Making Film Music Digitally: Temp Tracks and Mock-ups - Text 2
It is easy to see that mastering this tool and the quality of these mock-ups are critical matters for composers, whatever their experience. This “skill shift” has surely caused distress amongst “established” composers. The mock-up has become widespread very quickly throughout the entire film industry, to the point that we can say that “today, composing on a computer is the norm.”[3]
Whereas composers in the studio era visualized the film on an editing bench (the most famous brands of which were Moviola, Steenbeck and Atlas) and worked with a timer or “click track”[4] — which provides a regular beat on the optical track, like a metronome, enabling very precise synchronization — today, with digital technology, they can import a video file directly into digital audio software.[5]
