A score that turns in time with the performance.
A score video shows part of the page at a time — often a single staff system, though two or three short ones can sit together comfortably — with each view appearing as the performance reaches it. Two quite different tasks sit behind that.
Cutting the pages up can be automatic. ClapperBoard can find the staff systems on each page and crop them out — one per view, or several together where they fit — which is the tedious part, and the part you would rather not do by hand. You can also crop the pages yourself if you want a different arrangement.
The timing is yours to play in. ClapperBoard cannot work out when each system arrives: it has no way to follow a performance. What it gives you instead is a way to mark the boundaries while the recording plays, one keystroke per view.
Both steps assume the score and the recording are already in the project — see Adding images and audio if they are not.
If you have read about ClapperBoard timing pages automatically, that is a different job — it matches a spoken narration against the words printed on the page. A performance has no words to transcribe, and notation is not text, so none of it applies to a score.
Choose Tools › Split into Staff Systems. ClapperBoard examines every uncropped page in the project, finds the staff systems on each, and stages a crop for each one — staged, not applied, so you get to look before anything changes.
Three settings control how the page is cut up. The defaults suit a full score. Your choices are remembered with the project.
How many staff systems share a crop — the setting to reach for when one system alone leaves the frame mostly empty.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Systems | Every system gets its own crop. Right for a full score, where one system fills the frame. The default. |
| Fit to frame | Packs as many consecutive systems into each crop as the project's export shape allows, spreading them evenly so no page ends with a stub crop. Adapts to the material: a single-staff part groups several systems, a full score still gets one apiece. |
| Groups of N | A fixed number of systems per crop, however tall they are. Choose the number, from one to eight. |
Fit to frame is usually the one you want for anything sparser than a full score, because it works the answer out from your export size rather than asking you to guess it — the sheet names the frame it is currently fitting.
That shape is read when you split, and the crops do not follow it afterwards. Change the project's export shape later and the crops you already have keep the packing they were given: the new shape applies to the next split, not to them.
Re-splitting those pages means taking their crops off first, because detection only touches uncropped pages. Remove All Crops, in the Tools menu, does that for the whole score in one undoable step, and puts each split page back together as it goes rather than leaving a run of loose crops behind — see removing crops. For a single page there is still Remove crop on the preview's context menu.
Even so, it is worth settling the export size before splitting a long score.
With Groups of N, a page whose system count is not a multiple of N has to put the remainder somewhere. When systems run out decides: Strict keeps every crop at exactly N and lets the last one on the page be shorter, while Loose shares the leftovers out so all the crops on a page stay about the same size.
How two neighbouring systems share the gap between them.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Exact touch | The crops meet at the midpoint of the gap. Nothing is duplicated, but anything sitting on that midline — a dynamic, an articulation — gets split between the two. |
| Slight overlap | Each system claims 55% of the gap, so neighbours overlap by about a tenth of it. Midline markings survive in both crops. This is the default, and usually right. |
| Generous overlap | Each claims 65%, overlapping by about a third of the gap. Safest against clipping, at the cost of visibly repeating content between one system and the next. |
If expressive text or dynamics between staves are coming out clipped, move up a step. If neighbouring systems look repetitive on screen, move down.
When several systems share a crop, this setting applies only where one crop meets the next — systems inside a crop have no boundary between them to share.
How far the first and last system on a page reach towards the top and bottom.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Virtual neighbour | The outermost systems extend by one average inter-system gap, as though a neighbour sat just off the page. Keeps titles, page numbers and running heads out of the crop. The default. |
| Extend to page edge | The first system reaches the top of the page and the last reaches the bottom. Catches everything, including the header and footer. |
Choose Extend to page edge when something above the top staff is being cut off — a tempo marking, a rehearsal letter, or a movement title you want on screen with the opening system.
When detection finishes, ClapperBoard reports how many systems it staged across how many pages, and offers two ways on:
Nothing here is binding. If a crop comes out wrong you can adjust it in Inspect & Edit, and you can always leave the automatic split aside and draw the crops you want by hand.
On a long score, committing takes a while — every page is duplicated and cropped. The progress panel has a Cancel button (⌘.) if you change your mind: the pages it reached keep their crops, and one Undo reverses the lot. More on staged and applied.
Detection needs at least two systems on a page to work out the spacing, so a page holding a single system is left alone. Pages you have already cropped are skipped too — it only touches uncropped items.
Once the crops are applied, each one is a separate item on the timeline, in playing order, and you are ready to time them.
This is the part you play in by hand. The whole gesture is: start the recording, listen, and press one key each time the music reaches the next view.
Each ↓ means the view on screen ends here. The one after it starts at that same moment, and everything still untimed shifts along to make room, keeping its own length. So you can play the whole movement through in one pass, tapping as you go, and end up with every boundary roughly in place.
↓ and ↑ both set a boundary at the playhead. The difference is which view they move.
| Key | Meaning | Moves |
|---|---|---|
| ↓ | End the current view here | The end of the view you are on |
| ↑ | Start the current view here | The end of the view before the one you are on |
Tapping along live, ↓ is the natural one — you are always ending the view you have been watching. ↑ is for going back afterwards: park the playhead where a view should have begun, press ↑, and its start moves there without your having to find the previous one first.
↑ also rescues the tap you have just missed. An item is often shorter than the music it covers, and then the playhead crosses into the next view before the performance does: by the time you hear the music move on, the view you meant to end is already behind you and ↓ would end the wrong one. Let it go and press ↑ instead. The playhead is on the next view, so ↑ starts that view here — which is the same boundary, and it stretches the view before it out to meet the playhead.
If you find yourself doing that all through a movement, give the views more room before you start rather than lengthening them one at a time. Set Duration takes a range of item numbers and one duration, so you can make every view — or the stretch you are about to play — comfortably longer than any passage will take. Then the music always arrives early, and every tap is a ↓ that shortens a view you are still waiting out. Following the score and cutting a view short is easier to time than catching up with one you have already run past. More on setting durations.
When you set a boundary, the views after it slide to accommodate it and keep their own durations. That is cascading resize, and it makes a single pass work: everything you have not timed yet stays intact and simply waits its turn.
The other behaviour, absorbing, holds the total length fixed and lets the very next view swallow the change instead. That is the one you want once the score is roughly timed and you are correcting a single boundary without disturbing everything downstream.
The toolbar button shows which mode is active and switches between them; it is also under View › Timeline Resize Mode. To flip the behaviour for one keystroke only, hold ⌥: ⌥↓ does the opposite of whatever the project is set to, without changing the setting.
A live pass gets you close. Tapping along to playback can be imprecise, though, and some boundaries may want moving by a fraction of a second.
Move the playhead to the boundary you want to fix, then nudge it into place and press the key again. The playhead moves by 0.1 s with ← and →, and by 0.01 s with ⌥ held. ⌥⌃⌘← and ⌥⌃⌘→ jump between views, which is quicker than scrubbing.
Two things make this easier. The magnified timeline mode, in the controls bar, spreads the timeline out far enough to see small differences. And T cycles how much the playhead tells you — at its fullest it shows which view you are on, how far into it you are, and how long it lasts.
A third helps most of all here. Turn on View › Audible Scrubbing and moving the pointer across the timeline sounds the performance under it, at its own pitch, so you can hunt for the exact bar a system begins on by ear rather than by playing the passage again and again. More on scrubbing.
Switch to absorbing resize before this stage. Otherwise every correction shifts the whole rest of the score, and boundaries you had already placed will need placing again.