Dialogue Editing

A Picture Editing Primer (NTSC Version) 39
mood and rhythm and to give a screening audience (as well as the director
and editor) a clue as to how the scene will work. When the composer gets
involved, he’ll likely be told to use the temp music track as an inspiration, to
“make it just like this, but different.”
Don’t be surprised to hear “temporary” sound effects added during the
offl ine. Sometimes you really do need to hear a sound effect to understand
the feel of a scene. The endlessly ringing phone, the crying baby in the next
room, the downstairs neighbors who won’t give us any peace . . . these sorts
of things must be heard for the scenes to make sense. Moreover, as focus
groups become ever more common, directors feel that their unfi nished fi lms
must sound as “fi nished” as possible. Right or wrong, fi lmmakers assume
that a public audience (or even an audience of studio executives) can’t appreciate
an unfi nished work.
As a result, Avid edits are becoming more and more loaded with temp SFX,
temp ADR, temp music, and temp Foley. An entire industry has grown from
this mess. Signifi cant chunks of a sound budget now go to temporary mixes,
and supervising sound editors are often brought onboard during the picture
editing process for the sole purpose of preparing and nursing countless temp
mixes. The dialogue editor may or may not become involved with the temp
mixes, depending on the size of the production.
As the dialogue editor, you take what comes out of the picture editing room
and make sense of it. However, if the picture department loads sounds into
the Avid without timecode, you have no access to them except through the
OMF. 6 And if (God forbid) the wild sounds were loaded via analogue at very
low or distorted levels, you’re up a creek. Even though the sound department
will theoretically replace any Avid-loaded SFX, Foley, dialogue, ADR, or
music, you must be able to access what they did in picture, just in case the
director falls in love with his cutting room ADR and you’re forced to use it.
The only way to give the sound department some level of control over these
wild sounds is to arrange for all nonproduction sounds (i.e., everything that
didn’t originate at the shoot) to be fi rst transferred to a timecode format
(usually TC DAT or a soundfi le with a timestamp) and then digitized into the
Avid. These sounds or fi les can be loaded directly into the Avid session, and
as long as the fi lenames go unchanged you’ll have no trouble relinking to the
6 OMF is a means of transferring media between different machines (for example,
between a Final Cut Pro picture editor and a Fairlight audio editor). Much more about this
in Chapter 5.