LOS ANGELES—Chris Reynolds has been promoted to the position of executive vice president, Localization and Fulfillment Services, by Deluxe, a provider of digital and cloud-based systems for content production studios and distributors.

Reynolds, who most recently was the senior vice president, Localization, for Deluxe, is taking over this newly created position within the company. Deluxe says that its localization and fulfillment operations are more interconnected, and in his new role Reynolds will be responsible for overseeing the two business lines worldwide.

Deluxe’s localization business provides subtitling, dubbing, captioning and audio description services to domestic and international markets. Fulfillment provides mastering, QC, transcoding, digital delivery and SaaS platform services for content owners and distributors around the world. 

Deluxe says that by combining the two operations it is increasing efficiencies and ensuring it meets industry quality, format and security standards.

For more information, visit www.bydeluxe.com.  

Add dubbing for television shows, movies and other entertainment to the list of production workflows impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Working in close proximity is verboten in the age of the virus, so the interaction between voice talent, sound engineers, directors and others in a dubbing studio presents significant challenges—so much so that at least one vendor is offering a new product to virtualize the process.

An email from Deluxe showed up in my in-box about the same time I finally had a chance to watch the season finale of “The Blacklist” on Netflix. The episode was a creative mix of live action shot before the virus brought production to a halt and comic-book-like animation to fill in the missing scenes.

The episode piqued my interest, which led me to finding an article about the production and lengths to which the actors had to go to record their dialog for the animation. That’s not to imply that Deluxe was involved, but the coincidence of my watching the episode and the email led to this Q&A with Chris Reynolds, executive vice president and general manager, Worldwide Localization, at Deluxe.

Deluxe has been offering One Dub, a cloud-based dubbing solution for the past several months. The product virtualizes the dubbing process, allowing talent and production crew to work safely from home while producing professional results.

In this interview, Reynolds talks about how the need to socially distance has impacted the dubbing workflow, the challenges that must be overcome, how standards are maintained while working from home and what One Dub is and does.

(An edited transcript.) 

TVTechnology: COVID-19 has prompted major workflow shake ups among M&E organizations. How has the need to social distance impacted dubbing? 

Chris Reynolds: The need to socially distance has had a major impact on dubbing. It’s commonplace in many countries to have voice actors in the same room as dubbing directors, sound engineers and others, and there are also group recording sessions that involve multiple voice actors working in very close proximity to each other. 

In addition to social distancing, there is a lot of shared equipment and surfaces between recording sessions and actors—microphones, headphones and desks. Dubbing is a very collaborative process and adapting it to keep everyone safe has required space and equipment modifications, as well as new cleaning procedures.
There have been other restrictions in place that make some processes impossible. For example, different areas have travel restrictions that can make it impossible for participants to get to the recording studio. In other cities and regions, there are capacity rules that prevent studios from being able to have multiple actors in the same room.

For all of these reasons, studios have had to partially or completely move to remote recording to keep dubbing moving along.

TVT: What are the biggest obstacles to remote dubbing workflow?

CR: There are a variety of obstacles. The No. 1 obstacle is enabling a collaborative recording experience when participants aren’t in the same facility or room but still need the same level of interaction and engagement. To create the same quality output, it’s important that the roles of voice actor, dubbing director, sound engineer, sound editor and others can be maintained to get the best performance and technical quality possible.

Then there are the technical challenges. These range from the acoustics of the physical environment that voice artists have to work in, to the availability and quality of the equipment they’re using to record, to the security requirements in place for the content they’re working on. Internet connectivity can be a factor depending on the software solution being used. 

TVT: How does Deluxe’s new One Dub address what’s needed to support voice actors and others who can’t come into the studio and must work from home?

CR: One Dub allows participants to continue to collaborate and fulfill their various roles through an easy-to-use, secure cloud-based software solution. 

Each participant can log into the virtual recording session with access to secure streaming video and script, full-quality uncompressed audio and near-instant ability to collaboratively edit and review each line and take. No software needs to be installed as it’s all browser-based. While it does require internet connectivity, it’s been optimized to work even when connection speeds are below the recommended requirements.

Our new Session Sync feature allows all participants to sync their browser to the sound engineer’s so he can control the transport, playback and recording functions for the voice actor and director. 

Once the recording session is complete, it enables easy export into formats supported by all industry-standard Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs).

TVT: One Dub is rather new. Has it begun to take hold among dubbing studios?

CR: More than 1,000 recording sessions have been completed on One Dub over the past four months. Many more are scheduled. The projects range from streaming originals on the industry’s leading SVOD platforms to broadcast series and even specific actors for theatrical feature films, so it’s very wide-ranging. We license the product to dubbing studios, and have users in over 14 countries across multiple languages. 

TVT: Do these folks generally have what it takes in terms of technology and a soundproof room to work from home? I’ve seen some interviews where actors doing voice work say they get into closets to do their parts in an acoustically acceptable environment.

CR: Very few voice actors have professional recording environments, but that’s not absolutely necessary to produce a satisfactory recording. It’s important to recognize that the dialog in original version content is not often recorded in controlled acoustic environments, so even in someone’s bedroom you can do some basic things like turning off ceiling fans, closing windows and hanging up blankets to dampen the sound enough that you can get a very controlled response through an appropriate microphone. Others use closets or record in vehicles parked in garages, as do many voice-over artists and podcasters all over the world.

There are products available that can wrap around a microphone to block out unwanted reflections and other sounds, and even boxes that can be put on a stand for an actor to stand up in and have their entire upper body surrounded by sound insulation. In practice, we’ve found that most people prefer the simpler solutions like hanging blankets or finding a quiet room or closet.

TVT: What’s the typical One Dub setup? Can multiple voice actors in a scene work together remotely? Is latency too great to allow that?

CR: The current version of One Dub only allows one person to be able to record themselves at a time, but that doesn’t prevent having multiple people involved in a session. As the system is based on AWS and syncs the audio to each user’s timeline directly after each line is recorded, the interaction isn’t completely dependent on the latency during the live recording itself. Everyone hears the performance as it's happening, but immediately after each line is recorded the full resolution audio is transmitted to each user’s session where they can immediately play back what was just recorded in sync to picture in their own browser. This can be controlled by each individual, or they can simply sync to the sound engineer who can control the transport and playback each line so everyone can see it in sync and make accurate judgments, just as is typically done in the recording studio.

We are working on being able to allow multiple people to record themselves into the same session simultaneously as opposed to one at a time, but that will be in a future release.

More information about One Dub is available on the company’s website. 

NEW YORK—Previewing this year’s Streaming Summit, the NAB Show New York web page describes streaming as “the new business currency.” This year’s lineup, which offers executive interviews, technical presentations and case studies, is full of “real-world practical advice, tips and tricks for those with both business and technical challenges in packaging, monetizing and distributing online video,” said Conference Chairman Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

This year’s Streaming Summit is sponsored Ad-ID, Agora.io, AWS Elemental, Brightcove, Google, Haivision, Limelight Networks and Roku.

The Streaming Summit is scheduled for Oct. 17–18, beginning at 9 a.m. Wednesday with a Fireside Chat featuring NBC Sports Group/Playmaker Media Senior Vice President & CTO Eric Black in conversation with Rayburn about “Delivering the Biggest Audiences for the Biggest Events.” This half-hour chat is the first of 10 on the schedule. It will be followed immediately by Hulu Vice President, Head of Advertising Platforms Jeremy Helfand who will offer attendees “A Fresh Take on Advertising in the Living Room — Reaching Audiences in OTT.” In the afternoon, Google and TotalPlay get in on the action with “Bringing Addressability to Every Screen, Including Linear Television.”

Another interesting chat will be held Thursday morning, featuring Comcast Cable Executive Director of Technology and Product Chris Reynolds discussing how the telecom is “Building an Aggregator of Aggregators.” Other Thursday chats will highlight players who are known for disrupting the media space; namely, reps from Playstation Vue and Facebook (“Video and the Future of Immersive Experiences”).

Aside from most of the Fireside Chats, the rest of the conference will be broken down into three concurrent tracks. However, Rayburn explained, “We have business, technology and content topics throughout all of them. We don’t group content together based on a subject as it allows more options for attendees to move amongst all the tracks, while getting a more diverse program, content wise.”

The schedule also features time devoted to topics that are trending and timeless for media creators. 

“We’ll have technical sessions on codecs, bundling of content, protocols, distribution of video, blockchain, server side ad insertion and a host of topic around monetization of content direct to consumer, advertising strategies, cross-screen video ad campaigns and key insights into consumer data,” Rayburn said.

Examples of these technical sessions include: “Best Practices For Live Webcasting Production,” “Using OTT Consumer Data to Determine What, How and Why Viewers Want to Watch,” “Best Practices for Deploying Server Side Ad Insertion,” “Optimizing Streaming Performance and Video Workflows With SRT” and “Comparing Five Blockchain Startups And Their Potential Role In OTT.”

TARGET AUDIENCE

Rayburn noted that the Streaming Summit will cover “everything in the streaming media ecosystem, both technical and monetization subjects,” so he expects show visitors with a variety of job functions.

“We’ll have attendees focusing on content strategies; media operations and technology; solutions architects; those in charge of OTT video strategy; encoding engineers; and those managing video advertising solutions.”

That range is also reflected in the backgrounds of the speakers, who work in broadcast, media, publishing, social media and other industries that are involved in packaging, monetizing and distributing online video.

Those interested in attending must select the Streaming Summit Package ($795) during registration.

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James Eccles

LOS ANGELES—Prime Focus Technologies double dibs with its latest hiring announcement, sharing that it is bringing on James Eccles as vice president, key accounts, sales cloud applications and media services, and Chris Reynolds as vice president, head of Technical Solutions Group for its North America branch.

Eccles comes to PFT after working at Deluxe Entertainment Services, Chace Audio, Westpac Banking Corporation and various New Zealand government administrations. Reynolds also previously worked for Deluxe Entertainment Services and Chace Audio.

Chris Reynolds

The pair will be based out of PFT’s Los Angeles office. Eccles will be responsible for generating new business opportunities, while Reynolds is charged with leading the Technical Solutions Group.

Prime Focus Technologies is the technology arm of Prime Focus.