If you’ve been traumatized by aggressive crickets in your field recording as I have been, you may want to give Dialogue Match from iZotope, a closer look.

2019 has definitely been the “year of the movie” for me. Normally, I spend my time recording acoustic music but have been getting asked more and more to do sound design for local productions. The most challenging film I have worked on this year involved several hours of editing summer outdoors ambient sound. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to remote parts of Wisconsin in the summer, but the crickets are especially aggressive. 

While most of the actors were able to come in for ADR, one had moved to New York which meant I had to blend her lines in somehow. 

Luckily I finished the project just in time for iZotope Dialogue Match to be released! That was sarcasm if you couldn’t tell. I would have loved this to have been released a month or two earlier...

This December, I started on a new film and thought I would download Dialogue Match to give it a try, hoping that it’ll save me some grumbling while I edit dialog. While I haven’t got to the ADR phase of this movie yet, I am already in love with the plugin.  From iZotope’s website:

“Dialogue Match is a Pro Tools AudioSuite tool intended for re-recording mixers who deliver the final sound mix for films and television programs. For decades, these mixers have had the tedious job of matching dialogue from lavalier, boom mics, and ADR in order to create a seamless and cohesive dialogue performance. This long and work-intensive process takes valuable time away from crafting the sound of a scene and producing a final mix. Using machine learning, Dialogue Match reduces this process to seconds, making it the first tool to automatically learn and match the reverberant character of dialogue recordings.”

Dialogue Match is used as an AudioSuite plugin and has 3 different modules: Ambience, Reverb, and EQ. First, you select your reference audio, then select the audio that you’d like that thumbprint to be applied to.

The EQ module does just what it sounds like it would do - it helps to match EQ between reference audio and the audio you’re working with.

The Reverb module lets you adjust the amount of reverb, dry signal, and other reverb characteristics such as predelay.

You can also adjust how much ambient noise is applied or trimmed.

The interface is really intuitive and you can A/B your reference audio with your production audio as you make adjustments. Most of what I’ve been doing so far is to match lav mics with the shotgun mic and it’s worked like a charm. 

If you want to know more about Dialogue Match then do check out Mike’s article iZotope Dialogue Match - New Time Saving Tool For Pro Tools Users - We Have A World Exclusive Demo.

However, the jury is still out on if this would help with any future cricket issues...