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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Get a sneak peek at Adobe Audition CS6

One of the more difficult tasks in managing evidentiary multimedia is taking the audio from a body-worn recorder and merging it with various sources of covertly recorded video. Often times, the body-worn recorder produces the best audio, but the body-worn video misses the hand-off or the face shot. Thus, an investigator will want the better audio inserted into another video feed from the operation (pole cam, hand-held, etc.).

For this reason, I'm looking forward to the release of Audition CS6. According to Adobe, "Automatic Speech Alignment: Designed to align overdub dialogue quickly with existing production audio, the new automatic speech alignment feature does much more than merely align initial transients. When used on overdubbed dialogue, Adobe Audition analyzes the frequency spectrum involved as well as the waveforms, so each word of a dialogue clip is matched to its counterpart in the production audio—the real power is a new algorithm to provide alignment of noisy location audio to reduce mis-alignment. If you have ever worked with ADR or overdubbing, you know that this is a time consuming task and our goal was to provide a powerful tool to help make it a little easier. There’s no replacement for the skill and craft involved in professional ADR, but if you have an overdub performance which matches the location audio’s wording and phrasing, but the timing is off for lip sync, the new automatic speech alignment can help. Where you might normally perform a “stretch” on the audio to fit the timing, or be forced to do lots of editing/compositing to line up each word or phrase, automatic speech alignment can help you get good results quickly."

Yes, I know. This feature is designed for a production environment. Well, Photoshop is for photographers, and we love it in law enforcement. I think that the more LE folks get used to Audition, the more they'll love it. I can't wait to try this with body wire/body-worn matching for field operations.

Enjoy.

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