We recently posted an article iZotope Announce The Next Big Thing In Post Production - What Could It Be? because iZotope announced a presentation on November 7th and we learnt that a new product would be launched on November 5th, well the wait is over.

Today iZotope has launched Dialogue Match, which is an AAX AudioSuite plugin that automatically learns and matches the sonic character of dialogue recordings. This is the first product to combine iZotope and Exponential Audio technology, bringing together iZotope’s machine learning with the reverb technology developed by Michael Carnes.

Why Dialogue Match?

Every day, re-recording mixers and editors in film and television are faced with the challenge of matching dialogue from lavalier mics, boom mics, and ADR to create a single seamless and cohesive performance. There are, of course, many ways for us to tackle this problem but they all take time, often requiring several plug-ins, and so take time and slow up the workflow.

What iZotope Say About Dialogue Match

Dialogue Match has been designed so that users can analyze the audio, extract a sonic profile and then apply the profile to any other dialogue track for fast and easy environmental consistency in scene recordings, enabling you to complete the tedious process of matching production dialogue to ADR in seconds, rather than hours. iZotope’s Senior Product Manager, Mike Rozett told us…

“Customers who have tested Dialogue Match are telling us that it will change the way they approach dialogue editing forever,. We are very excited to collaborate with Exponential Audio founder Michael Carnes on this product and we’re both convinced that this technology will revolutionize the laborious process of getting continuity in dialogue.”

For re-recording mixers and ADR editors, Dialogue Match will be an unprecedented time-saver. Tonal characteristics can be matched between a boom and a lavalier microphone. When it comes to redubbing films and TV for different language it will be so much quicker to be able to automatically match the localised language tracks to match the sound, ambience from the original language, with global snapshots and reference profiles that can be saved or loaded.

Dialogue Match Features

The EQ Module uses the EQ matching technology from iZotope's Ozone 9 to quickly learn and match the tonal and spectral characteristics of dialogue.

The Reverb Module uses brand-new reverb matching technology, powered by iZotope machine learning, to capture spatial reflections from one recording and accurately apply them to another using Exponential Audio's clean, realistic reverb engine.

The Ambience Module harnesses the Ambine Match technology from iZotope RX and analyzes the spectral noise profile of a recording, identifies and then re-creates room tone so speeding up the matching of dialogue from location recordings, acquired with boom and lavalier mics as well as studio acquired ADR tracks.

How To Use Dialogue Match From iZotope

Imagine the scenario, you have a dialogue track, which is made up of some boom mic tracks, some lav mic tracks for scenes where the boom couldn’t get close enough in and some clean ADR tracks recorded in the studio because the location sound wasn’t usable. You would probably end up creating fill tracks of clean ambience, either buy stitching together bits of clean ambience or using Ambience Match from iZotope RX. Then using EQ to match the sound for the lav or ADR tracks to the boom mic, whether that is manually with an EQ plugin or using an EQ matching plugin like SEQ-S from Nugen Audio or the EQ Match module in iZotope RX. Finally, using a reverb plugin to try and manually match the reverb to the sound of the location, or if you are very lucky, use a convolution reverb and an impulse response acquired for you by the location sound recordist.

Enter Dialogue Match from iZotope. This plugin using machine learning to do each of these 3 stages automatically. Once Dialogue Match has captured the reference track, usually the boom mic, and the lav or ADR track the plugin’s machine learning can calculate appropriate EQ match, reverb and ambience extraction and then present these in 3 separate sections in the plugin, one each for EQ, Reverb and Ambience to enable you to fine tweak them, before using the AudioSuite plugin to render a processed version back onto a track.

Another application is for foreign language dubbing where the new dialogue is recorded in a different language, usually in a studio. Like ADR, you then need to be able to process the studio-recorded dialogue so that it sounds like the original recording and matches the location the viewer can see. With Dialogue Match you are able to use the original dialogue tracks as a reference and then impose the profile onto the replacement language recordings and get them to match the original locations.

Exclusive Demo Of Dialogue Match From iZotope

In this exclusive video demo, audio restoration specialist Mike Thornton takes the brand new plugin Dialogue Match from iZotope for a spin and shows what the first product to combine iZotope and Exponential Audio technology can do by automatically learning and matching the sonic character of dialogue recordings.

What We Think of Dialogue Match from iZotope

It is great to see how the iZotope developers have taken the Exponential Audio reverb technology, developed by Michael Carnes, which iZotope acquired earlier this year, and married it with their own very clever machine learning technology to produce this unique plugin.

Even better is that they have made is simple to use, making it quick and easy to use. If you are working with a mix of dialogue from location sound via boom or lavalier mics with ADR recorded in a studio, Dialogue Match is going to be yet another iZotope lifesaver, saving time and stress bypassing the need for multiple plugins to process the audio so that all the different dialogue sources come together in one cohesive mix.

As with so many of the iZotope tools, the Default preset does a great job and our experience testing Dialogue Match is that the machine learning gets it pretty well spot on the first time. A couple of things to be aware of are mainly to do with levels. It is worth making sure that the reference track and the track to be processed are pretty well the same level, to help when comparing the reference track with the processing with Dialogue Match. We also found that the reverb dry signal could end up a little low so that there was a level difference when using the Capture Preview option to check back how good the processed version is compared to the reference track.

We have to mention the manual at this point. iZotope seems to have really worked at their manuals with more recent releases and the Dialogue Match manual is no exception. We found it very easy to follow with clear and easy to understand explanations enabling us to get excellent results very quickly but also be able to understand how we can drill down under the hood to be able to fine tweak the settings to get even better results.

The Reference Profiles and Snapshots will also save you time especially when you are dealing with the same actors in a set of different locations. Once you had a reference track for an actor in a setting, there is no need to keep analysing the reference track over and over. With the Snapshots, you can save the settings for each character in each location.

The price might seem a little high at first glance at $599, after all, that is $200 more than RX 7 Standard or half the price of RX 7 Advanced but for just one plugin. However, when you consider the time-saving benefits of Dialogue Match, it’s not going to take long before Dialogue Match will pay for itself.

Dialogue Match Price And Availability

Dialogue Match is only available as an AudioSuite Plugin for Pro Tools 11, with $100 off as an introductory offer at $499 until 10th December 2019. After that, it will be priced at $599 MSRP.

Please be aware that Dialogue Match is not supported in any other DAW other than Pro Tools as it depends on the AudioSuite plugin format and features to work.

Dialogue Match is also available as part of the following iZotope bundles.

• Post Production Surround Reverb Bundle ($1,199 MSRP)

• RX 7 Advanced Reverb Bundle ($1,499 MSRP)

• RX Post Production Suite 4 ($1,999 MSRP)