QC rejection when dubbing to video
Hi, I recently received a job where the client sent videos that needed to be dubbed over. They provided an English scratch track for reference.
I imported the video into my DAW and recorded my audio to sync with the mouth movements of the character, while loosely referencing the guide track for timing (the person doing the scratch track was not a native English speaker so sometimes the pacing was unnatural.) I checked every line against the video to make sure it fit, and sent it off.
Got a QC revision because "certain lines did not sync perfectly with the reference audio", even though they did sync perfectly with the video.
I have dubbed professionally for many years, and even when dubbing to scratch audio, I have always been taught that matching the VIDEO is the most important thing, so that it will look seamless with the mouth movements. It seems the QC agent only checked my audio against the scratch track and not the actual video I was dubbing to, as with one of the lines they rejected for sync, my character was off screen to where strict internal timing shouldn't have mattered.
I personally think that, for a dubbing job, making it line up/look nice with the video should be the utmost priority over strictly matching an audio guide track. But am I correct in that the QC agents are only going to care about us matching the scratch audio and nothing else?
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Update: The client kicked back one of the lines for a revision due to an "unnatural pause" in the line. I had initially recorded the line WITHOUT the unnatural pause, but Quality Control made me redo it because there was an unnatural pause in the scratch audio that they wanted me to match. It would be nice if we could at least clarify expectations with the client somehow when sync projects have issues like this, and it may perhaps be a good internal policy to review going forward.