Preface

There are many books about film sound. There are books about sound theory and the role sound plays in a movie. There are practical books that teach you about sound editing, sound design, or sound equipment. There are books for film music composers or those who wish they were composers. And there are books about Foley, sound effects, music editing, and mixing. But you do not hear of many books about dialogue editing.

Every live-action film contains dialogue. Lots of it. After all, that’s how most films tell their stories. When you, the dialogue editor, receive a locked film from the picture editor, the sound is a mess. It sounds bad, it’s unorganized, it doesn’t “act” like a movie. You have just a few weeks to untangle this mess, to create a believable cinematic flow, and to remove the artifacts of the filmmaking process. You have to fix what you can and rerecord the rest. During this short time you work with a film’s dialogue tracks, you must get to know them, cajole and seduce them, and get them to behave the way you want—this is dialogue editing.

This is a book for people who need to edit production sound for dramatic films but were never taught how to do it. Dialogue editing operates under a different set of rules than music editing or effects editing. There are some things you’ve simply got to know, but unless you’re fortunate enough to work with more experienced editors in many different situations, there’s no one to teach you the process. This book offers you that education.

Who Can Benefit from Reading This Book?

How a film was shot, recorded, and edited will dramatically influence the dialogue editing process. Much of this book, then, deals with things that at first glance don’t appear to be dialogue. There’s a lot of talk in this book about process—the overview of how things work. You’ll find technical overviews of motion picture postproduction: film, tape, NTSC, PAL, 24p, and more. There are summaries of film picture editing, OMF manipulation, and ADR management.

You’ll also find a lot of discussion about organization. If you keep your work organized, you stand a better chance of learning what the tracks are trying to tell you. A well-run dialogue editing room helps to make the process rewarding and fun rather than the dreary, repetitive, nerdy chore that some allege it to be.

There’s a section in this book that deals with managing your time and another about getting along with the picture department. Brilliant tracks and subtle manipulations aren’t enough when you’re miserably behind schedule or if you can’t get what you need from the picture cutting room.

A Note about Word Choice

In an attempt to make this book as universal as possible, I’ve included English-language professional film terms used the world over. And in an attempt to be as fair a possible, I’ve used relatively interchangeable words, well, interchangeably. This is meant to prevent confusion, but like all good intentions, it may backfire.

For example, you’ll find the terms “ADR,” “looping,” and “postsync” used almost indiscriminately. I do explain that looping is a specific process that is not the same as ADR (see Chapter 15). However, so many people use ADR, looping, and postsync interchangeably that once you know the difference between them, you might as well use the word that most easily rolls off your tongue and is acceptable to your colleagues. Sometimes, tilting at linguistic windmills is pointless.

You’ll notice that I cavalierly exchange “sound designer” with “supervising sound editor” and “sound supervisor.” These titles do not mean the same thing, but depending on the crowd you run with, it is difficult to tell one term from the other. Out of fairness, I have sprinkled a bit of one term here and a bit of another term there. In general, I use supervising sound editor to describe the person in charge of a film’s postproduction sound.

A “mix” (New York) and a “dub” (Los Angeles and London) are the same thing. From lifelong habit, I use mix, try though I do to be fair to the dub people. Practices vary by location, each film culture having its own system and terminology. The techniques and jargon described in this book have their roots in New York, but there’s a smattering of Europe, Los Angeles, and the rest-of-the-world tossed in.

Avid’s not the only picture editing workstation in the world. But let’s face it, Avid currently maintains a near monopoly, with Apple’s Final Cut Pro still a distant second in market penetration. It seems silly to constantly write “Avid or Final Cut Pro or whatever else you use to cut picture,” so often I use Avid to mean “picture editing workstation.” It’s easier to read.

In addition, this book is very Pro Tools-centric. Examples must be described and shown on something, and Pro Tools’ omnipresence makes it an obvious choice. Still, all this DigiSpeak isn’t meant as an endorsement, and this is not meant to be a book about editing dialogue using the Pro Tools products. The examples that specifically mention Pro Tools can be transferred easily to other workstations.

I’ve tossed around the terms “location mixer,” “sound recordist,” “location recordist,” and the like to mean “the person responsible for the location sound recording.” This rather clumsy randomizing of terms is due to two problems faced in writing a book like this. First, depending on where you live and how big your production is, a different term is used for the role. Second, wanting to keep you, the reader, on my side, I’ve generally tried to avoid gender-specific terms such as “soundman.” All of this results in occasionally inelegant prose, but you’re here for the information, not the eloquence.

Finally, on the topic of gender-specific language, please forgive me my use of he, his, she, her, and so on, or if it looks like I’m giving the guys too many of the good positions. I’ve tried to randomly distribute the jobs in my make-believe productions, and I alternate between he and she with military regularity. But someone may be put off, either by my goofy inconsistency or by my failure to accurately balance the use of gender pronouns. It’s not that I didn’t try.

Key Words

Every book like this has a glossary of relevant terms. There are many, many excellent books about film sound that offer outstanding definitions of “industry” terms, a few of which are cited at the beginning of the glossary. I won’t try to top those. However, some words that apply specifically to dialogue editing are written in boldface when they first appear in the text. These words are defined or discussed in the glossary at the end of the book.

This book’s objective is to tell you about those things you can’t figure out on your own. Dialogue editing may be misunderstood, but it’s not magic. If you don’t lose sight of the needs of the film and stick to a few rules, you can create brilliant, interesting dialogue. This is a practical guide for getting the most from dialogue tracks, telling a story with production recordings, and making a huge invisible contribution to the narrative success of any film.