My name is Patrick Ortman, Iʼm a partner at Genius Monkeys, a Los Angeles based multimedia production company. We just finished post production on a web comedy series called Couch Cases (www.couchcases.com), which is one of the first broadcast-quality web series out there.

 

Director Patrick Ortman with Couch Cases stars Kathi Funston and Sabrina
Bolin, on location in North Hollywood, CA (photo by Nic Adams)

 

For budget and other reasons, we shot Couch Cases 100% on location. We love the realism of real locations, but sound quality is a major problem when you shoot that way. We took a lot of precautions and had a great sound team, but we still ended up with a lot of dialog that couldn't be cleaned up with the usual noise reduction tools in post. Initially, we tried using Apple's SoundTrack Pro to replace our bad location dialog. After all, it comes with Final Cut Studio, and weʼre an indie production. But it took forever, and the talent really hated the process, resulting in takes that weren't great performances. We needed something better. So, we did a search online for ADR solutions and found
VoiceQ.

 

On the set of Couch Cases (photo by Justin Donais) 

 

VoiceQ is incredibly easy to use-we set it up on both a low-end iMac and on our edit machine, a Mac Pro. Adding lines of dialog is fast, and synchronizing VoiceQ to SoundTrack Pro was a snap. After a few minutes, we were able to run ADR session after session with no pain or frustration. The talent loved the built-in cue system, which is visual as well as audible. And everyone loved being able to view the video and cues in 720p resolution on a second monitor.