Ensuring that dialogue is clear and audible is one of the most fundamental aspects of any film or TV mix. Unfortunately, dialogue intelligibility is often not given the importance it should, leaving many viewers to resort to viewing with subtitles. We’ve covered this topic previously, including in the very informative article from Dr. Neil Hillman, in which he looked at some of the potential reasons for this.

One thing to consider when trying to ensure dialogue remains intelligible is the interaction of the dialogue with reverb. This is two fold. Firstly, the reverb on the dialogue itself should not swamp the speech, but secondly, reverb on other sounds such as music and sound effects should also be carefully set so as not to affect intelligibility.

One solution to this is to utilise ducking on the reverb. Cinematic Rooms Professional from Liquidsonics is an excellent reverb plugin which incorporates ducking. In the previous version 1.2 update, Cinematic Rooms Professional gained a dynamics section which allows the reverb to be ducked or compressed. Options are included to allow this dynamics processing to occur on either the whole reverb, including reflections, or just on the late reverb but not the reflections. This is a particularly useful feature to use on dialogue. In scenes where a longer reverb time is required, reverb can often muddy the dialogue, impeding clarity and increasing the likelihood of viewers having to resort to subtitles. The ducker can be used to reduce the reverb level whenever dialogue is present, bringing it back up again during gaps. In this case, the dialogue itself triggers the ducking.

Whilst this works great when applied to dialogue reverb, it’s not the right option when you need to duck a reverb on another sound source whenever dialogue is present. Fortunately, the new version 1.3 update to Cinematic Rooms Professional adds additional options for sidechaining. Similar to the existing ducking options, this can be applied to either the wet mix (entire reverb) or just the late reverb, excluding the reflections.

The ability to tuck reverb out of the way whenever dialogue is present is a neat way of helping to ensure that the critical dialogue component of a mix remains as clear and understandable as possible. In dense mixes, this is of particular importance.

In the video below, I demonstrate the new side chain ducking feature in Liquidsonics Cinematic Rooms Professional 1.3. This feature is a very welcome addition to the plugin, and one which a lot of users in both music and post production will find extremely handy.