The home for all things related to Game Audio.

Latest Deus Ex Trailer

Written by Michael Elman on November 22, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: Trailers, Videos

Check out the latest Deus Ex trailer mixed by the Team from Eidos here at WaveGen Studios.

The (un)importance of orchestras in game scoring

Written by Michael Elman on September 15, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: Music Scoring

The (un)importance of orchestras in game scoring.

Here is my latest post on the Develop blog. I went with a controversial title to see if I could stir up some comments. So far so good

The meat and potatoes of the piece is not as controversial as the title, but feel free to chime in!

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Behind the scenes: Splinter Cell voice-over

Written by David Lipes on April 15, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: Voice over casting and recording

Last spring, Ubisoft approached us to help support the casting and recording for another one of their titles, Splinter Cell Conviction.

We seized the opportunity, of course. For many clients, we provide full audio solution services. But in this case, Ubi had a very complete and experienced audio team. This meant that we were there to complement the team they had in place. Read more »

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Canadian Video Game Awards

Written by Alex Saba on April 13, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: Awards, news, wave

This May, Vancouver B.C. will host the first annual Canadian video game and digital arts award. Wave Generation is proud to lend a hand in two of the sixteen nominees for Best Audio.

We had the pleasure of working alongside Ubisoft Montreal, mixing several trailers and in-game cutscenes for Assassin’s Creed II, as well as supplying dialog post production services and music to the Bioware Edmonton team for Dragon Age : Origins.

Good luck to all the nominees

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Ready to ride?

Written by JC on April 7, 2010 - 0 Comments
Categories: dialog mix, rider, rms, wave

Recently, 2 companies put brand new plug ins on the market: the Wave rider by Automatic mixing and the Vocal rider by Waves. Those 2 plug ins claim to, (in a way) replace the work of a mixer, by riding the level of an audio track. Obviously, you have to adjust some parameters. After seeing the demo for the Vocal rider, I thought of something potentially interesting: what about using the plug in to “normalize” the dialog lines of a game? A lot of people use “normalizer” to do that kind of job. For me, there is a fundamental problem to this: we lose all the natural dynamics of the voice. This results in an un-natural feel to the in-game conversations.

To put these plug-ins to the test, I’ve first selected a very dynamic recording session. My goal was to be able to get the average level of dialog to -14 RMS, using the Dorrough meters, without sounding un-natural. Not an easy task! I have to admit, the Vocal rider is very easy to use and quite amazing…for a vocal track in a song! But for dialog post-production… well, not really. At least, it seems to respect the dynamics of the voice in a way better manner than the commonly used “Levelator” tool, for instance. But, because it’s not possible to select an average output level at -14 RMS, it’s no use for me. Same problem with the Wave Rider. The Wave rider is also more complex to use. So, for now, the only way for me is to “ride” a fader manually for all of the files. I know that sounds crazy, but the results speak for themselves. It sounds natural in-game and our clients are happy. And with a good workflow and a good team, it’s doesn’t take as long as you’d think!!