Mistakes, Changes and Re-Use

J. S. Gilbert asked,
What about archiving? Do you archive iterations, such as raw dialog in 24 bit format, and then perhaps normalized, then perhaps with effects applied? What is a good way to handle this?

As stated previously, batch normalizing is pure evil. Don’t do it.

The larger a project is, the more likely these things will happen:
> Mistakes will be made,
> People will change their minds, and
> Others will re-use the assets

In short, game audio tends to be re-visited. Let’s take an example: a set of files needs to be mastered differently. We’d prefer not to start again from raw recordings which also need head/tail edits, internal cleanup edits and file naming. This is why I like to save full file sets at major milestones along the way. Then I can choose how far back I need to go to fix a problem or make a change. And when it’s well organized, collaborators also benefit from quick access to the parts they need.

Some file sets worth consideration to build and organize as you go:
(1) Raw, unedited recordings
(2) Edited, named, but unmastered
(3) Mastered (processed) final audio

It can be pretty annoying to create intermediate parts after the fact. But if you build this into your workflow it doesn’t cost a lot of extra time. Time spent may break even after just one fix or change.

Listen to all of the questions and answers… Dialog Editing for Game Audio.