The wonderfully talented people at Non-Lethal Applications have been busy responding to feedback about the groundbreaking Video Slave ADR Cueing and Video Playback software that I reviewed last year, and today have released Video Slave 3.2.

Video Slave 3.2 - New Features

NLA's crack community of testers, which includes many Oscar, Emmy, RTS, MPSE and BAFTA Nominees and Winners, have been putting Video Slave 3 through its paces, and their invaluable feedback has helped bring these new features and improvements, to an already incredible piece of software -

• Added support for half-speed playback from Pro Tools.
• Video Slave now determines its playback speed from the video reference if attached. This requires a Blackmagic or AJA device with video reference input.
• Video Slave now supports the import of DS Taker DBF files. Markers are imported as Streamer events.
• Added new preference for the import of sub cues (currently only supported with DBF files)
• Added support for flutters/punches during cues
• Added ADR Cue default duration setting. This setting is also used when importing ADR Cues from script files when no output TC is provided.
• Added support for open-ended cues. If start and end TC are set to the same value, cues will behave as if they were open ended. There will be a cue at the beginning and the overlays as usual but no progress bar and no black screen. 

Video Slave 3.2 - Improvements

• Improved frame-accurate looping. This requires a DAW connection and is thus only available in Video Slave 3 Dub
• Video Slave now displays the HUI connection state in the preferences
• Filtering for actor and character now uses a dropdown menu instead of a text field
• New display settings preferences UI. Many customers were confused by the combination of device list and device settings. We changed the settings UI now to make it more obvious.
• Renamed recording mode "Open Ended" to "Batch Recording" to avoid confusion to the now available open-ended cues

Video Slave 3.2 - Bug Fixes

Video Slave is still in active development, so NLA has also been busy tying up some of the loose ends. It's already one of the most stable reliable pieces of software I use and these fixes just keep on improving things -

• Fixed a bug where importing a short CSV file with a trailing carriage return wouldn't work
• Fixed a stall/beachball when using MMC
• Fixed a bug reporting a successful activation even though there was a problem with the internet connection 
• Fixed a bug of wrong event TC addresses when changing movie start/end TC
• Fixed a bug where systemwide shortcuts for the ADR features wouldn't work in the demo
• Fixed a crash on event file import if character and actor are not both mapped
• Fixed a bug where Video Slave would crash if a Mono output bus was selected for the beep out
• Fixed a bug causing a crash when deleting movies from the playlist
• Fixed a bug where adjusting an audio region's start TC wouldn't work reliably

Best Find Yet?

I can honestly say that this software hasn't simply been my "find of the week", but it certainly qualifies as one of my best finds of the last four years. It has transformed my workflow, and with it still in active development, continues to do so.

Video Slave 3 by Non Lethal Applications starts at £249 for the standard version, £389 for the Pro version and £1149 for the Dub version. Subscriptions are also available, starting at £14.99 per month.