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Set Voice Delivery Style

Goal: Control how a character delivers their lines in a specific shot or scene — pacing, emotion, emphasis — rather than accepting the default voice delivery.

Assigning a voice to a character defines who is speaking. Voice delivery controls how they speak: whether this line is delivered with fear or warmth, quickly or slowly, with a hard emphasis on a specific word. Delivery settings are applied at the shot level, which means you can have the same character speak calmly in one shot and urgently in the next — matching the scene's emotional arc — without ever changing the underlying voice assignment.

Steps​

  1. Open a shot with dialogue. Navigate to a shot where the character speaks. Click the shot in the Timeline or Shot List. The Shot panel opens on the right.

  2. Go to the Voice tab in the Shot panel. Click the Voice tab. You will see the dialogue lines attributed to each character in this shot, along with the current delivery settings for each line.

  3. See the dialogue lines for this shot. Each line of dialogue is displayed with the character's name, the text of the line, and a row of delivery controls. Lines are listed in the order they appear in the shot.

  4. Click on a line to open delivery settings. Clicking a dialogue line expands its delivery settings panel. If the shot has multiple lines, each can have independent settings.

  5. Set the emotion. Choose from the preset emotional registers: Neutral, Excited, Sad, Angry, Fearful, Warm. You can also click Custom and type a short descriptor: "quiet resignation", "barely contained panic", "forced cheerfulness". The emotion setting affects the prosody and inflection of the generated voice.

  6. Set the pacing. Use the Pacing control to adjust delivery speed:

    • Faster — useful for rapid-fire dialogue, arguments, excited speech
    • Normal — the voice's natural default cadence
    • Slower — useful for gravitas, grief, deliberate speech, a character choosing their words carefully

  7. Add emphasis marks to specific words. Click any word in the dialogue text to mark it for emphasis. Emphasized words are spoken with more stress and slightly increased volume. Example: in the line "I told you this would happen", emphasizing "told" makes the delivery feel accusatory; emphasizing "this" makes it feel more resigned. Use emphasis sparingly — one or two words per line is usually right.

  8. Add a pause between lines. To insert a breath or dramatic pause between two dialogue lines, click the + Pause button between them and enter the pause duration in seconds. Short pauses (0.3–0.8 seconds) feel like natural breath. Longer pauses (1.5+ seconds) read as dramatic hesitation.

  9. Listen to a preview before rendering. Click Preview Audio to hear the line with the delivery settings applied. The preview generates quickly (no credit cost) so you can iterate before committing to a full shot render.

  10. Understand how delivery settings write into the AI generation prompt. Delivery settings are translated into SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) instructions before being sent to the Azure Neural TTS service. You do not need to know SSML — ACT3 AI handles the translation — but you can click View SSML to inspect the instruction if you are troubleshooting an unexpected delivery.

Tips​

  • Subtle emotion settings read better on screen than extreme ones. "Warm" reads as friendly; "Excited" at maximum reads as frantic. Let the dialogue text, the visual performance, and the scene context carry the emotional weight — voice delivery is a supporting tool, not the primary performance driver.
  • Test delivery changes on a single key line in the scene before adjusting every line. If the character's voice sounds right on the most emotionally loaded line, the others will generally follow.
  • Pacing interacts with lipsync: a slower delivery means more visible mouth movement time. After adjusting pacing, review the lipsync on close-up shots.

Next steps​