How to make score read-along videos - fast!

March 23, 2021

A couple of years ago I spent some time making YouTube videos of some of my early scores, read-along style. This was a rather painstaking process, involving manuscript scanning or notation tweaking and taking a lot of screenshots, editing images and audio files, and finally putting things together with video editing software. After having done that many times, to be honest I wasn't too keen on doing it again, but after posting a few score images on this blog at the start of my latest project (reimagining Bach's continuo arias), I realised that the best way to share this work would be through YouTube videos.

In the mean time I've also changed my notation software and my video editing software. I felt sure by now there must be a faster way to get results than what I had done before. Sure enough, it turns out these videos can be made in a matter of minutes. I was asked on Facebook how it's done, and I thought the best answer would be to go through the process step by step here.

I assume you have a completed score and a recording of your piece, and a YouTube account. (Making a recording could be topic for another time.) All you need are your notation app and a video editing software capable of uploading to YouTube. I'm using MuseScore and Adobe Premiere Elements, which I can recommend since I know they work well for this, but I assume these steps will transfer to other software.

Begin with your finished score, and follow these steps:

  1. Copy the source file and rename it Title-VIDEO
  2. Put that file in a new folder inside your project folder, and name that folder VIDEO
  3. Set the page dimensions of this new file to 300 mm x 170 mm with 15 mm margins
  4. Export the score as .PNG at 600 dpi.

The folder is there to hold not only your score but all the supporting files needed to make your video, which (if you're at all like me) you'll want to keep separate from your score since video editors tend to create a lot of subfolders that will otherwise clutter up your workspace. Step 3 makes your score fit the HD screen. It's virtually 16:9 using numbers that are easy to remember, though you can be more exact if you like (302 mm x 170 mm or some other numbers that are in 16:9 proportion). In MuseScore you can do this once and then save the page layout as a Style. Then you just need to use Load Style. The above altogether in MuseScore takes less than a minute for 8-10 page pieces. The most time is taken waiting for the .PNG images to render, so be smart and use that time to set up your video editing app.

Next, in your video editing app, do the following:

  1. Open an empty project for HD, and save it in the VIDEO folder you made
  2. Import the images into the project
  3. Import your audio into the project
  4. Place the audio on the timeline
  5. Place the images on the timeline in order, staggered at estimated intervals
  6. Tweak the placement and duration of the images to match the audio.
  7. Once the page-turns are all in place, upload to YouTube

Of course here the longest time is spent on the next-to-last step, but once you do a couple of these, you get a sense of where to place things. Premiere has a convenient drag and resize feature that lets you put images side by side and then drag-resize only the left image, and the right image drags along with it, so essentially you're just dragging the page turn point. How long it takes to get all the pages right depends on the length of the piece and how uniform the page turns are. For a work with a consistent tempo where the same number of bars appear on each page, the pages will end up taking equal space. Premiere makes the YouTube upload very easy. Once you allow the app access to your YouTube account, to upload the video you just click a button and type in the info for the video.

A few caveats about the specific software I use - this type of thing will vary based on what apps you are using, but I imagine probably all apps have some quirks you'll have to work around. Adobe could stand to improve their interface for YouTube uploading, as the right-left arrow keys don't work in their input fields (how absurd is that?) The obvious workaround is to type out the info in another app and paste it in. Adobe is also quite lame here as the keyboard shortcut for Paste also doesn't work, but luckily a right mouse click allows pasting. So once you get the hang of it, it's no problem. If you're like me and want to post a lot of similar videos, it helps to have a template for the text anyway. Another small caveat concerning the MuseScore .PNG export is that the files get numbered using suffixes, so you get Title-1.PNG Title-2.PNG etc. which seems fine, except that Premiere doesn't display the full file names after importing, and only shows you thumbnails of the images (which are likely to be totally indistinguishable from each other - imagine viewing the pages of your score at a distance of 50 meters), so after exporting the images, I manually rename the files putting a number at the beginning, so I end up with 1-Title-1.PNG, 2-Title-2.PNG, etc. so that I can see which page is which in Premiere. (Prefixed names should obviously be made an export preference in MuseScore, so I'll be requesting that.)

And that's all there is to it. Here are the few videos I've made so far using this method. You'll notice on the first one I hadn't quite got the HD page size correct, and I had exported the .PNG files at 300 dpi so the image quality is under par. If this helps you make your own score videos, let me know.


Stay well,
Aaron

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