C2E37 VOD Updates

Over the weekend, our production crew worked day and night to try to find solutions and fix the technical difficulties that occurred during our NYC live show stream on October 4th (C2E37). We wanted to share an update on what we were able to fix and what proved to be unfixable on our end. A few important things to note:

• C2E37 will have a delayed upload. The cleaner VOD (video on demand — the archived version of our livestream) will be available the morning of Tuesday, October 9th, pending any additional unforeseen delays. Please keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook feeds for updates.
• Because of the audio issues, subtitles will be available with the VOD upload and we have consulted the cast on any missing lines to ensure that all dialogue is included.
• We take full responsibility for both the delayed upload and the stream quality. Our friends at Geek & Sundry have been amazing partners and this is in no way the fault of G&S whatsoever.

From all of us here at Critical Role Land, thank you so much for your understanding and patience as we work through these issues. Both the delay in upload and the technical issues from our NYC live show are not in-line with the quality of production that we want to provide to you. We are so incredibly sorry that we dropped the ball this time around and we will be working on a plan of attack to avoid these issues moving forward, as our immediate concern was doing everything that we possibly could to improve our live show VOD quality.

We wanted to pass along a note from our head of production, Vinnie Singh, that explains in detail the post production process and the steps we took to do our absolute best to fix our C2E37 VOD. Feel free to leave any questions or comments below and we’ll do our best to answer.

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• We completed a full audio post production mix of the episode.  There were several problems with the audio from the show, but the most glaring was that the audio drops completely to zero. This is most present in the quiet moments, when one cast member finishes speaking and before another begins, but it also cuts portions of words from the cast. Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to recover that audio data.  The best solution was to add ambient sound back into these quiet moments to smooth over these drops so that they aren’t as jarring.
• We also added EQing to different moments to help eliminate the “ringing” in the space and feedback.
• Because portions of the dialogue are unrecoverable, we have transcribed the entire episode and have made captions available at the time of upload.  For moments where a cast member’s mic was unintelligible, we received input from the cast to recreate what they said in the captions.
• We did a color correction pass to improve the quality of the video image.
• We have input from the community that the cameras were shaky at times.  The issue came from us using robotic cameras that were mounted off the balcony of the theater.  The issue is most present at times where the crowd reacted to the show so loudly that it literally shook the theater.  We’ve tried running stabilization filters on the video, but unfortunately they’ve failed to improve the amount of shakiness you see during these moments.
• During the stream, the show suddenly jumped back several minutes.  There is no jump in the new, edited VOD.

Vinnie Singh, Head of Production at Critical Role

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Update: C2E37 is now live. The improved VOD is below.

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