Hi guys, like many of you, I’m intrigued at the time savings with iZotope Dialogue Match for post production, but my understanding is that it’s only currently available for Pro Tools, although iZotope seems to be considering a VST version in the future.
Anyway, I have moved films mostly over to Nuendo, and I do NOT want to export this film and migrate it over to Pro Tools just to use Dialogue Match, and then export from there and come back to Nuendo to finish up. And I’m quite happy having moved these kinds of projects over to Nuendo in general and don’t want to use PT again anyway (for many reasons), even for one part of the workflow that would be theoretically very nice with Dialogue Match. Just not worth the time savings and effort.
However, I’d love some additional tools similar to Dialogue Match (if they exist) that I might not know about yet and I’m wondering if any of you have some recommendations for other dialog/matching/noise/ambience tools that might speed up my Nuendo dialog workflow right now, instead of waiting for iZotope to release a VST version of Dialogue Match. I already have RX, SpectraLayers of course, plus tons of standard plugins… just nothing that adds up to a workflow quite as streamlined as what Dialogue Match can offer out of the box.
So I haven’t actually gotten an impression on how it improves workflow since I haven’t watched enough videos or demoed it. How much do you really improve things, and are there different algorithms at play or something?
Just wondering if you could achieve similar results by careful crafting of preset signal/module chains in RX…
I am very tempted to get the Post Pro bundle with Exponential Audio 3D reverbs though, which would include this (and other stuff)… hmmm…
The workflow is really good for film dialogue post… really good IMO. iZotope clearly worked with some industry pros to help them develop the whole workflow/concept… it’s a common problem and this is a pretty good solution. The algorithms themselves seem good to very good, nothing particularly new or great IMO except how they combined those existing concepts/processes with what appears to be some half-decent AI learning stuff and then created a workflow that tackles the tedious task of dialogue matching to save tons of time. On a typical feature film with lots of dialogue, the plugin will easily pay for itself IMO. The integration and pseudo-AI stuff is the “revolutionary” aspect of the product. But in all honesty with the existing tools we all have, there’s nothing we can’t already do by hand with careful crafting, as you say. In fact, you’ll have to use your “careful crafting skills” anyway to take it all the way to the finish line. But depending on the source material, it can get reasonably close and definitely save time.
The main benefit is speed, speed, speed. For those who are spending a lot of time matching and tweaking dialogue from different mics + ADR, etc… it’s a real winner IMO, at least in theory. From what I can tell so far, it would get me 70-90% of the way there for the film I’m working on right now, for example. This new tool, plus RX, plus Revoice Pro, etc., would be THE killer dialogue post combo right now, covering almost everything you need to do with dialogue tweaking and matching for film with great time savings.
Is it necessary? Again, only if you are doing tons of dialog matching. On the other hand, I can imagine a 2.0 version of this thing to be even better, and it might just become one of those “essential” tools.
Problem is that iZotope Dialogue Match is for Pro Tools only at this point.
I’m just wondering if there’s some other tool out there that I don’t know about yet that would help speed things up in a similar way. Probably not. But no way it’s worth the effort of moving my projects to Pro Tools though. If iZotope Dialogue Match were in VST format, though, I’d buy it instantly.
You might consider the Voxengo Curve EQ. It comes with Nuendo. While it may or may not be useful for you but, it has saved me in multiple instances. I have used this to match different flute recordings with acceptable (to me) results. I have not yet used it extensively for dialogue matching but I think that it can work nicely. However, the workflow can be relatively cumbersome.
Right, and after more research, I think there really is nothing else close to how Dialogue Match streamlines this specific workflow at this point. But I might have missed something. Please do post if you know of something similar. Again, not that the results can’t be matched or exceed by hand with existing tools and Nuendo, but I’m just trying to save precious time.
Without moving my films over to Pro Tools, I think I’ll have to wait for the VST version of Dialogue Match. Maybe some other developer will seize the opportunity and do something similar. There’s nothing really magical about the algorithms in Dialogue Match IMO that other developers haven’t also done before, except for the machine learning part and the way that iZotope integrated it all together.
It’s like anything else when you’re dealing with workflow and the various DAWs out there. While Nuendo has other great workflow advantages compared to Pro Tools for what I do, in this case iZotope has created a Pro Tools workflow that is currently the best for this specific task of matching dialogue. It’s somewhat perplexing why they decided not to launch it with VST support up front, but frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Avid paid an exclusivity fee so they’d get the plugin before anyone else.
It is a bit sad though how a complete market segment has been ignored by iZotope. I mean, how hard is VST support for them? Seriously. And it continues to paint the picture (and support the reality) that in the US, Pro Tools remains the dominant DAW for film post, so much so that iZotope felt they could totally ignore VST on launch.
I wonder if the SpectraLayers devs (now at Steinberg, thankfully), might develop a tool inside SpectraLayers that could do something similar, quickly? I mean, a lot of the underlying tech seems to be in SpectraLayers already, except for the machine learning algorithms to bring it all together… Oh well.
There was a thread on Gearslutz where someone posted a link to give feedback to iZotope requesting a VST version, which I did. I got a reply that they’d received a fair amount of requests already.
I highly recommend everyone here to find that link or find a place on iZotope’s website where you can give feedback and request it. If users don’t speak up they won’t port it.
The main problem with a VST version is that there is no workflow to match audio suite offline processing.
We have had this with RX and auto align post, also with revoice pro. Pretty much all the audio post specific plugin solutions that came out during the last years rely on audio suite offline. While you can work without it - no problem - as uarte says
I don’t know, maybe ara2 could help you guys here in Nuendo land, if you could get devs to implement it (I believe soundradix and synchroarts are there or almost there) We will have to see if this could translate into a real time saving workflow for post in Nuendo. If I had one thing that was the most important thing for me in the transition to ProTools it might have been 3rd party integration. Dialog Match is nice to have, Auto Align post is impossible to live without imho in audio post.
As MatthiasNYC points out the bundle with the nice reverbs vom exponential audio is a very good offer. iZotope is one of the very few companies that have really focussed on audio post, they manage to do this at very competetive prices as well if you go for their bundles.
Cool option. And perhaps a little bit faster workflow Compared to what we have with RX. But any static fill will suffer from a static fill sound. It is just the way it is.
I have been experimenting trying to create a modulated fill sound using a modulated noise and IR to avoid the total static feel. It almost works, but the workflow just got a bit to slow and the matching not quite perfect enough.
You could get similar results, possibly even better than Dialog Match with RX7 Advanced EQ matching (same back end I imagine) and Altiverb 7 which can take a sample of location ambience and create an IR to use that is the same as the location, OR you can just choose a similar one from the massive library, OR even better, get their Indoor plugin.I haven’t tried it, but I’m thinking about it