Dialogue Editing

Setting Up Your Editing Workspace 109
great places to store—in sync—these unwanted regions without clogging up
your sessions. I also use them to store alternate takes as I reconstruct a shot.
Plus, they’re a convenient place to keep room tone for a scene.
Neither “work” nor “junk” is a standard industry name or concept. Too bad.
To my way of thinking and working, this model serves well. Use it or fi nd
something else that works for you.
Templates
If you edit a lot of fi lms, or if you’re embarking on a 12-reel feature, you’d do
well to make a master template session that you can open, offset, and use as
the basis of each reel’s session. If you’re a master typist, this isn’t necessary,
but if you get tired of typing “Dial A,” “Dial B,” and so on, over and over
again for each track in each session, make a template and be done with it.
A template, shown in Figure 9-2, is a generic session containing the named
tracks as well as the head beeps and the reference tones. For each reel you
make slight modifi cations to the template before importing your audio tracks.
It beats rebuilding from scratch, and it helps ensure that each reel has the
same track sequence, which is something rerecording mixers appreciate.
Here are some tips on making templates:
Properly set the sample rate and bit depth to match the fi lm.
Build your template for reel 1. Session start: 00:57:00:00. Reference
tone: 00:59:00:00–00:59:30:00. Head sync pop: 00:59:58:00 (if the
picture timecode “hour” rolls over at FFOA. If the hour is at “picture
start,” the sync pop will fall at 01:00:06:00). On reels 2 and on, reset
the session start (R2 = 01:57:00:00; R3 = 02:57:00:00; etc.). Also move
the reference tone and sync pop to the appropriate timecode locations
for each reel.
Open about 20 mono tracks and label them accordingly. Include the
work and junk tracks.
Save a copy of your template on the internal hard drive of the
computer (or on a CD or USB Flash drive), since your next fi lm will
probably need a very similar template.
Import both the OMF and the auto-assembly of each reel into a copy
of this session.
One Giant Session or Several Smaller Ones?
Some editors like to combine all of the dialogue reel sessions into one giant
timeline so that they can have the entire fi lm before them without having to