Being able to apply ambience to ADR or studio-captured sources to match location sound has traditionally been a matter of using the right tool in the right way. We look at one new product that may have just made the process a whole lot easier…

Many Locations, One Mix

Bringing audio together from different sources and making it blend seamlessly together will be a situation that most dialogue editors will be familiar with, and increasingly, this is also a scenario that anyone working in a collaborative workflow can find themselves in. The rise of self-record music projects also presents new challenges for the remote mixer who must bring together disparate sources of varying subjective quality into a single entity.

Bringing It Together

Of all the anomalies the mixer or editor is presented with, perhaps the most common is inconsistent levels of ambience in the recorded audio, with ambient location audio and replacement studio dialogue needing to blend perfectly. While modern reverbs give us all the realism and control we need, the problem for those with tight deadlines or less experience is knowing where to start. Step forward A.I..

Accentize Chameleon

With an increasing number of developers turning their attention to tools that do the parametrization for us, Chameleon from Accentize brings us a reverb that can actually imitate other reverbs. For anyone who needs to superimpose the ambience from one recording onto another this is very good news indeed. Users only need learn a reverb profile with one instance on the ambient track, then use that profile in a second instance on the dry track.

Accentize describe Chameleon as

“an intelligent audio plugin which uses artificial neural networks to estimate and model the exact reverb content of any source recording. You can build a reverb profile in seconds and easily apply it to dry studio recordings.”

Features include:

• create unlimited different unique reverbs with a single click

• automatic parameterisation of dry/wet-mixing, stereo-width and pre-delay

• the ideal tool for realistic ADR and foley matching

• useful for creative sound-design or music-production

• extract the natural room-impulse-response of any recording and export as a wav-file

How Well Does Chameleon Work?

In a nutshell, this product works extremely well indeed. For me it’s simplicity in use was bettered only by its astonishing mimicry of the test ambience which should bring a smile to the face of all but the most hardened cynic. Accentize have been quietly honing their mastery of this technology, and this latest in a line of products certainly delivers. If you haven’t yet tried Chameleon for yourself, you should.