Dialogue Editing

The Auto-Assembly 73
you read Mad magazine. All auto-assembly programs load by source roll,
beginning with the lowest. It would be crazy to load in program order
because you’d be constantly changing source rolls.
Periodically, you’ll be asked to change tapes. If there’s a timecode problem
and the machine can’t properly cue, you’ll have to set the player to “local”
and manually cue the tape past the timecode irregularity.
There are times when you don’t want to use the auto-load feature. In such
cases, you load the sounds manually and conform later. You may, for example,
want to load all of the dailies, then link the fi les to the EDL for auto-assembly.
This will place all of the recorded takes at your disposal, although not in a
very well-managed format. (To make all takes available on your workstation,
you’re far better off loading the original tapes directly into the DAW, dividing
them into takes, and then creating fi les from these regions.) If your movie
was recorded on a hard-disk recorder, you can copy all of the soundfi les onto
the workstation drive, later linking the fi les to an EDL.
Conform the Session Once the auto-assembly program fi nishes recording
the required sounds from the original tapes, you’re ready to conform the
sound material to match the EDL. In truth, what you’re doing is linking
the EDL events to the recorded soundfi les. If the sounds were autoloaded by
the program, these links have been established without your intervention. If,
however, you’re conforming previously recorded fi les or the original fi eld
recording fi les, you must manually link the EDL with the sounds.
If you receive a new (changed) EDL of a reel before you’ve begun to edit, you
can once again conform the session with the existing soundfi les. However,
since the new EDL wasn’t the basis for the autoloading, it won’t automatically
link to the old soundfi les and you have to manually reestablish the link. If
you’ve already done considerable editing on a reel, a new session is of little
use. You could import the session refl ecting the new EDL into your Pro Tools
session, but then you have to redo your edits. You’re usually better off performing
a conformation of your Pro Tools session to match picture department
changes (see Chapter 14). Only if there’s new raw material in the revised
picture cut (not just new edits of old material) should you go to the trouble
of making a new postconform.
Test before Autoload Before spending all night loading tapes only to discover
in the morning that the FCM was set incorrectly or that your audio 3
and 4 edits are mute, run a test. To make certain that the EDL is correctly
formatted for the auto-assembly, select about ten contiguous events that