Dialogue Editing

62 GETTING SOUND FROM PICTURE DEPARTMENT TO SOUND DEPARTMENT
006 BL NONE C 00:00:00:00 00:00:00:00 02:00:26:02 02:00:26:02
006 DVD09 NONE D 004 13:38:30:08 13:38:33:14 02:00:26:02 02:00:29:08
AUD 3 4
* TO CLIP NAME: 24-07 OF 7 ANNOUNCED 6 JORDAN BORDER T131 MERGED
* COMMENT: 08-02-04
Notice that event 006 occupies two lines. The source of the fi rst line is BL,
which stands for “black.” Notice too that this part of the event has no duration.
Now look at the next line. Rather than the usual C, for cut transition,
there’s a D followed by 004. This double-line event represents a 4-frame dissolve
(“fade” in audio terms) from black (silence in the case of sound) to the
material on DVD09.
The fact that the fi rst line of the event has no duration is a vestige of how
dissolves were made in the days of linear videotape editing. If you wanted
to dissolve from tape 32 to tape 67, for example, the CMX editor would make
an edit precisely at the beginning of the transition. This “zero cut” was the
splice point between normal footage and the transition effect. At the end of
the dissolve, there would be another splice to return to normal footage. Pro
Tools handles fades and dissolves in more or less the same way, although the
process is invisible to the operator.
In truth, by the time you get an EDL it should be stripped of dissolves since
an auto-assembly program can’t generate fades for your session. Ask the
assistant fi lm editor to convert fades to cuts before generating the EDLs. If he
can’t, you can easily do it yourself with EDL Manager.
The other common source symbol in an event is AX, or AUXILLARY, which
specifi es a video switcher or signal generator. You’ll commonly see AX at the
head of a reel, signifying PAL or NTSC color bars that coincide with the
1 kHz reference tone. It’s unlikely that you’ll encounter AX pointing to meaningful
dialogue information.
There’s something else odd about event 006: the record channel. Rather than
A for audio channel 1, A2 for audio channel 2, or AA for both 1 and 2, the word
NONE appears.
006 DVD09 NONE D 004 13:38:30:08 13:38:33:14 02:00:26:02 02:00:29:08
AUD 3 4
What’s the point of an audio recording with no record track enabled? But
wait, on the line below you see AUD 3 4, which means that event 006 is edited
to channels 3 and 4 in the Avid session. Remember, the CMX3600 EDL is a