Halo 4 Plus O'Donnell - Legendary Bungie Music in Halo 4

[UncookedMoa]

Ever wanted to watch Halo 4's cutscenes with Martin O'Donnell's music? Now you can! Took time to edit it together. It utilizes a bunch of custom mixes I had to make to get everything to work.

 

 

DESCRIPTION:

The fan edit I've always been wanting to do. This is Halo 4's cutscenes with Martin O'Donnell's amazing music. As much as I *also* like Halo 4's music, O'Donnell has this special nostalgia spot for me. I really wanted to see how well I could take O'Donnell's music and work it into Halo 4's various cutscenes and QTEs. They actually work really well if you ask me. Old school Halo music can definitely work with 343's style. Just hire Marty already, 343!

 

I consider this my best music swap so far. I took my time on it and my familiarity with the classic trilogy soundtrack really helped make this the best I could make it. Where my Halo 3 and Reach music swaps took me only a few hours, this one spans multiple days. The editing here is 100% audio with no alterations made to the video footage.

 

The pre-rendered cutscenes were the toughest to edit, due to the lack of layers of audio to work with. In fact, the most obvious bit of background music that can still be heard is in the intro cutscene. The in-game cutscenes had the benefit of having a dialogue layer and a music/sounds layer, which allowed me to focus on isolating the sound effects from the music, without worrying about the voices.

 

NOTES:

1.) This was made using voices from Halo 4's pck files for crisp vocals (I have already uploaded this dialogue only version), but since SFX wasn't available for extraction, I had to do a lot of sound editing for the SFX to work. To make it easier, I extracted the cutscene audio mixed with music and chose the audio track with the quietest music.

 

2.) Since MCC's Reclaimer Closing scene ("Give me that chip" scene) is untextured and off-putting, I opted for Gamecheat13's 4k version of the scene, and then interpolated it for 60 fps and edited it further to eliminate artefacts.

 

3.) I took the liberty of fixing some of the lip syncing that was off in the original Halo 4. Helps with immersion.

 

4.) Some music pieces here are entirely custom mixes I made myself in order to get them to work with Halo 4. I'll be uploading them at some point over at AwesomeHaloMusic one by one. In addition, I'll be uploading one video on this channel that has all of them in one as a Halo "mix album" that'll also advertise the AwesomeHaloMusic channel and serve as a showcase for my improved audio editing.

 

5.) I tried my best to give each character, location and sequence its own theme and sound. For example, the prologue on Earth used ODST music, scenes on Infinity used Reach music, scenes with the Chief used trilogy music, Cortana's scenes use the piano, and Didact's scenes have a heavy choir, for that intimidating effect.

 

Admittedly, Brothers In Arms is used quite a lot, but I've decided that would be because it's Chief's theme in place of 117. Anytime a section features the Chief making a risky decision/doing something epic, it plays. I could go on with explaining each music choice, but that'd take a whole video. The video also gets better and better up till the end if you ask me, since the beginning sections are mostly ambient tracks. This is intentional. I'm attempting to build tension. I did start strong for the prologues, however.

 

The Halo Theme is epic in the final Didact encounter. It's like the scene mas made for it. 'Nuff said. (Same thing goes with some other scenes, but eh, you'll see when you watch them)

 

One more thing, "Ashes" is used when Didact composes everyone because they're all "Ashes" now. Eh? Get it? Anyone?

 

6.) The music, in typical Bungie fashion, changes and works with the scene according to the mood. This makes it feel more dynamic and feel more official. I honestly feel that it makes Halo 4 feel better, though fans of Halo 4's minimal and quieter approach to music (and fans of Halo 4's soundtrack in general) will disagree, but this isn't for them. This is for the Bungie and Martin O'Donnell fans who've been with Halo from the beginning, and Bungie always had music roaring loud and clear.

 

7.) 1080p 60 fps was a decision I made after using the Xbox 360 version cutscenes and actually being really satisfied with the edit, that I had to continue polishing and making the edit as high quality and official feeling as possible. Here's the initial edit I made before this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQiQVEizizo (Less polished - only herefor archiving purposes)

[Drizzy_Dan]

Wow good stuff Moa!

[lika22]

Hello! I very like an instumental music. I just recently started learning the piano. Can you tell me where I can buy a piano. It's important that it be of high quality and not too expensive.

[karlshady]

I agree with you 100%. This is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.

[SamsonHarold]

Thanks for sharing.

Download your favorite songs as mobile ringtones at klingeltone-kostenlos.de.

Edited June 17, 2023 by SamsonHarold