Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512183
24 M PS E . O R G it seems like it's mostly dialogue. There's some camera movement, a little bit of Foley, but how early on are you getting the dialogue to know sync and how the dialogue will be laid into this cinematic? JS: So I was actually the dialogue editor, as well as the Foley guy—I did it all. But that was a really long process, because I did all the in- game dialogue, and the cinematic dialogue came in at the end. I did all the dialogue editorial and mixing and mastering in the sessions for the cinematics. EM: Wow. Okay. So you knew sync because you had the dialogue. JS: Right, this was not a departmen- tal thing. This was all just sort of like, "Hey Mike, where's this?" Pulling this game off was a technical feat because of the way that we were developing the Unreal tech, along with managing the systems of the Xbox 360. Prior to this, the Playstation 2 was the benchmark of what you could do with audio in a game. I mean PC stuff was a different bag, but as far as consoles at the time, we crammed 512kb worth of sound into an entire game. And I'd worked at Naughty Dog where they were very graphics-intensive, so they didn't leave a lot of space for audio to be streamed, and we had to do level loads. We had basically 512kb of resident ram that held everything. From weapon grabs to weapon switches, feeds, and general sounds. And then we could load in a megabyte and a half at level loads. EM: So when you're walking into a new map and a door takes five minutes to open up, that's the game loading in all the data, right? JS: Exactly. So, the generational leap from that to the Xbox 360 was huge. It was literally ground shifting, so understanding those variables and what we could do, at first was like, "wow, it's amazing." But there were all kinds of technical challenges. The way that we were developing it was we would do game captures of the cinematics, and then I would build them out linearly, like we would do it in a film. And everything would be in sync. And then we put it in the game engine and everything would be out of sync. We found out that it was because when we were capturing video, the bandwidth between the engine and the writing data to the disk of capturing video, Sound designer Jamey Scott at his workstation while working on Gears of War.