How it works
The picture keeps its music and its mood. Only the dialogue goes quiet — and you fill it.
Dub-Off takes a short scene from a film or show, mutes the spoken dialogue, and leaves everything else exactly where it was: the score, the room tone, the footsteps, the picture. You record your own version of each line over the silence, one at a time, and then the scene plays back with your voice in the cast. A dub takes about as long as the clip does, plus however many retakes you want.
Three ways to play
Play Solo is you, a scene and a microphone. You take every line yourself, re-record any of them, and watch the premiere alone. It's the way to practise a delivery, or to make something you actually want to post.
Dub Roulette pairs you with a stranger who is online right now. You each take a seat, the scene's lines are split between the two of you, and you both record live. Neither of you knows what the other sounds like until the premiere. It's the mode the game is named for, and it is the one that produces the most terrible, wonderful results.
Private Room is Roulette with people you choose: open a room, send the code, and your friends fill the seats.
Recording a line
Every line is recorded against the same clock the scene runs on, which is what makes the finished cut hold together. When you press record, a few things happen in a fixed order.
The count-in. The picture parks on the line's first frame and a count runs down — three beeps, then a higher one on the green. The default is one second; you can set anywhere from straight-in to five seconds. This is the main thing that helps you land on the dialogue instead of chasing it.
The guide. As you record, the original line plays quietly underneath you so you can match its rhythm. It's deliberately low — quiet enough that the browser's echo cancellation keeps it out of your take — and you can turn it up or off. Where a scene has a dialogue-only stem, that's what you hear; otherwise it's the full mix.
The head start. Most takes come out slightly late, for two reasons that push the same way: you hear the line arrive and then react, and the mic itself adds capture latency (a couple of hundred milliseconds on a Bluetooth headset). The head start rolls the picture a little ahead of the recorder so your reaction-late words land on time in the cut. The default is 25 ms — small enough never to read as early on an on-time take — and it only ever moves one direction, because nothing in the chain pushes a take early except a player who jumps the cue.
Headroom. Each take runs on past the end of its line — about six tenths of a second, trimmed so it can never run over the next line's take — so a word you were still finishing isn't clipped.
The mic settings that matter
Everything is per-browser and survives a reload; there are no accounts, so a phone and a laptop each keep their own.
- Echo cancellation — on by default. The guide plays through the same speakers your mic hears; this is what keeps it out of your recording. Turn it off only on headphones.
- Noise suppression — off by default. The browser's suppressor is a gate that ducks anything it decides isn't speech. It cleans a noisy room, but it also clips breaths and the tails of lines — which, on a dub, is the performance.
- Auto gain — on by default. Rides your level so a quiet mic isn't lost. Off, loudness is entirely yours through the input trim.
- Input trim. A gain on the way in, from a quarter to double. The level meter reads after it, so it tells you the truth about what's being captured.
- Hear yourself. A monitor that plays your processed input back a beat behind you — the same echo cancellation, suppression and gain your take will get, so if the processing is eating the end of your words you'll hear it do that. Best on headphones.
The premiere
When the last line is in, the scene plays back with your takes laid in — each one starts exactly where its line starts, which is the one rule every dub in the gallery depends on. You get a voice-match score for the performance, line by line, then you can download the cut or post it to the gallery, where other players watch, vote and comment. Posted dubs are public; you can take yours down any time.
Getting a good take
- Watch the count, not the line. Dubbing is anticipation, not reaction — you already know what's coming.
- Match the shape of the line before you match the words. A line with a pause in it wants a pause in yours; the scorer notices, and so does the ear.
- Leave noise suppression off unless the room is genuinely loud. Breaths and trailing consonants are half of sounding like a person.
- If your takes keep landing late, nudge the head start up before you change anything else.
- Headphones make everything easier: the guide can be louder, echo cancellation has less to do, and you can hear yourself.