2 hours ago
Hi everyone,
I’ve recently started getting into the world of audio preservation and restoration, and after doing some research, I stumbled upon this forum. I have to say, the level of technical expertise here is absolutely amazing.
I was thinking about a specific approach to hybrid audio restoration, and I wanted to ask if this is something you have already experimented with, or if it's considered a standard practice here.
When restoring a local release (in my case, Italian), we often face the issue of great older mixes being trapped in lossy formats (like AC3 or standard DTS from old DVDs), while the modern Blu-ray/4K releases have an incredible, dynamic Lossless English track (DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD/Atmos).
Has anyone ever tried to build a "hybrid" lossless track by keeping the untouched English Lossless channels for everything related to M&E (Music & Effects) — meaning Left, Right, Surrounds, and LFE — and then extracting and sync-matching only the local dialogue from the lossy center channel onto the lossless English center?
Conceptually, this seems like the ultimate way to get the best of both worlds: the full dynamic range of the original lossless effects/score, combined with our local dubbing.
However, being new to this, I can foresee a few technical roadblocks, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on them:
1. Bleeding: How do you deal with dialogue bleeding into the Left and Right channels on older local mixes?
2. Center Channel M&E: Since the English center channel also contains specific localized sound effects and foley, replacing it entirely with the lossy local center might degrade the ambient quality. Do you use spectral isolation (like iZotope RX) to extract only the dry vocal track from the lossy source before mixing it into the English track?
3. Phase & Mix Differences: How painful is it to level-match and EQ the hybrid track when the original theatrical audio stems for the two languages come from completely different masters?
I would love to hear your experiences, tips, or if there are any specific threads/guides covering this kind of "vocal transplant" workflow.
Thanks a lot for your time and for this incredible community!
I’ve recently started getting into the world of audio preservation and restoration, and after doing some research, I stumbled upon this forum. I have to say, the level of technical expertise here is absolutely amazing.
I was thinking about a specific approach to hybrid audio restoration, and I wanted to ask if this is something you have already experimented with, or if it's considered a standard practice here.
When restoring a local release (in my case, Italian), we often face the issue of great older mixes being trapped in lossy formats (like AC3 or standard DTS from old DVDs), while the modern Blu-ray/4K releases have an incredible, dynamic Lossless English track (DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD/Atmos).
Has anyone ever tried to build a "hybrid" lossless track by keeping the untouched English Lossless channels for everything related to M&E (Music & Effects) — meaning Left, Right, Surrounds, and LFE — and then extracting and sync-matching only the local dialogue from the lossy center channel onto the lossless English center?
Conceptually, this seems like the ultimate way to get the best of both worlds: the full dynamic range of the original lossless effects/score, combined with our local dubbing.
However, being new to this, I can foresee a few technical roadblocks, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on them:
1. Bleeding: How do you deal with dialogue bleeding into the Left and Right channels on older local mixes?
2. Center Channel M&E: Since the English center channel also contains specific localized sound effects and foley, replacing it entirely with the lossy local center might degrade the ambient quality. Do you use spectral isolation (like iZotope RX) to extract only the dry vocal track from the lossy source before mixing it into the English track?
3. Phase & Mix Differences: How painful is it to level-match and EQ the hybrid track when the original theatrical audio stems for the two languages come from completely different masters?
I would love to hear your experiences, tips, or if there are any specific threads/guides covering this kind of "vocal transplant" workflow.
Thanks a lot for your time and for this incredible community!
