Performance
Cinescore performed very well on the ADK laptop (3Ghz Mobile P4; 1GB RAM; 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9600) and Core2 Duo desktop (1.86Ghz Core2 Duo, 3 Gb RAM; onboard video card) we tried it on. The software never crashed, and playback was always smooth.
With that said, there were a few issues I would like to see improved. For example, currently you must load each song when you click on it in order to preview it and begin customizing it. While this only took a few seconds on our faster machines, it became irritating as each song had to be loaded for you to even see if it would might work in a certain spot. Folks with slower machines would easily get frustrated with this. In Cinescore 1.5, I would love to see them pre-load the songs into an active cache the way competitors SonicFire Pro and the Mac-only Musicbed DV do, which allows you to preview and even adjust custom songs on the fly.
Additionally, for future releases, Cinescore really needs to improve how it renders the mixes of your music. Currently it renders a new .wav file every time you make a change to a composition, which wastes both time and hard drive space. Neither SonicFire Pro nor Musicbed DV suffer from this limitation and it really does decrease the efficiency of using this program to its full potential.
Value
I'd say Cinescore represents a very good value overall. It's easy to get started, yet powerful when you dig in. The music is good and there are more audio/video editing features than on competing products I've looked at. Even though other products currently have larger libraries available, with a company like Sony behind it, Cinescore's library is likely to expand at a rate that will be hard to match.
Final Comments
Overall, Cinescore is a winner. Honestly, in its current form, I see it most useful as more of a sketchpad for a director to line out some musical ideas for a composer. However, if you have little to no budget for music and you don't want the freebies you can find from bands on the internet, it's a must-have tool that can take your final product way beyond where the same amount of money can take you in a music library!
