i-DEA Rephaser in action
The concept
The i-DEA Rephaser software comes from the daily experience of Dialog Editors and their Assistants, more and more pressed by the need to get – quickly – a decent sounding dialog channel from the increasing number of audio tracks coming from the set. An average production nowadays features up to a dozen of audio tracks per scene and lots of Lavaliér radiomicrophones.
The plain sum of all these sources with the Boom track doesn’t give back an accurate image of the scene sound, just the opposite: the better the Boom guy has done his job the worse the rough mix will sound!
The reason of this weirdness is explained in detail here but the core concept stills: you must put in phase the various sources before getting a decent sound from their mix, period. The i-DEA Rephaser software does exactly that: first selects the proper couple of signals coming from the actual speaker – his Lavaliér track and the corresponding portion inside the Boom track – and then put them in perfect phase, that’s it.
Hours of boring work with uncertain results are now given back to the Dialogue Editor to accomplish his peculiar tasks without caring anymore of the mechanical details of the phase alignment.
The workflow
Batch processing all Dialogue dailies would be the perfect solution to get once and forever the aligned signals, but there’s more: the i-DEA Rephaser software “knows” who’s speaking and when.
So by operating only on the accompanying files of each reel, since the alignment of the pair of signals produces an increase in the signal level and stabilizes its overall amplitude, knowing from the OMF or AAF file the location of the files on the timeline, it is possible to automatically write the automation values of the auxiliary tracks and obtain a Dialogue rough mix in minutes instead of days.
Leaving aside any consideration about the increase in the quality and intelligibility of the Dialogue, the overall saving of time in the technical analysis of the materials and editing is conservatively in the order of 25%.
Unlike other systems or plug-ins that operate individually on critical takes, the i-DEA Rephaser software automatically operates in batches on the Boom files only, respecting their integrity and their metadata, without generating any new files to be aggregated to the current project: the original files of the Boom tracks are copied and preserved and a clone of them, with the audio aligned, is generated in their place, thus requiring no subsequent relink operation.
Further improvements
It is easy to imagine how this basic technology could be further implemented at the stage of acquisition and coupling of scenes and sounds, for example by providing perfectly synchronized guide tracks, preventing the scene editing department from acquiring the materials in their entirety, as is often the case now, just to compensate for the phase interference and improve the comprehensibility of the dialogue. Not to mention this solution could be licensed to the Field Recorders manufacturers, ensuring the delivery of perfectly suitable and mixed in-the-box guide tracks.