Titan Conforms ADR On Top Movies - Harrison Meyle

Harrison Meyle is an LA-based dialogue editor who has worked on feature films including “Entourage”, “Godzilla” and “Red” and TV shows such as “Empire” and “American Crime”. He tells us of his experiences in the industry and why he uses Synchro Arts Titan and Revoice Pro.

Tell us what you've been up to recently?

Well I've worked on a bunch of different things. The main films I've worked on over the past two years have been ‘Red 2’ which is a film that was released in July 2014. I did some ADR work on ‘Godzilla’, worked as part of the LA sound team on ‘Noah’ and a film called 'In The Valley Of Silence' out at the end of 2015. 

I’ve just completed a long run on ‘Entourage’ the movie that concluded around March. I also work for Warner Brothers although we work on a lot of films that are produced outside of the studio but require our sound services. With ‘Entourage’, it's a Warner Brothers film so there's a lot that goes into that. I've also done some TV show work during breaks from Entourage – for 'Empire', 'American Crime' and 'Mysteries Of Laura'. 

It sounds like you certainly have been keeping busy! It must be nice to have a split between film and TV work, just to keep it interesting for yourself?

Yeah I actually really enjoy doing TV work. Film is the number 1 priority but if I can get a TV show to cut, I really enjoy it as it’s a lot different to how we approach things in film and I kind of enjoy the variation.

What have you found most useful about working with Titan? 

There’s certainly a lot of versatility that Titan can offer us that is really imperative to our sound production workflow. Our department uses it all the time and it’s become a mainstay. Our industry is evolving constantly and that's a good thing although we're always trying to catch-up with technology. Technology gets in the front-end and here we are in post-production on the back end, trying to figure out ways to adapt to this constant change. That being said, Titan has been something that we always use to assemble our dialogue for initial edits. It’s been great for everything from 35mm to digital and we use a lot of the tools inside. There's Flash Conform of course - which is something that we definately rely upon. Then there's Fix Sync, which we use in conjunction with Flash Conform, every single time. Over the last few years, we've not really been seeing as much use of film as a format although some TV shows still prefer to shoot in film as well as some feature-film makers. We've also started to learn ways of incorporating Titan with other tools as well - to kind of catch-up with the way technology is changing. We'll often get a film that is shot on film and recorded at a certain sample rate so we can use Titan to covert that sample rate and then start working with Field Recorder on other elements. 

Is there a particular 'go to' feature you keep going back to Titan for?

It really depends on the movie. We've been finding recently that every single film is different so it really depends on what it was shot on, what the metadata avaliable is, the sample rate and other factors that all dictate how we're going to use the programme. What we've been seeing a lot of recently is films that are shot at 24 frames per second but the picture might be at 23.98 so there is a discrepancy in terms of frame-rate - so we have to either do a sample rate convert then a Flash Conform. The way the dailies are injected into Avid can also dictate whether we might need to use Fix Sync or not. For sample rate converting, we will always use Fix Sync. If the dailies injected are based on daily timecode, then when we do the assembly, our dailies could be out of sync a bit, so we use Fix Sync in those cases. There’s always a lot of Fix Sync variables that dictate the way we use Titan. For me personally, I generally always use it with Flash Confirm, Fix Sync and Field Recorder.

Do you ever find yourself also using VocALign or Revoice Pro?

I now use Revoice Pro all the time. I used it on ‘Entourage’ quite a bit actually. We didn't have an enormous amount of ADR to work through but that was our 'go to' programme to use. 

Was it mainly used for time alignment purposes or have you started playing around with it’s re-tuning capabilities as well?

I mainly use Revoice Pro 3 for time compression purposes. I don't need to re-pitch much ADR work – like when matching an intonation but I could use it for sound design. Generally what I like to do is use it on loops. I will re-pitch or change the way the actual loop sounds, using Revoice Pro to give it a kind of design element. There are certain loop offenders that really need Revoice Pro. There's certain lines that just aren't working right and Revoice Pro really saves the day in terms of that. I'm very technically savvy so I really dive into the full functionality of it. I think it's terrific and there's really a lot of uses for Revoice Pro in the future that I haven't even really thought of yet, but I'm sure we'll continue using it and continue trying to find different ways to make things a little bit different. Synchro Arts products are definately mainstay's within our workflow and Revoice Pro is something that I will always use. We absolutely rely on Titan and the Fix Sync functionality. There is nothing out there that can do what Fix Sync does and I love the way it does it and the way it’s set up. In terms of the guide track and then lining up your other tracks underneath - it's really easy to use and always turns out great.

After working on lots of films and TV shows over the years, what's the most valuable piece of advice that you would pass on to those first starting out in audio post-production?

Post-production sound is extremely competitive so the way to break through and lift yourself above and beyond the rest of the field is to be persistent, completely reliable and above all, produce good work. I think it's kind of cliche to say that you can be the person that is a genius sound editor or sound designer and produce incredible work but if you aren’t persistent or reliable then it's really difficult to hire that person, no matter how talented they might be.