Jean-christophe Boulay
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I think that is already going above and beyond the call of duty and should be more than enough for any voice talent. I’m actually kind of jealous that I work on North American projects and not German ones.
Good luck on the rest of the project.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Johannes,
Living and working in a French territory surrounded by English, I work on projects like these every day. The usual way of doing it really is what Richard is reluctant to do. If only everyone was so nice!
usually, you cut to the initial language and others have to fit in. The result all depends on your translators. In fact, we call them “adapters” because they do more than just translate sentence-to-sentence. They work to convey the same meaning in the time at their disposal. This can take a better understanding of the languages involved but if the translators are good, they should be able to do this. If some very specific information or turn of phrase absolutely needs to make it into the translation, underlining it is important so the translator can work around it. Asking this of the voice talent themselves might be too much.
If you’re cutting image to a longer-winded language like German or French, that is already quite a treat for adaptation. More than we’re used to, at least. If total length is not restricted, cutting with some extra breathing space should ensure everyone can get the words in. Providing the translators with precise timing information is very important. Since you’re German, I don’t even know why I’m specifying this.
Once you have a final cut and an adapted script, all the talent needs is the video to record to. It’s important to provide this so they can alter their reading speed to match without editing, which will sound much more natural and will require less work time. The absolute luxury is to provide burnt-in timecode, which can help some talents in finding cues. No need to have the script on screen or anything, that’s just distracting and they probably know where to put it naturally more than you do anyways. Also, less work time.
If you follow your initial ideas and some of these tips, the project should go pretty smoothly. Much much worse adaptation workflows have yielded seamless results.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Anthony,
Phase issues can also happen when the same source is recorded by two different microphones positioned at different distances from the source. If there is a possibility that you were recording through both your Rode mic and the H4N’s built-in mics, that could also explain the issue.
Another cause is when you have the exact same signal on two audio tracks (as would happen if you’re working in stereo with a mono recording) and one of the tracks gets nudged a few samples one way relative to the other track, either through accidental manipulation or some importing workflow weirdness. If the raw files have the issue, this is probably not your problem here, but worth knowing for the future.
Bottom line, when you’re working with off-camera voice, always work with one mono track panned dead center. There is no reason at all to work in stereo with VO, especially if your stereo signal is one mono recording doubled to two tracks. Even with on-camera voice, stereo is rarely justified. What you ended up doing in the end is the way you should do it.
Also, try to always use a proper pop filter when recording voice over. A windscreen often isn’t enough to stop the energy of the plosives and there are some pops in that recording. Google will return quite a few tips on how to make one with household items if the budgy is tighty. One of your girlfriend’s stockings and a clothes hanger can change your VO recordings.IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
If it’s for theatrical, Peter’s second post is spot on. If it’s for something else, no hard standard exists that I know of, so it would be safe to go with ITU assignment with the two extra channels tagged onto the end, left first, as per Peter’s first post.
Is this going to a DCP output for theatrical release?
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
I second Peter’s suggestion. VisLM-C does a great job, is widely compatible and is cheaper than most other options. Plus, Nugen really have established themselves as the broadcast metering and limiting specialists and they closely follow each standards revision. Updates are online days after revision at the most, not weeks as with some other developers. Most other options are expensive, have limited compatibility depending on software versions or imply that you’re already drinking the developer’s authorization kool-aid.
The VisLM-H version has histogram metering and data logging facilities the VisLM-C version lacks but, in my experience, The Compact version more that enough for almost all situations.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Ah, the pleasure of multi-format projects!
OMF interchange can be a bit of a crapshoot. Since OMF is not a true, solid standard, each developer integrates it the way they want on export and import and some combinations work and others don’t. I haven’t imported a multi-bit-depth OMF in the newer versions of ProTools, but the older ones (v5, v6, v7) used to not work with that. It just gave you an error and nothing imported. I did see it work with ProTools 7 using the AAF format. I hear OMF compatibility is better in PT versions 9 and 10 but haven’t had to use it on those versions myself.
Since you can’t always know which version of what software the mixer will have, I think a safe bet is to export a short test OMF file from a timeline containing all the formats the actual production will use. Output an AAF as well, while you’re at it. Send that over to them and make sure they can import it properly.
The absolute safest bet would be to transcode all your material to one single format and edit with that, even though that may entail some relinking fun at this point. A little work now could save you a headache later. Backup the original files with the camera masters in case anything happens down the line.
Then find the recordist who didn’t set things up in a unified format and inform him he owes you a few beers.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Daniel,
As long as your audio mixing house is aware of the situation before they start working, there should be no real issue with you continuing with the 44.1 material rather than converting it all. It really is a standards issue and has no real repercussion on anything quality-wise. In practice, there is really no perceivable difference between 44.1 and 48kHz material.
In fact, proceeding as you are will minimize artifacts, as you will mix all the audio in native format before transcoding, applying any artifacts only to the complete mix rather than adding up the artifacts of all the separately-transcoded elements. This is really theoretical, as the 44.1/48 conversion is usually a clean one.
So give the heads up to the audio mixer, as his templates and usual workflow are probably set up for 48kHz, but (s)he should be able to adapt to the situation without any problem. Be careful of any conversion you do from the NLE timeline for approvals or such. Most conversion presets are expecting 48k material and you may get sync issues if no sample rate conversion is set to be applied. You’ll see it straight away so it’s easy to catch. I’ve worked on many projects where we had to work like this for similar reasons and it’s always worked fine.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
You are correct that the EBU updated their norms and both are now identical but we still have separate measurement names. It wasn’t complicated enough as it was, I guess. I mentioned A/85 as I presumed this was for broadcast only, which may not be correct. If your specific specs call for overall level, then measure to that. The delivery specs are always right. Until they’re not.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Kenneth,
You don’t mention what tools you have at your disposal but if you have a Mac with Quicktime 7 installed, this is a snap. QT X can’t do this.
If you already have sound on your video file, you’ll have to delete those tracks. Just open the Movie Properties (cmd-J), select the audio tracks and hit the delete button.
Next you’ll need the new sound exported to the exact length of the video. Line it up in your NLE or DAW and export the correct duration for audio only, which shouldn’t take long.
Open that audio file with QT7 in another window.
Go to the QT7 window for your audio-less video and select all (cmd-A). Copy that (cmd-c).
Go to the QT7 window with your new audio and, from the Edit menu, select Add to Selection and Scale (all modifiers-V). That should add the video track to your audio ones. Check that sync is good.
Save that as a self-contained movie and you should be set.Pasting the video to the audio is best as the opposite can give slight audio artifacts if selection length is not sample-accurate. Both files must be of exact same length to the frame for best results. If not, the speed of the video could be changed and that’ll throw things out of sync. This can be done on a PC with QT Pro, but that’s not free. There are other ways of doing this for sure, but this is the one I use many times a week solidly.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com