Tools
In-house
Although I can’t show off many of the tools that I have worked on and created for Naughty Dog, I can demo these ones because they are already on the internet! I presented a GDC talk, along with my fellow Senior Dialogue Coordinators Grayson Stone and Thomas Barrett, about a few of the tools that we made for The Last of Us Part I and Part II, where we presented some of these tools (along with some additional ones). If you would like to hear that talk, you can find it on the GDC Vault!
Stacking Tool
This tool was created in order to organize our sessions after a recording session has been completed and delivered. First, it strips the silence out of all the files, splitting them into individual takes. It then grabs the different take information from our Excel cue sheets, organizing the newly split files in the Reaper session based off of the information in the cue sheet. This includes, but is not limited to, making sure there aren’t too many/few files in a scene, placing the split takes in a cascading order for easy editing and recognition, and removing unneeded takes. Although it isn’t a perfect tool it does manage to cut our time to organize sessions drastically, as it is no longer a completely manual task.
Leveling Tool
This tool was first created during The Last of Us Part II by Emily Scrivner, one of Naughty Dog’s Dialogue Designers. It’s purpose was to do a quick temp level pass of all the assets in a session, leveling them according to a volume spec that we created. In the beginning it only leveled based using the item volume of the file (i.e. the generic volume that applies to all takes across the entire file). To improve this, I made the tool a bit “smarter” - programming it to apply level a file using both the item and the envelope volume/clip gain, creating a much more fine-tuned pass as it can level transients individually rather than leveling the entire file to deal with them.
Public
For any of the tools that I make on the side, and therefore ones that are open for public use, feel free to download them off my GitHub and give them a try! As always, let me know if there are any bugs with them or if you would like any features added!
This script is displays all of the items that are currently selected in a session, separating them by the track that they are on in order to make them more legible. This tool makes use of Lokasenna GUI, and requires that package be installed in order for it to be used, as well as an addition “tree” class that I created for Lokasenna GUI. That class can be downloaded here if you are interested in using this tool!
This script is used to make a track at any depth level after the selected track. The following are instructions to use this tool, and they are also in the script if you need a refresher on how to use it. It can cover a range of situations, whether you want to create a base-level track or a track within a folder, and it determines this based off of what track(s) are already selected when running the tool.
These scripts are meant to be used when editing the tops and tails of files. Hovering over the item itself will allow you to cut into that item, whereas hovering over an empty part of the track will cause the top/tail to extend to the mouse cursor (depending on which script is being used). The difference between the versions are mainly that the "No Fade" version doesn't adjust the fade length when editing the item, so it just changes position but not length.
This script repositions all of the selected items based off of the duration of the time selection. It will separate them each equally, determined based off of the initial position of each selected item.