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MillimeterRead My Lips!
Sep 1, 1997 12:00 PM, Ty Ford
VocALign Puts the Squeeze (and Stretch) on ADR The idea of a 90 percent reduction in the number of ADR sessions has broad appeal, not only for the actors who do the work, but also for the producers who foot the bill. VocALign, a $1,495 Mac-based software program from Synchro Arts Ltd., UK, is helping to trim the costs of ADR sessions, often making them unnecessary.
In April 1991, the DAR SoundStation II was one of the first 15 digital audio workstations to hit the market. WordFit, a much earlier iteration of VocALign, was an integral part of the SoundStation II. Synchro Arts developer Jeff Bloom has continued to develop the software as VocALign, now a stand-alone application that works with Pro Tools 3.1 to 4.01 on any Macintosh OS-compatible computer with Power PC or 68040 processors. VocALign uses the host processor instead of DSP cards or TDM, allowing access to users with less sophisticated Pro Tools rigs. In an industry where copycats are the norm, VocALign remains the only third-party software to provide offline automatic alignment and editing of audio for lip-synching; foreign dialogue replacement; tightening-up of double tracking, backing vocals, and instruments; and modifying the timing of one sound effect or music track to match another.
VocALign works by automatically time-expanding and/or compressing the replacement audio to align its modulations with those of the original guide track. And because VocALign will operate on any two audio signals, it can also be used on sound effects or to align the timing of electronic instrument tracks to man-made tempos. The software package also includes TimeMod, a mono/stereo linear time compression/expansion algorithm.
For Todd Grace, a re-recording mixer at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, who has also done some postproduction consulting for Digidesign, "VocALign is a totally invaluable necessity for what I do. We do a lot of sitcoms: Seinfeld, Friends, Third Rock From The Sun, Cosby. We use VocALign on almost every show we do. I can't live without it. You isolate the original phrase, then isolate the replacement phrase. It uses the waveform and energy of the original take and compresses and expands the new line to match. Usually the entire process is done in under 30 seconds, depending on the length of the original lines."
Grace says VocALign allows him to use optional or alternate takes from dailies instead of having to schedule an ADR session. "If the lines can't be fixed, we'll schedule an ADR session. Usually for the sake of the actor's comfort we'll get as many takes as we can. If we get a take that's close, I'll use my best judgment to select a take that VocALign can correct."
In addition to dialogue, Grace also uses VocALign to change the length of music cues forced by last-minute editing changes. "If the music for the scene ends up being too short or too long due to a last minute edit, we can fix it with VocALign on the dubbing stage without changing the pitch."
Grace says the only problems he's run into are caused by high background noise. "If there's too much background noise the software can't get a grip on the original track. We had some incorrectly recorded lines, with audio recorded at the correct pitch but incorrect speed. We had to speed the audio guide track up to get a correct guide track that would match the picture, but then it was the wrong pitch. We could either pitch down the track or time correct the original track. We like to process as little as possible, so we used the pitched and sped-up track as our new guide track and VocALigned the original track, which was too slow, and got a correct pitch, correct speed track. That was a pretty cool solution. It worked amazingly well."
Rob Sephton, Sound Supervisor at Fox in L.A., has been using VocALign for the last 18 months. "I've done Beta testing for Digidesign since 1988. Since then the whole system of digital editorial gets faster every six or seven months as computers get faster and software gets better. I used VocALign when I was at Disney in Burbank. We used it as a stand-alone at first but then integrated it into Pro Tools. It makes our lives easier by handling the manual tasks and allowing us to be creative in increasingly tighter and faster postproduction schedules.
Like Grace, Sephton has found VocALign is an effective preemptive tool that eliminates the need for an ADR session about 90 percent of the time. "I haven't used it in an actual ADR session. We use it instead of doing ADR or after the session to make things fit even better. If the director likes reading, and the ADR supervisor says we can make it work, they might just do a backup line and move on."
About the 10 percent of the time that VocALign doesn't work, Sephton says, "If you push the program too far either way you get various artifacts. At that point you try another line or have the actor reloop it. You're also listening to make sure you're within certain parameters: quality, inflection, and tonality."
Sephton is also Beta testing Titan, a new Synchro Arts software. "It works in the same range. You take the work track and your EDL-assembled dialogue tracks and analyze and move the dialogue to the continuous work track. Even if the EDL is right, stuff can be a frame or half frame out. Titan will make it closer. With that job done, the editor can start splitting the dialogue and filling it out. It's another software that saves time and money for postproduction supervisors and gives us more time to be creative. Some shows go along smoothly like [Carl Reiner's] That Old Feeling, Con Air, or Speed 2 had massive changes every minute through final dub. It was hard to keep up with changing predubs."
Synchro Arts Ltd., UK, can be reached @: www.synchroarts.co.uk
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