Dialogue Editing

140 NOW, THE ACTUAL EDITING
of the footage (and conceals its weaknesses) to best tell a story. Chances are,
the resulting sound bumps aren’t the editor’s highest priority. The picture
people tell the story; we try to make it work. Besides, “It all sounded pretty
good in the Avid!”
Once you open the OMF, the scene is immediately annoying. Cuts between
Betty and Bob result in two mismatched kinds of kitchen noise, while moving
to Blanche you lose the hum of the kitchen only to hear the din of the restaurant.
And neither of the wider shots cuts well against the close-ups. Even if
the scene is interesting and dramatically effective, it won’t sound like a movie
because of the bumps. How can this happen? How can the picture editor do
this to you? Easy.
Picture editors have things on their minds other than the sound of
shot transitions, so what to you seems an unforgivable lapse of
judgment makes perfect sense to them. They’re right. The story is
what counts. Let the sound department deal with the bodies.
Between the hard drives, the computers, and the lousy speakers, you
simply can’t hear in a modern picture editing room. Nothing masks
bad cuts like computer and air conditioner noise.
Picture cutting rooms are rarely equipped with adequate mixers,
amplifi ers, or loudspeakers.
Scene 45 is sitting on your desk and, for whatever the reason, it doesn’t
work.
Every time there’s a change in sound sources, room tone, voice characteristics,
or level, you’re temporarily knocked out of the scene—reminded that this is
a movie. Since every ounce of your fi lm-literate brain wants to think of scene
45 as real life, you get back into the scene quickly enough. But the magic is
temporarily violated with each cut. Before you can effectively attack the other
issues (noises, overlaps, replacements, perspective, etc.), you must make the
scene reasonably smooth. Otherwise, the irregularities caused by room tone
mismatches will make it all but impossible to listen for the more subtle problems.
(See Figure 10-10.)
You soon discover, however, that smoothing scenes is a constant tradeoff
between total noise and evenness, and many novice editors err on the side
of noise. “Lay down a wall of room tone,” the logic goes, “and you can mask
the differences between shots.” Or you can mask the differences between the
shots by running a vacuum cleaner in your cutting room while listening to
the scene, but that’s hardly a solution. (See Figure 10-11.)