ADR matching on set audio

[Ty Ford]

Jeff,

Thanks for your thoughtful and generous reply. We all learned something from it.

One other non-ADR plan that may help people is in situation where you have multiple takes and there’s a problem with the “keeper” take.

Vocalign software, either stand alone or plugin can make a “keeper” out of a bad take. If the problem is just a small section of the “keeper”, you may be able to use a portion of the audio from another take. Vocalign will analyze the “keeper” and apply time compression and expansion to the target take to make it match the timing of the “keeper.” It works scarily well a lot of the time, but there are limitations.

I interviewed an LA post house (Doc Kane, I think) and he said Vocalign reduced their ADR by about 70%.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Jeff Friah]

Yes, I forgot to mention that…as we were talking about the ‘sound quality’. Doc is ‘the man’!!! Alt-takes from within production sound and ADR takes are a great thing to have in your back pocket (if you have access—just did a project where all I had access to were the offline/picture edit tracks, and what the DIA editor had in place [usually the same unless he/she has changed it]—clients were asking for different reads and I didn’t have ’em.).

Vocalign is a great tool—use it all the time!

As always: it is a TOOL. Sometimes tools work. Sometimes they don’t. I’ve had to carve up entire lines, timestretch/compress, change pitch, insert a word of ADR, a word from an ALT-take…all in a day’s work. (well…all in about 20 minutes’ work).

“Sounds good!….I think?”

[Brad Bogus]

Wow, you guys are a wealth of knowledge. I’ve made amazing leaps and bounds today over my previous week’s work. There are some terms I didn’t quite understand completely, but I got everything beyond workable, so I consider it a major success. Just a basic understanding of what frequencies to play with took hours out of my workload, let alone the rest.

This is what I’ve been doing as a process, and let me know if this is good, can be improved, whatever advice:

I’m using Soundtrack Pro (their users didn’t offer any advice!) and adding a Space Designer Reverb (the plugin comes with the program). I’m using about 2-3 dB of wetness only, and turning the reflection down quite a bit, so as to not have much of an echoey effect. Just touches.

After that, I add a Channel EQ, roll of the most of the frequencies below 80Hz, take about 2-3 dB out of the under 200Hz range, and for the guys, I’m pulling just a dB or less out of the 750-2000 range. When the scene is outside, I am adding the +5kHz as much as 2dB. For the women, same out of the lows and mids, but adding as much as 3dB to the +5kHz and keeping it in that range up into the 10-15kHz range.

That seems to get them as close to the natural sound that my video-editing self can muster. I’ll give the pitch a little shift on some of the women. The quality of the ADR makes them almost sound like two completely different ages compared to the location sound. There’s still a touch or more of the spacial closeness I described, but not nearly as much as I had before.

If you want (and can tell me how) I can post some of the samples up for you to hear, but other than hearing them, does my process sound pretty right on? It’s at least better than before, that much I know!

Thanks for all of your priceless help!

[Jeff Friah]

Congrats (on finding some words of assistance in all that you’ve read)!

As for your process—not too familiar with Soundtrack (though I hear the Match EQ is a nice feature) but what you’ve described ‘could’ work (because you have to trust your own ears and those changes may work up against what you have, but not in other scenes/locations, for example).

If it is better—congrats!

If you had a server or webspace (or youtube…if you think it is ‘ok’ for ‘public consumption’ until you take it down), you could use something like FileZilla to post to.

Or bounce out a short video clip in stereo and create an mp4 (too technical?).

I’d be curious to hear your before and after, for sure.

“Sounds good!….I think?”

[Brad Bogus]

The Match EQ function is really cool, but way too involved for my file setups. I am trying to match an ADR track to an on set audio track, and they’re in different tracks, so the work around to match them is very tedious, but very effective, I think. I was adding the reverb to my ADR session first before EQing it, and I think doing it the other way around may have been more effective, but was still very tedious. I preferred just the old EQ approach.

I wasn’t sure if I could post directly to the forum. I can easily export something for you guys to hear it, but not for a few days at least. Still have a lot of meat to cut through. I will definitely do that though, since I’d like to get whatever professional opinions your ears can pick up over mine.

[Jeff Friah]

There’s no hard ‘n’ fast rule for the sequence of what you do to a piece of DIA (or any other sound). EQ first, compress first, de-ess first, etc. There are some things that tend to work better ( I de-ess my DIA last, after my compression and EQ correction/boosts in the top end for example–no sense de-essing first and then boosting those same freq’s).

Go with what sounds best to you (and your clients).

I’ve been bitten more than once by reverbs and the low/hi freq tailoring, often having to re-eq a piece of DIA after the verb gets it.

Just depends…

yeah keep in touch when you have something for us to listen to!

-J

“Sounds good!….I think?”