Starfish Technologies has revamped the interface for its flagship audio description software, Advantage Authoring, further streamlining the authoring process, which enables a voice artist to script and then record segments of commentary at appropriate times in the programme.
The overhaul of the GUI has involved incorporating industry standard transport/delete controls, limiting the use of drop down menus and removing some of the button labelling for ease of localisation.
Advantage Authoring automatically mixes the audio description recorded by the voice artist with the programme audio. The software creates an Extended Subtitle Exchange Format (ESEF) file that contains the script of each spoken segment of audio description, with a timecode and a reference to the separate WAV file for each segment. Video files in most common formats are supported.
“The workflow is very slick, ” said Starfish Sales and Marketing Director Peter Blatchford. “Once the voice artist has recorded the audio description on this workstation, they just need to hit one button and the linear audio file is delivered for transmission. It’s heavily automated and very simple and there’s no audio engineer involved.” – Michael Burns
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