Sony Cinescore 1.0 review

Music is an essential part of the film-making process, but finding a piece that works sympathetically with your video can be tricky.

Cinescore offers a novel solution, using a colour-by-numbers approach to create music that fits the mood of your video and even develops in synchronisation with it.

The screen layout and basic controls resemble Sony Vegas, and provide a neat, efficient means of importing and manipulating video and audio files. Soundtracks are created by picking and customising themes. The themes are essentially collections of loops, which are well produced and cover a broad range of musical styles. There are 20 themes provided, each comprising 20 variations. You can buy more themes, but at $89 (around £47) for 10 these aren't cheap.

Once you've picked a theme, you need to define Hints. These are points in the timeline at which you set the intensity, mood, section (verse, chorus and so on) and tempo. You can also decide whether these parameters vary randomly between Hint points and, if so, by how much. This system is not without flaws. You can dictate how the section varies over time, but you can't place a specific section at a specific point. Worse, it's almost impossible to line up musical events with specific moments in your video; you're more likely to get a change somewhere in the vicinity of your Hint point.

The biggest flaw is that the different moods and levels of intensity are just variations in arrangement rather than developments of the underlying musical themes. Cinescore tends to stick to a small palette of musical phrases, which means changes don't sound particularly dramatic, and soundtracks longer than a couple of minutes can get dull.

Cinescore 1.0 is an interesting idea, but its price pitches it at serious semi-professional users, and the results aren't up to scratch.