Man...sure would like to see a deep dive into those stream deck shortcuts and cubase logical editor stuff...... or have you done some videos before? Thanks Chef.
Thank you very much! I searched long time to find video that explain what I needed to know. You, sir, gave me lots of ideas and why I will nedd Dorico AND Cubase! If I may ask...can you please make video explaining how you make your sample library sound like a real orchestra for productions.
I appreciate your feedback! I’d love to do some more videos explaining my mockup approach. Strangely, I haven’t really covered this that much. But, I will - thanks for this suggestion!
I tried this workflow and got it working! One unfortunate thing I discovered is that you cannot do a negative bar or negative timecode offset in Dorico. A lot of time with video you want to pre-roll and start at bar 10 or so. I like doing a negative 10-second offset of 00:59:50:00, and starting my first bar at 01:00:00:00. Unfortunately, Dorico will not allow you to pre-roll a video's offset before the first bar though. So I then exported a midi file from Cubase using a cycle range without the pre-roll. This worked well on the Dorico side, but then when I brought this back into Cubase, midi import automatically drops everything at the start of the bar - in other words, 10 seconds too early. I can move it down no problem, but then I observed that it also imported duplicate markers, all 10 seconds earlier than their counterparts. Now I know. My workaround will probably be to not add the negative bar offset in Cubase until after I've brought everything back in from Dorico. Curious to hear how you approach this.
This is a challenge that I've run into. My workaround is that I abandon the idea of pre-roll until I actually deliver a stereo file. Once I'm ready to mix, I'll usually bounce my MIDI tracks (in Cubase) to audio and mix the audio tracks. I'll add pre-roll at this point just to give the editor breathing room. I'd rather have a pre-roll, too though.
@@musicchefpro Thanks for responding. Makes sense. Good thing is regarding my re-import into Cubase issue, I discovered there is a hidden setting in preferences to allow you to import to left locator (which I can set at my desired bar), and to also not import markers, so I did at least solve that issue. All in all I finished scoring a test scene and I'm thrilled with how well it worked, although I still have many kinks to iron out. I cannot thank you enough - it's an amazing workflow, and will make scoring to picture a lot more fun and focused! 🙏
@@musicchefpro I'm sure I've driven you a little crazy with my detailed questions, but as I continue with this workflow onto other cues in a reel, I have discovered an issue when using the tempo track which I am not sure is a bug in Dorico. Basically what's happening is that marker timecode seems to be inextricably linked to video start offset. To use a simple example, let's say your cue begins at 01:05:00:00. So you set your Cubase start timecode at this point, create your markers, export your midi "tempo track" and import that into Dorico as you described in this video (with Markers set to import with timecode). All looks great. Until, however, you attach a video - by default, it will play the video from its first frame, which if you're starting at 5 minutes in you don't want - so then going to Video > Properties > video start offset, you adjust the timing of the video to begin at 01:05:00:00. Now video playback is in sync - great! However, guess what happens - all your markers shift off the timeline and therefore disappear! If you look at the timecode track, now it will read as doubling the offset and timecode start = that is, 01:10:00:00! My expectation is that it should *only* offset the video for playback, and not the actual timecode track (which is the point of "timecode start" - but instead it looks like it's adding them together). When you have a moment, let me know if you are able to reproduce this and if so if you happen to know of a solution? In the meantime I am importing markers as system-attached text and they will now stay put because they aren't linked to timecode, however I definitely want to see timecode with my markers if I can... and it looks better than the system text. Thank you!
Man, you are a lifesaver! I've been on a steady diet of your Dorico & Cubase Workflow videos and I'm finally grasping this stuff and feeling a bit more optimistic amidst weeks of frustration.. You have such a great way of clarifying these complicated structures, much appreciated! I have a question regarding the Cubase template you uploaded the Dorico midi export into: it seems that you have all the tracks set up in their instrument section folders, routed to the Vepro instances and ready to go, but when you import the midi (and dissolve them into their respective articulation channels) it seems that it creates new tracks on the bottom while you already have them ready in your track section folders of Strings, Woodwinds, etc. What is the reason for that? Because in the end you do route them to the correct buses for stem mixing. Doesn't that become chaotic on the bottom? My initial noob instinct would have been then to drag the midi to their respective tracks to "clean up" but that sucks the life out of me even thinking about it.. If you could make a video about building a template in Cubase that would we awesome!
Thanks for the suggestion - i’m so glad you’re getting a lot out of my videos! I’ll consider making a video about how my template is set up in the near future. In the meantime, the tracks that are pre-existing in my template are simply the outputs coming from my Vienna Ensemble instances. Cubase creates them automatically, actually. So, They aren’t something that I created directly.
This is great stuff, thanks for sharing! A couple of questions: 1) Do you monitor video through Cubase or Dorico when composing your piano sketch? 2) How do you re-iterate this workflow when you get minor edits to the video that requires changes to the initial tempo track?
Thanks for posting and I’m glad you like the videos :). Regarding your questions… Yes, I monitor video in whichever one I’m using as I sketch (and orchestrate). I create my tempo track in Cubase before I sketch. Then if I get edits, I update my tempo track in cubase, export it, re-import it into Dorico and I’m done :). Dorico makes that very easy.
Fratxen, bratzen! Missed the livestream. I must say mixing in Cubase is the least of my worries. The big issues I'm still fighting with are expression maps in both Dorico & Cubase. One problem driving me crazy in Dorico is when entering Shift P to enter an articulation in the score (the "Popover Text" in Playing Techniques) will often show the same text twice - meaning I've created it globally in two different projects. Would like to delete one of them, of course. But finding the duplicate...that is the problem--which project was it in--this can take quite a bit of searching. Seems I'm going to have to create a spreadsheet for these so I can stop duplicating what's already defined in another project-
Sorry you missed the stream. I’ve had that issue too - duplicates in the popover. The best practice is to index Playing Techniques against what your Expression Map uses. If your expression map doesn’t use it then deleting it should be fine. Any changes made to Playing Techniques require resaving your template (if you want your playing techniques to be consistent for future projects). Also a best practice is to make sure playing techniques have the ‘star’ lit so that they’ll persist in future projects and you will be less likely to create a duplicate. I hope that helps!
@@musicchefpro I always put a click on the star to make things globally available as you suggested. Indexing playing techniques must also include the popover text I've found. I definitely need map out which expression maps are used in which projects. I've got something like that as all my expression maps have a 4 to 6 letter code in from of them to identify the library maker and the type of library. This allows options like having 3 different manufacturer's "Violiin I" library in the same project. This works well. A spreadsheet is needed to identify which expression maps are used in which projects. That will solve the duplicate issue. Now I've got a lot of back tracking to do!
This is such a fantastic tutorial, and inspiring message toward the end about staying in the creative flow! I'm starting to score a short film tomorrow, and have been trying to figure out how I'd like to approach it, since I do prefer to write & orchestrate in Dorico. I own Dorico Pro, Cubase 14, and VEP (as well as a Streamdeck XL) - so I have all the ingredients, but no recipe and no idea how to start cooking them together. Good thing I found the Music Chef! 👨🍳🤌 If it's a longer project and they have edit changes which require big changes to your cues after you've already roundtrip'ed back to Cubase, how do you go about bringing the updated timing/markers back into Dorico afterwards? Do you step through the same process over again? Finally I have a request for a video on your logical editor preset / macro /streamdeck workflow! I don't know much about setting those up so I'd love to learn more how you've done that. Thanks so much!
You have all the right ingredients - now you’ll need to experiment and find what works best for your own creative flow! I’d love to do a video on my Logical Editor & macro setup, so thanks for the suggestion. As far as handling revisions goes... I'll update my tempo map in Cubase, export that (MIDI) and import the new tempo map into Dorico (as a Tempo Map). That will overwrite the tempos in my Dorico flow while keeping all my music in tact. Then I'll tweak things where needed to get things working perfectly. That works really well for me.
@@musicchefpro Fantastic, that sounds easier than I realized actually - I wasn't aware the tempo map can be re-imported into an existing flow, great news!
Yeah, that is a great feature. I learned about it from a video on TH-cam about how Alan Sylvestri uses Dorico. Its a 2-part series called "Scoring a Blockbuster". I recommend it.
Thank you again for all the great work and sharing your expertise with all of us
I appreciate your support, thanks!
Excellent work!! Thank you for sharing
Thank you! Cheers!
Great video!
Thanks!
Man...sure would like to see a deep dive into those stream deck shortcuts and cubase logical editor stuff...... or have you done some videos before? Thanks Chef.
Cool idea! I haven’t really covered that before, but I will make a note of it. I keep a list of topic ideas and I’ll put your suggestion on there!
Hear Hear!
Thank you very much! I searched long time to find video that explain what I needed to know. You, sir, gave me lots of ideas and why I will nedd Dorico AND Cubase!
If I may ask...can you please make video explaining how you make your sample library sound like a real orchestra for productions.
I appreciate your feedback! I’d love to do some more videos explaining my mockup approach. Strangely, I haven’t really covered this that much. But, I will - thanks for this suggestion!
I tried this workflow and got it working! One unfortunate thing I discovered is that you cannot do a negative bar or negative timecode offset in Dorico. A lot of time with video you want to pre-roll and start at bar 10 or so. I like doing a negative 10-second offset of 00:59:50:00, and starting my first bar at 01:00:00:00. Unfortunately, Dorico will not allow you to pre-roll a video's offset before the first bar though. So I then exported a midi file from Cubase using a cycle range without the pre-roll. This worked well on the Dorico side, but then when I brought this back into Cubase, midi import automatically drops everything at the start of the bar - in other words, 10 seconds too early. I can move it down no problem, but then I observed that it also imported duplicate markers, all 10 seconds earlier than their counterparts. Now I know. My workaround will probably be to not add the negative bar offset in Cubase until after I've brought everything back in from Dorico. Curious to hear how you approach this.
This is a challenge that I've run into. My workaround is that I abandon the idea of pre-roll until I actually deliver a stereo file. Once I'm ready to mix, I'll usually bounce my MIDI tracks (in Cubase) to audio and mix the audio tracks. I'll add pre-roll at this point just to give the editor breathing room. I'd rather have a pre-roll, too though.
@@musicchefpro Thanks for responding. Makes sense. Good thing is regarding my re-import into Cubase issue, I discovered there is a hidden setting in preferences to allow you to import to left locator (which I can set at my desired bar), and to also not import markers, so I did at least solve that issue. All in all I finished scoring a test scene and I'm thrilled with how well it worked, although I still have many kinks to iron out. I cannot thank you enough - it's an amazing workflow, and will make scoring to picture a lot more fun and focused! 🙏
That's great to hear! I'm glad to share what I've learned and have it be helpful :)
@@musicchefpro I'm sure I've driven you a little crazy with my detailed questions, but as I continue with this workflow onto other cues in a reel, I have discovered an issue when using the tempo track which I am not sure is a bug in Dorico. Basically what's happening is that marker timecode seems to be inextricably linked to video start offset. To use a simple example, let's say your cue begins at 01:05:00:00. So you set your Cubase start timecode at this point, create your markers, export your midi "tempo track" and import that into Dorico as you described in this video (with Markers set to import with timecode). All looks great. Until, however, you attach a video - by default, it will play the video from its first frame, which if you're starting at 5 minutes in you don't want - so then going to Video > Properties > video start offset, you adjust the timing of the video to begin at 01:05:00:00. Now video playback is in sync - great! However, guess what happens - all your markers shift off the timeline and therefore disappear! If you look at the timecode track, now it will read as doubling the offset and timecode start = that is, 01:10:00:00! My expectation is that it should *only* offset the video for playback, and not the actual timecode track (which is the point of "timecode start" - but instead it looks like it's adding them together). When you have a moment, let me know if you are able to reproduce this and if so if you happen to know of a solution? In the meantime I am importing markers as system-attached text and they will now stay put because they aren't linked to timecode, however I definitely want to see timecode with my markers if I can... and it looks better than the system text. Thank you!
Man, you are a lifesaver! I've been on a steady diet of your Dorico & Cubase Workflow videos and I'm finally grasping this stuff and feeling a bit more optimistic amidst weeks of frustration.. You have such a great way of clarifying these complicated structures, much appreciated! I have a question regarding the Cubase template you uploaded the Dorico midi export into: it seems that you have all the tracks set up in their instrument section folders, routed to the Vepro instances and ready to go, but when you import the midi (and dissolve them into their respective articulation channels) it seems that it creates new tracks on the bottom while you already have them ready in your track section folders of Strings, Woodwinds, etc. What is the reason for that? Because in the end you do route them to the correct buses for stem mixing. Doesn't that become chaotic on the bottom? My initial noob instinct would have been then to drag the midi to their respective tracks to "clean up" but that sucks the life out of me even thinking about it.. If you could make a video about building a template in Cubase that would we awesome!
Thanks for the suggestion - i’m so glad you’re getting a lot out of my videos! I’ll consider making a video about how my template is set up in the near future. In the meantime, the tracks that are pre-existing in my template are simply the outputs coming from my Vienna Ensemble instances. Cubase creates them automatically, actually. So, They aren’t something that I created directly.
This is great stuff, thanks for sharing! A couple of questions:
1) Do you monitor video through Cubase or Dorico when composing your piano sketch?
2) How do you re-iterate this workflow when you get minor edits to the video that requires changes to the initial tempo track?
Thanks for posting and I’m glad you like the videos :). Regarding your questions… Yes, I monitor video in whichever one I’m using as I sketch (and orchestrate). I create my tempo track in Cubase before I sketch. Then if I get edits, I update my tempo track in cubase, export it, re-import it into Dorico and I’m done :). Dorico makes that very easy.
Fratxen, bratzen! Missed the livestream. I must say mixing in Cubase is the least of my worries. The big issues I'm still fighting with are expression maps in both Dorico & Cubase. One problem driving me crazy in Dorico is when entering Shift P to enter an articulation in the score (the "Popover Text" in Playing Techniques) will often show the same text twice - meaning I've created it globally in two different projects. Would like to delete one of them, of course. But finding the duplicate...that is the problem--which project was it in--this can take quite a bit of searching. Seems I'm going to have to create a spreadsheet for these so I can stop duplicating what's already defined in another project-
Sorry you missed the stream. I’ve had that issue too - duplicates in the popover. The best practice is to index Playing Techniques against what your Expression Map uses. If your expression map doesn’t use it then deleting it should be fine. Any changes made to Playing Techniques require resaving your template (if you want your playing techniques to be consistent for future projects). Also a best practice is to make sure playing techniques have the ‘star’ lit so that they’ll persist in future projects and you will be less likely to create a duplicate. I hope that helps!
@@musicchefpro I always put a click on the star to make things globally available as you suggested. Indexing playing techniques must also include the popover text I've found. I definitely need map out which expression maps are used in which projects. I've got something like that as all my expression maps have a 4 to 6 letter code in from of them to identify the library maker and the type of library. This allows options like having 3 different manufacturer's "Violiin I" library in the same project. This works well. A spreadsheet is needed to identify which expression maps are used in which projects. That will solve the duplicate issue. Now I've got a lot of back tracking to do!
@@musicchefpro P.S. I hate missing the livestreams!
This is such a fantastic tutorial, and inspiring message toward the end about staying in the creative flow! I'm starting to score a short film tomorrow, and have been trying to figure out how I'd like to approach it, since I do prefer to write & orchestrate in Dorico. I own Dorico Pro, Cubase 14, and VEP (as well as a Streamdeck XL) - so I have all the ingredients, but no recipe and no idea how to start cooking them together. Good thing I found the Music Chef! 👨🍳🤌
If it's a longer project and they have edit changes which require big changes to your cues after you've already roundtrip'ed back to Cubase, how do you go about bringing the updated timing/markers back into Dorico afterwards? Do you step through the same process over again?
Finally I have a request for a video on your logical editor preset / macro /streamdeck workflow! I don't know much about setting those up so I'd love to learn more how you've done that. Thanks so much!
You have all the right ingredients - now you’ll need to experiment and find what works best for your own creative flow! I’d love to do a video on my Logical Editor & macro setup, so thanks for the suggestion.
As far as handling revisions goes... I'll update my tempo map in Cubase, export that (MIDI) and import the new tempo map into Dorico (as a Tempo Map). That will overwrite the tempos in my Dorico flow while keeping all my music in tact. Then I'll tweak things where needed to get things working perfectly. That works really well for me.
@@musicchefpro Fantastic, that sounds easier than I realized actually - I wasn't aware the tempo map can be re-imported into an existing flow, great news!
Yeah, that is a great feature. I learned about it from a video on TH-cam about how Alan Sylvestri uses Dorico. Its a 2-part series called "Scoring a Blockbuster". I recommend it.
@@musicchefpro thanks, I'll check it out!