Match Leveler

This tool was initially developed for the Last of Us Part I (2022) where I found myself as the only Dialogue Coordinator on the project for most of its production. Unfortunately, however, that meant that I had to face a rather difficult task all alone - mastering two new localized languages (Greek and Turkish) and re-mastering an existing language (Brazilian Portuguese).

Once I realized that I was going to be tasked with those requests I quickly made a tool that, using the same tech as our Leveling Tool, would allow us to get a good first pass with less hand-tuning. To do this, the tool levels a file according to the reference English file, allowing us to match the loudness of the individual English files while utilizing a batch process to improve efficiency.

By using the English as the reference we were able to get around the knowledge-gap of knowing what file should be what loudness, as things weren’t well documented on the original The Last of Us (2013), and it gave us the ability to “match” each file appropriately. It isn’t perfect though, as it tends to break down when trying to match longer, more dynamic files, so I still needed to level some files like our in-game cinematic stems by hand.