Dialogue Editing

68 GETTING SOUND FROM PICTURE DEPARTMENT TO SOUND DEPARTMENT
completely within SMPTE norms. Using such lists without fi rst cleaning them
may result in unpleasant surprises. If you regularly prepare EDLs and you
need more fl exibility than the free utilities can offer, consider a more serious
EDL management tool such as EDLMax. 8
Getting Clip Names into Your Regions
It’s important that your session region names refl ect the scene/shot/take
information from the Avid and, ultimately, from the original recordings. You
can in fact cut dialogue without this information in the region names, but
you’ll expend so much energy fi gur ing out camera angles and digging about
for clues to sources that you’ll be exhausted before you’ve even begun.
Comment or Clip Names As we saw previously, shot information is carried
below the main edit line in an EDL, either as a comment or as part of a clip
names line. If you don’t have comments in your EDL, send the list back to
the picture department and ask for a version that includes scene/shot/take
information in the COMMENT fi eld. In most auto-assembly programs you can
choose which line to import: comment or clip names. There’ll also be an
option to drop certain recurring text that you don’t want in your region
names. For example, you don’t want all of your regions looking like
*COMMENT: 21B/4
It’s pretty obvious that you’d prefer to work with just
21B/4
It’s much easier to get good, consistent results if the picture editor provides
the shot information on the comment line rather than as a clip name. The
reason is that *COMMENT: is always *COMMENT:, whereas CLIP NAME can begin
with *FROM CLIP NAME: or *TO CLIP NAME: or a few other variants. If shot
information is carried on the comment line, all you need to do is tell your
auto-assembly to delete the string COMMENT: {space}{space} and region names
will be correctly labeled. If, however, you inherit a list that uses the more
troublesome clip name line for passing along shot information, you must
delete these long prefi xes or you’ll end up with unusable region names.
8
EDLMax is a multipurpose EDL management tool made by Brooks Harris Film & Tape,
Inc. (http://www.edlmax.com).