Timeframe for Dubbing Episodic Animations

[danijel]

A production for which I do some reality stuff lately has asked me to find out about man-hours required to dub an episode of a cartoon into our language.

Can you give me some approximate numbers for recording, syncing and mixing, for a well-functioning team with experienced actors and sound people? I'm not talking pure art here, but best times without children noticing acting/sync issues etc....

I know it's hard to give numbers for recording per episode, so perhaps how much time per character per episode (or whatever), and also, how much time is optimal for a recording session with a single actor?

So, right now I'm only interested in timeframes, I'll probably have more questions on workflows later on....

Thanks!

[cubivore]

are you using kids or adults? with many kids i can only get 15 lines per hour. with professional adult actors i can get 30-50 lines per hour. i just started a animation dub where we booked 28 hrs of recording and edit for 22min program. that's almost like 1 hour of recording time for every 1 minute of footage. we're not doing mix, but i've mixed a 22 min episode in 6-8 hours.

[Sonsey@mac.com]

Doing English to French, we generally budget a day (8-9 hours) per 23 min (broadcast half hour here in Canada) ep. for recording (or for two 11 minute shows, which is fairly common in kid's shows). A lot depends on how well the script was adapted. Editing and re-sync usually takes an additional day.

I usually find 4 hours is about the maximum the average actor can go at one stretch before their voice starts to fatigue. I've had actors go 8 and 10 hour days, but those are the exceptions.

Assuming the stems/M&E's are in good order (or I did the original version, which happens quite a bit) then I can usually mix in about a day.

[Fajita]

I recorded "Life" in Spanish with a non-announcer (Juanes) and we did each one hour episode in about 4 hours. Mixing took another 3 or so, each.

The translations were very well written however, and there was NO lip sync whatsoever.

[D'Animation]

With a good voice cast, your talking about 20 min film per day for the recording and probably 1-1.5 days for edit and remix. Depending on if you only get an M&E or seperate fx/mx stems, sometimes there is only so much you can do in the mix
Oh and if its kids then you won't get half that - the novelty of having to sit still in a booth wears out pretty quickly!
D

[danijel]

Thanks for the responses! I also asked around town, and it seems like 1 day / 22min episode for recording and 1,5 days for edit and mix are what I'm looking for.

But I'll tell them they probably won't be able to do it in less then 4 days / episode in the beginning, hopefully achieving 2,5 days in a month of practice. But it's good to know what to aim for

[smurfyou]

I'll add to the chorus and say that you should budget extra time for working with kids. Some have very short attention spans

[nucelar]

Hi
We do a lot of animation dubbing. It's really not that different from dubbing other stuff. Using children is totally out of question. By our law, children can only work max 2 hours a day, after school. And as others mentioned, totally unpractical workflow. These characters are dubbed by young women with higher pitched voice.
Anyway... timeframes...
for a typical 20 min episode we dub it in maybe 8 hours and mix it in about 4-6 hours. The full M&E is provided, so the mix is relatively simple. There is really no much editing to do, we record everything lipsynced already.
Timewise, project planning is very important, specially if you receive a whole batch. You talk about recording and mixing, but of course you also have to consider the timeframes of translation, time-coding, session set-up, cue sheet generation, quality control, layback, etc...
Cheers