The Experts team wondered what we thought people would want to find behind the windows of a dream studio advent calendar. Some of the things we own, some we wish we did. Owned or not, we think any of the things we name in the next 13 days would be a gift to a professional studio owner. Paul Maunder chooses Auto Align Post 2 from Sound Radix.
Day 12 - Sound Radix Auto Align Post
Typically when I start work on the audio for a new film project, the first thing I receive from the editor is the dialogue. This consists of multiple channels from different microphones. Quite often this is several lav mics and a boom. One problem with this is that if you try to combine these in the mix, you inevitably encounter phase problems due to the spacing and timing differences between the microphones. In a situation where the mics were all in fixed positions, this could be fixed by time aligning the recordings in post.
Of course, this never happens in practice because actors are moving around and the boom mic is also moving, continually changing the phase relationship between the various channels. Consequently, a solution is needed which analyses the audio and allows you to correct these timing and phase differences. Sound Radix Auto Align 2 provides that solution. By enabling dynamic time-alignment correction of moving microphones, the boom and lav mics can be mixed together without the phase artefacts and comb filtering usually associated with combing multiple microphones.
Auto Align Post was originally introduced in 2018 and it was a great time saver for anyone working on post-production dialogue. If you’re unclear about the difference between Auto Align and Auto Align Post find out more here. In October 2021 Sound Radix updated the plug-in to version 2, introducing a number of new features and an improved algorithm. The new features include ARA2 compatibility in DAWs which support this, and the Spectral Phase Correction Module. This feature was introduced to correct for the phase shifts which can be introduced by the use of a high pass filter on location. The new module dynamically corrects frequency-dependent phase shifts, resulting in an even better spectral alignment and better, fuller sound.
I’ve chosen to include this plug-in as one of my Advent Calendar entries because it’s such a big time saver and it makes the first part of the process of dialogue editing significantly easier. I started a project earlier this year which consisted of several channels of dialogue and I found that as soon as I tried to combine them, very noticeable phase problems occurred. In just a few minutes I was able to fix these problems, using the boom mic as the reference and time aligning the lavs to it. The result was a lot better than anything which could be achieved manually and it didn’t take much work on my part, thanks to the quality of the processing which Auto Align Post 2 does.
Here’s the video which Sound Radix released when Auto Align Post 2 was released.
Photo by Voyage Pro on Unsplash