Dialogue Editing

Setting Up Your Editing Workspace 105
assembly on the right or left, but always do it the same way so that
you don’t have to think about it. I always put the reference on the left.
Play one auto-assembly region and the guide track together. Adjust the
volumes so that left and right are equal. If the sync offset is big, it will
be pretty clear if the auto-assembly region is late or early. Sometimes
small sync differences are hard to hear when played in a “pannedout”
manner. In this case, listen to the stereo image. If the autoassembly
is on the right and the stereo image is “pulling” to the right,
then the auto-assembly region is early. When sync differences are very
slight, you tend to favor the earlier signal, perceiving it as louder. 3
Nudge the auto-assembly region until the sound is centered in the
stereo fi eld and you hear the phasing sound that indicates sync.
If you’re using an external mixer to monitor, pan the two channels to
center and listen for absolute phasing.
Repeat this process for all regions.
Setting Up Your Editing Workspace
Once you have an in-sync OMF and auto-assembly, choose the one you want
to use for your edit. Odds are you’ll pick the auto-assembly as it will probably
sound a bit better. If so, make the OMF tracks inactive and hide them; then
copy the auto-assembly tracks, and make them inactive and hide them. (See
Figure 9-1.)
Why go to such trouble? What will these copies buy you? The OMF copy,
even if you don’t use its sounds, is a useful reference. Fades, temporary sound
effects and music, and volume automation are all intact and will help
you understand what the picture editor was trying to accomplish. Plus, nontimecoded
material, such as “edit room ADR,” will be in the OMF but probably
won’t show up in the auto-assembly. When you start editing a scene,
listen to the OMF tracks to get into the editor’s head. Then you can go back
to the virgin auto-assembly tracks with a good idea of the editor’s artistic
and storytelling hopes for the scene.
The copy of the auto-assembly will come in handy if you inadvertently offset
or delete a region. Just unhide the track and copy the missing region into
your dialogue tracks in sync. You can also use these unaltered regions as
guides if you need to conform your edit to a new picture version. Unlike your
elegantly overlapping edited sounds, these virgin regions have the same start
3 This phenomenon is called the “Haas effect” or “precedence effect” and is used in
many psychoacoustic processors and algorithms.