MatchBox lip sync solution (Hitomi) will preview its future at NAB 2024

Hitomi will power several live demos throughout NAB 2024 of its Matchbox tool, designed to solve latency and lip sync problems.

MatchBox seeks to respond to the growing difficulties derived from the remote productions, which sometimes implies the need to find a “simple, reliable and extremely precise” way to measure the differential latencies between multiple video and audio sources. As Hitomi points out, lip-syncing by eye “is always a challenge,” especially on those occasions when audio comes before video.

NAB 2024 attendees will be able to discover in real time how MatchBox helps to overcome these types of challenges. With the app MatchBox Glass, a camera assistant simply needs to hold an iPhone in front of the camera lens, which will cause audio and video test patterns to pass through the entire chain to be measured and aligned at the final checkpoint. The entire process, Hitomi remarks, “lasts seconds.”

Russell Johnson, director of the company, highlights how lip sync errors They can “be extremely distracting to the public, and when there are many sources there is a lot to align.” To this end, the company continues to improve its products “to make it even easier to achieve minimal latency and precise alignment of sound and vision, even as the number of channels increases.” That is the reason why firm is working "in a software alternative to our hardware analyzer". "Offers users easy expandability. “If you have 64 channels to align, you're not going to use 64 hardware analyzers, but they could all be controlled by software,” Johnson concludes.