

mrbillet · Post by **mrbillet** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 7:01 pm

I second getting involved with student film makers. If available, take film and video production courses at a community college. On the first day of class, when everyone usually gets a chance to introduce themselves, mention you're into music composition and production. The students who already have some ideas in the works will probably pull you aside after class.

-Ian

billgers · Post by **billgers** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 2:03 pm

Thank you everybody for the responses. I probably should have clarified in my first post that I worked as a full-time composer for 2 years and part time for over a decade. I do have numerous projects that I could use for marketing purposes, but as I said, I think that the world of sampling has inproved so much in he past 5 years that some of the cues mights sound dated in terms of the sample quality. I have in fact scored countless student and festival films and I could go out and do more of those, but my goal is to show my work with the best sounds against really good production. The problem with so many of the school and festival projects is that the production values are often lacking in other areas (acting/writing/direction etc.) such that I don't necessarily think these help to represent a composer as a "real pro" any more than re-scoring a great movie. I could be totally wrong about this, but the thing that got me thinking about doing this was that I have a friend/mentor who is very successful as a composer (numerous Disney feature credits) and he is the one who encouraged me to do it this way and he said that it was what he did when he was getting started. When I got into the business 20 years ago, this was very common, but I think the technological side of it was easier to hurdle because we were all working with tape back then and you could probably just record over one of the tape channels while leaving the other intact.

As far as the legal side of it is conerned, I should think that a small disclaimer on the website or marketing materials would make it clear that I would not be representing that I was the original composer for the film in question.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 2:39 pm

billgers wrote:
As far as the legal side of it is conerned, I should think that a small disclaimer on the website or marketing materials would make it clear that I would not be representing that I was the original composer for the film in question.

Not really. All the elements are protected and no producer or distributor worth their salt will stand for unauthorized distribution. Ask your friend at Disney. The issue isn't representing you're not Giachinno, it's using any of their protected material.

billgers · Post by **billgers** » Wed Nov 30, 2011 8:00 pm

Thanks - that's a good point. Perhaps I'll check with my attorney on that one just be sure. It was probably easier to do that in the era before everyone had a web site because the composer would only be sending it to a select group of people.

-Bill

mrbillet · Post by **mrbillet** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 10:47 am

Yikes! I thought I was responding to someone with a bit less experience. Hope i didn't seem like jerk for my suggestion. Good luck.

-Ian

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 11:08 am

Oh, don't worry about appearing to be a jerk. I do it all the time and it wears off after a while. Well, usually.

billgers · Post by **billgers** » Thu Dec 01, 2011 12:31 pm

mrbillet wrote:Yikes! I thought I was responding to someone with a bit less experience. Hope i didn't seem like jerk for my suggestion. Good luck.

-Ian

No Sweat. No offense taken. I actually miss the days of taking classes and interacting with other student composers and film makers becasue it was a great sense of community and everyone was excited to be learning and working on stuff together. I may try to do one or two student or festival projects just to make some new relationships and get in the groove of working to a schedule. The thing that can be frustrating with some of that stuff is that you can put a ton of time and energy into something and unless everyone on board is committed to the same quality level as the composer, the composer is left with something that they did for free and and doesn't really contribute that much to their demo reel.

Sadly, I found the same to be true even for a lot of paying gigs. When I got started, I was one of the grunts at Zimmer's Media Ventures (the precursor to Remote Control). Nothing seemed to be coming from that after 6 months, but I got a separate opportunity to start ghosting for a guy. That lead to numerous opportunities doing "erotic thrillers" in both episodic and feature form. It wasn't my first choice in work, but I learned a ton about working under pressure and it paid for me to put my studo together and helped land me some other gigs. However, for the most part, the problem was that even if I really liked the music I had composed, I couldn't use that much of it on my video reel because it was either over a steamy love scene or it was over a scene with poorly written dialogue or bad acting. One positive that came out of that era was that most of those flicks got temped with Goldstein's Basic Instinct score, so it was a great opportunity for me to listen too and analyze that score.

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