Hi guys, I may be missing a "how to" somewhere, but one of my biggest frustrations with composing multiple musical ideas on one project is that changing a tempo earlier in the score changes the entire timeline from that point onwards, unless you lock the audio to absolute time, which has it's own problems if you want to make adjustments to midi etc later.
 
How about a "Liquid Tempo" or a "Isolated Tempo Region" feature where all speech and other on-camera audio is locked to absolute time, and you can define the tempo and MBT grid for a specific region in isolation?

That would mean you could define the exact start point for Measure One of each piece according to the scenes and edits in the film. Compose, move to the next scene, select a region and create a new tempo map for that part of the film..  All in ONE Sonar project without fear of affecting the overall audio timeline.
 
One could even have two tempo rulers running parallel and depending on the focus, that tempo applies. That way one could compose overlapping pieces of music with different tempos.
 
Any thoughts on this? Maybe you already have a way of getting around this - please let me know.
 
Ludwig

I just found out that Logic apparently does this already - all the ore reason to add this feature to Sonar :O)

I love this idea. I've been hoping for a Sonar timeline overhaul for a while, but I think I was limited to suggesting incremental improvements (for example, being able to change the sequence start time like you can in DP, or even just a TC offset). Your idea is far better and I think would instantly make Sonar much more competitive in the scoring for picture world.
 
As we speak, I'm doing a conform to a new version of picture, and doing a good bit of math that I wouldn't need to do if we had a solution like the one you're suggesting. Having to manually calculate offsets, then add/subtract measures and adjust tempos to put the same data against the same part of the picture. Assuming I understand you correctly, I would be able to just select all my midi & audio, as well as the "tempo region", and move them all to a new TC and I'd be done. That. Sounds. Fantastic.
 
This would also be a great way to get around the start-time offset issue in the new Media Foundation video engine (for those who haven't experienced it, setting the video trim-in to anything other than zero results in a transport lag, at least for some users). As I recall, that is a Microsoft problem, not a Cakewalk problem. But the idea you've put forward here gets around it completely.
 
What do you say guys and gals? I think this one's a winner! Can I vote more than once?!

Thanks Mesayre, 
 
The idea to just simply define a a region to with it's own tempo is the way to go IMO. I would LOVE to know how the guy who composed Black Ops used Sonar, though in a game I guess you just chop it all up and so on.. Any other composers care to pitch in?
 
To me, this is the feature that will attract a whole new user base to Sonar - the inverse is I have to consider Logic of this does not get added very soon - which I'm not keen on at all!
 
L.