Dialogue Editing

54 GETTING SOUND FROM PICTURE DEPARTMENT TO SOUND DEPARTMENT
In 1984, the Montage Picture Processor was introduced. It was a surreal array
of 17 or more Super BetaMax players shuttling, winding, playing, and coughing
out commitment-free scene previews. Preparing for an editing project
was a huge task, but the actual editing worked pretty well. The same year,
Lukasfi lm announced EditDroid, 3 a laser disk-based random access editor,
whose sound cousin was SoundDroid. The technology behind EditDroid and
SoundDroid was acquired by Avid in 1993, and many of the key developers
of SoundDroid went on to form Sonic Solutions.
Nonlinear Workstations
The late 1980s witnessed the births, and often the deaths, of countless nonlinear
sound editing systems for the sound-for-picture market. Overwhelmingly,
these tools were hardware-based proprietary systems that often settled
into a market niche. Most of the sound workstations were offshoots of music
editors, while others were spawned from restoration and mastering, coinciding
with the introduction of the compact disc. Some were built from the
ground up for audio postproduction. All of these workstations were closed
systems, so neither code nor fi le formats were easily exchanged between different
manufacturers’ products. Still, as long as you kept your job with one
studio, life really was getting better.
This “Brave New World” fell apart when jobs had to move from one facility
to another. Worse, there was no sane way to take a fi nished picture cut and
begin working on the production sound. Typically, a reconform, often done
by hand and ear, was the only way to get the picture editor’s cut to the sound
department. This cumbersome and time-consuming chore took much of the
fun out of random-access production sound editing.
Auto-Assembly and OMF
It wasn’t long before a method was devised to automatically conform the
original takes based on the picture editor’s choices, assuming that the original
production sound came with timecode. Auto-assembly was invented. Using
an EDL for source name and address information and the RS-232 or RS-422
protocol to control the source machine (initially ¼-inch tape with timecode
and later DAT), manufacturers offered a way, however clumsy, of moving
from picture to sound. But the resulting soundfi les were based on proprietary
platforms and weren’t the least bit interchangeable. You still couldn’t mount
3 For a riveting personal history of electronic picture editing, see In the Blink of an Eye,
Second Edition, by Walter Murch (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2001, pp. 75–146).