Anyone who’s ever had to try and match ADR recordings to location dialogue will know that it can sometimes be a difficult task. One of the key factors in getting a good result is being able to get close to the reverb of the location recordings. Accentize provide a nice solution for this in the form of Chameleon 2.
Chameleon 2 is an intelligent reverb plug-in which is able to learn and imitate the room reverb of any source recording. It works by analysing a few seconds of audio and building a reverb profile which exactly models the original room conditions. This can then be applied to a dry studio recording in order to perfectly match it. Whilst dialogue might be the most obvious use for this, it would, of course, also be useful for matching foley.
After instantiating the plug-in on a track, you’ll be given the option to either create a new reverb or open the reverb library. The library includes a number of presets but it’s especially useful for saving your own captured profiles for later use.
The Create New Reverb option allows you to capture a reverb profile from an existing recording. This can be done either by playing audio directly from the track on which Chameleon 2 is active, by playing audio from another track via a sidechain input or by dragging and dropping an audio file into the plug-in interface. There are options to estimate the dry/wet balance and also the pre-delay. Analysis takes just a few seconds and once it’s done, you can apply it to your dry audio.
Chameleon 2 does a remarkable job at matching the reverb characteristics of location recordings. There are a number of controls which can be tweaked in the plug-in, including width, stretch, pre-delay, decay, treble and bass controls, dry/wet balance and output gain. In using it, I found that it does a very good job automatically and the dry/wet control was the only thing I really needed to refine. The other controls are useful to have though, especially when you’re also trying to compensate for slight tonal differences between the recordings.
Take a look at the video below to see and hear Accentize Chameleon 2 in action!