Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Now this is clever

I don't watch a lot of TV or movies, real life is far too interesting for that.

However, on the odd occasion when I do find myself with a few minutes to spare and in need of some mindless distraction, I have been known to plonk myself on the sofa and pass an hour or two watching some form of audio-visual entertainment.

My taste in movies and series is somewhat eclectic but probably remains focused on scifi and action movies. Good, clean, mindless blood and guts that is so far beyond reality that I never lose track of the fact that I'm watching a work of fiction.

I've noticed that on Netflix, a lot of the really interesting stuff is now made in non-English speaking countries and has been dubbed.

Dubbed audio can really ruin an otherwise good movie.

My brain just can't adapt to the fact that the actors' lips are saying one thing while the audio track says something else.

This has always been a huge distraction ever since, as a child, I watched a TV series called The Samurai back in the 1960s. This was dubbed from Japanese to English using the most outrageous Japanese accent and most of its entertainment value was the comedic sound of the overdub.

Things are a lot better these days, not at least in part because when movies or series are dubbed into another language they remix the whole soundtrack, retaining all the background noise and other audio effects. This is much more natural but still leaves the annoying issue of the total lack of lip sync.

Fortunately for those of us who find this distracting, AI has come to the rescue.

Watch this trailer for a scifi series that was made in Sweden with Swedish dialog and then dubbed into English for other markets. Watch the lips very carefully:

How clever is that?

Although it's not perfect, the use of AI to modify the footage so that the lips track the English translation is pretty damned impressive and, at least to me, makes the whole thing far more immersive.

If the entertainment industry is to effectively harness AI without making actors and other workers redundant, this has to be one of the ways it can really add value.

I certainly hope that more foreign productions decide to utilize this tech so that next time I decide to waste an hour or two of my life, I don't constantly get distracted by the lack of lipsync in some poorly dubbed foreign language movie.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font