Mixing techniques to cut costs

Q:  We’re looking for suggestions that will provide lower budget alternatives alternatives for our clients for translating vignettes and talking heads. Ideas?

When translating videos from one language to another, there are a variety of techniques.  How the project audio is edited and mixed can have a strong effect on budget.  The most expensive approach to video translation - that produces the highest “class” results, is a video translation tecnique called lip sync (aka dialog replacement).   This technique involves removing the original language voice track.  Then, translate the script, and adapt the translated script for the lip movemments on screen.  (more about this in other parts of this site).  Then, a professional voice actor, who is experienced at lip sync, records the voice track.  At this point, the audio studio editors then tweak almost every short phrase of the entire project to align as best as possible with the lips on-screen.  So, this technique is both the most effective and the most costly approach to video translation.  A lesser expensive way to handle lip sync, is not to try to replace the voices  perfectly with lip movements, but to use a mixing technique that produces the effect of a “news reportage” or “documentary style” mixing.  This is a technique in which the translated script is shortened a bit, but not adapted for the movements of the lips.   The voice talent records, and tries to time the voice recording sentence by sentence, or paragraph by paragraph, rather than word by word.  Then, during mixing,  the original spoken language is retained in the background softly, while the foreign voice is louder to the forefront.  With this “news reportage” approach, it is not necessary to try to match the lips, and the entire video translation process - from the first step of script adaptation, to voice talent recording, to editing and mixing - are all much much faster.  And, therefore, cheaper for your client.

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.