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By TimothyMasters - 4 Years Ago
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Now I'm really, really, really furious with Replica Studios. It was bad enough that my burn-to-produce ratio was about 25, meaning that I have to burn 25 minutes of billable time working around their numerous bugs to get 1 minute of usable audio. But now they really screwed me. I've been working for several weeks on a video in which my main character is voiced with their 'Jack' voice. Today when I logged on to continue my project I discovered that all of my Jack voices have been disabled, and I can no longer add lines for him. After further investigation I discovered that Jack is no longer in their library of available voices. Huh??? How the #$$%%^^&& can they do this?
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By Peter (RL) - 4 Years Ago
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That's not good. Have you contacted Replica Studios support to ask them?
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By TimothyMasters - 4 Years Ago
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I contacted them early this morning and have no response so far.
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By TimothyMasters - 4 Years Ago
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I just got a preliminary answer to why my lead character's voice is no longer available to continue my project. The actor who provided that voice did not renew his contract with Replica Studios, so they were obliged to remove his voice from their library and disable from my saved Replica project all previously used instances of his voice. They say they are looking into what can be done to help me out, now that I am dozens of hours into a project in which he is the lead character.
Yikes! I guess that means we should be cautious about using their voices for a project whose development may be over an extended period, or which we might want to tweak at a later date. A character in your project can be disabled and vanish at any time. It seems like they should have better contracts with their actors! Maybe this will be a lesson to them and they'll change their contracts. I sure hope so!
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By toystorylab - 4 Years Ago
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Damn, that sucks...
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By Cary B - 4 Years Ago
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Oh man, I sympathize.. That is a rough situation.
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By animagic - 4 Years Ago
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Sorry to hear about your issues. I'm using the same voice, but my project is already done. The takes I created are still there, by the way.
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By TimothyMasters - 4 Years Ago
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The takes that I exported to iClone are still there, but their versions in the Replica project are all grayed out, so I can never go back and tweak them if I want, or redo them if they improve the voice quality. And somehow the dialog must be internally embedded into the iClone project, because they do not exist as separate WAV files that I could go back and add reverb to or tweak the tone curve. But now I don't know what to do. My work on this project has ground to a halt. Do I find a different voice and laboriously replace every instance of him talking? Or do I give up on it and come up with a new project? Sigh. I think I'll just go have a beer.
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By kungphu - 4 Years Ago
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That’s horrible news. I feel for you. Don’t give up your project! Have you tried to source local actors either in college or just local talent. Many times in film communities they’ll do work gratis if you give them an audio reel in return. Just food for thought. Best of luck!
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By TimothyMasters - 4 Years Ago
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There's a great irony here. I have had tremendous success using Fiver to voice my videos. I've gotten some truly excellent character acting at very reasonable prices. But I had a project before my current one, with three scenes completed, and when I was ready to send out for voicing my fourth scene I found to my dismay that my lead male actor had quite Fiverr and was no longer doing voice work! So I decided to quit using Fiverr due to that problem that I had not foreseen. I decided to use Replica Studios instead, even though the voice quality was not nearly as good as real humans. At least nobody would quit mid-project. And now this. Sheesh. Who knew.
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By animagic - 4 Years Ago
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TimothyMasters (9/14/2021)
The takes that I exported to iClone are still there, but their versions in the Replica project are all grayed out, so I can never go back and tweak them if I want, or redo them if they improve the voice quality. And somehow the dialog must be internally embedded into the iClone project, because they do not exist as separate WAV files that I could go back and add reverb to or tweak the tone curve. But now I don't know what to do. My work on this project has ground to a halt. Do I find a different voice and laboriously replace every instance of him talking? Or do I give up on it and come up with a new project? Sigh. I think I'll just go have a beer.
You can render out the wave file in iClone (select Render/Video/.Wav) and then do whatever you need to do.
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By TimothyMasters - 4 Years Ago
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I got good news this morning. Replica says they were able to renew 'Jack's contract, so his voice is now back for the use of myself and others. I wonder what they had to pay the guy?
And they promised that they would revise their contract situation to make this less likely to happen in the future.
Good! Users really need to have confidence that their chosen voice will stick around for at least the duration of project development, and ideally beyond to allow later tweaks.
I'm amazed at the varied quality of their voices, and my hope is they will continue to improve rapidly.
Some of the voices I get from Replica are amazing, so close to real that most people would be unable to tell that they were computer generated.
Then others are so bad that even an hour of tweaking fails to make them usable.
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By animagic - 4 Years Ago
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I'm glad it got sorted out. Peculiar situation though. It is like doing a feature film and your star suddenly runs off...:unsure:
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By kungphu - 4 Years Ago
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TimothyMasters (9/14/2021)
There's a great irony here. I have had tremendous success using Fiver to voice my videos. I've gotten some truly excellent character acting at very reasonable prices. But I had a project before my current one, with three scenes completed, and when I was ready to send out for voicing my fourth scene I found to my dismay that my lead male actor had quite Fiverr and was no longer doing voice work! So I decided to quit using Fiverr due to that problem that I had not foreseen. I decided to use Replica Studios instead, even though the voice quality was not nearly as good as real humans. At least nobody would quit mid-project. And now this. Sheesh. Who knew.
Sounds like you’re snake bit! :) Glad you got lucky and the voice is back! Very much like Ani mentioned. It’s like your lead left the set, up and quit! Best of luck! May I suggest getting all his scenes done first? You know…. Just in case. Ha!
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By sungod - 3 Years Ago
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animagic (9/15/2021)
I'm glad it got sorted out. Peculiar situation though. It is like doing a feature film and your star suddenly runs off...:unsure:
Main reason to use voice AI becomes useless if this can happen.
There should be 100 percent certain that voice is available always.
We need a Desktop version with better pricing .
This per min pricing is exactly opposite of what Iclone perpetual license is all about.
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By aaroberts - 2 Years Ago
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The same thing has happened to me!!! If we don't get a work around I am absolutely done with this product. We are totally being screwed!!!
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