Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1470109
the same space. We use tools like Fab Filter and various plug-ins that help us achieve that. One of my dialogue supervisors and I talk about this all the time— mastering is not a craft that you can learn by just doing things once or by someone showing you. You really have to do enough of it to understand the dynamics and the uniqueness of a person's voice and how it's going to complement other characters in that scene, ensuring that they're all sounding as if they're in the same room, because more than likely, none of them were recording in the same space. [laughs] That's not always a guarantee. Outside of knowing how to use mastering plug-ins, we must ensure that the recording is good, first and foremost. When we're reviewing studios that we're going to be recording dialogue at, I do ask for tests from all the mics that we're going to use to see how they sound in that space. We can then see if we're hearing weird reflections that are not working well with the microphones and we analyze the recordings before we green-light a studio to record our dialogue. With our young team members who are not yet seasoned in terms of editorial mastering, I want them to train their ears. I always encourage them to play different games and watch TV shows and films and notice how the people from that industry are ensuring that there's a seamless experience between all of those scenes. We all know that not everyone can get good audio off of production sound. A lot of it has to be picked up with ADR. How do they make it sound like ADR doesn't exist? That is a huge goal for every title that we work on. It's a challenge, especially with the pandemic. The whole industry had to figure out innovative ways to capture dialogue and make sure that it didn't sound like it was recorded in somebody's closet, which we all know happened. [laughs] I'm really impressed my team was able to accomplish that and make our titles sound like the pandemic didn't happen. We certainly scrambled to figure out innovative ways to ensure that production didn't stop. EM: Are there ever instances where you have dialogue processing going on in the game engine that needs to somehow be replicated in the cut scenes? LR: Yes! We're leaning more and more on dialogue processing happening in the game engine in runtime. The processing I'm referring to would be adding effects to make the dialogue sound as if they're coming through a radio and the like, and if that occurs on the in-game dialogue (gameplay lines and systemic lines), we certainly review the best way to trigger that same vocal effect in the cinematic (cutscene). There are titles we work on where we have 5.1 or 7.1 stems that we mix linearly for cinematics where we integrate them into the game that way, and for those assets, we normally bake the processing in. But we also work on titles where the dialogue in the cinematics is implemented as individual lines and therefore, we can have the runtime process triggered on the cinematic lines. It varies for each title, and it also depends on how many dialogue assets in a title need to be processed. We have to look at how it will impact memory and runtime. If there is a significant amount of dialogue that needs to be Kratos and Atreus navigate the treacherous waters in God of War (2018).