Vocalign Pro for Foreign Dialog Rec?

[Ken P]

anyone use Vocalign Pro when recording foreign translations to pic? we have been doing a ton of 1 hr programs - recording spanish dialog for english videos. the producer i am working with is very particular about watching the video for reference and lining up spanish audio to match pic, so sometimes the spanish audio might match the lips better than the english audio. he has his own system, no matter how much i think i understand his methods i always get pulled back in to following his lead. nevertheless, i've been reading about Vocalign and some of the features seem spot on to what we are doing manually, and possibly it might be a good tool to get maybe 80% correct and save some time in editing while providing better overall accuracy. anyone have any experience with this on similar projects?

[conky]

Vocalign isn't the answer either. I've done 100's of fogeign dubs and still find the sync is best by hand...vocalign will be helpful in some instances but in most, its just wrong...accents and inflections can change the alignment enough that you have to move it anyway.

[Ken P]

Vocalign isn't the answer either. I've done 100's of fogeign dubs and still find the sync is best by hand...vocalign will be helpful in some instances but in most, its just wrong...accents and inflections can change the alignment enough that you have to move it anyway.

sounds like based on your experience you are quite familiar with my approach to this, and this is good info. just yesterday the producer and i were both working on a show trying to imagine exactly how vocalign pro could work right. there are way too many spots where there are longer words in spanish where swiss-cheeze holes exist in the english - how coud something mechanically line this up and /faster/more efficiently/more correctly than we are doing manually. but the feature list did sound appealing, its too hard not to at least ask if there really is a better way to do what we are doing since it is a long and painful process nonetheless...

thanks for your info!

[Ken P]

i am working with the VocAlign Pro demo right now, just wanted to give it a shot based on the client's request. after 5 minutes of working with it, i can't figure out how it is going to make things more efficient with foreign dialog. i feel i can confidently tell the client it is not worth the investment for this purpose; manual editing is the only real efficient way to do this right. i was hoping though that i could use VA Pro to get maybe 80% or so ligned up and then just do some minor tweaking here and there, but i can't seem to get a setting that doesn't completely destroy the spanish dialog.

before i totally give up on any type of software assistance with this type of thing, is there anyone at all using vocalign or any other software that may be out there, to assist with lining up foreign dialog to pic?

thanks in advance!

[Tiago Silva]

My experience with Vocalign Pro on Portuguese dialog is the same: we concluded that it wasn't worth the effort, because certain sounds (phonemes) would always be mangled by Vocalign.

Besides, Vocalign is built to sync "two of the same". Even if you divide the line in several hit points manually, it still won't sound as good as manual editing, and you'll still have to go to the trouble of marking the hit points.

[bigbadhenchman]

Having done my fair share of foreign dubbing, re-writing the scripts is the only way to get it closer.
I worked with a client, who would re-write on the fly in the sessions, if she wasn't happy with the way it was playing.

[Ken P]

Having done my fair share of foreign dubbing, re-writing the scripts is the only way to get it closer.
I worked with a client, who would re-write on the fly in the sessions, if she wasn't happy with the way it was playing.

this is exactly what we are doing too... the producer and his team of talent have been doing this for years and they have it down to a well oiled machine when it comes to reading the spanish dialog to pic. it amazes me how the main female voice talent almost instictively knows when to speed up or slow down to match phrases and whatnot. she rolls for 9 minute takes straight without mistakes at times, AND keeping very close timing. when we can't make it, we pause for a producer rewrite. but my questions pertain to the editing process, where we go in and manually line up dialog after the recording is done. there is so much shifing a few frames here, a few frames there, 80% of the work is very minimal shifting. this is the stuff where we are looking for some way to electronically line up regions without tormenting the audio. the other 20% is where we have to do a bit more extensive editing that obviously no software plug could detangle. in the meantime i will keep pressing on the manual way we are doing it currently.