Dialogue Editing

Shot Balancing and the Rules of Thumb 141
Figure 10-10 Detail from scene 45 after you’ve organized the tracks but before
editing. Each shot has different room tone, so the scene is bumpy. Note that
Blanche (45A) and the shot from the kitchen (45D) have much heavier room tone
than the other shots have.
Although there are (rare) occasions when you want to include a wall-to-wall
carpet of room tone in a scene, you shouldn’t count on this as a solution to
shot mismatches. But because this ill-conceived practice is so common, it’s
worth looking at why you shouldn’t work like this. Look again at Figure 10-
11. We’ve done nothing to ease the transitions. True, the bumps are less
audible, since the problematic transitions are hiding behind the room tone
track. During the dialogue premix, however, you’ll undoubtedly remove
some of the ambient noise and the mask will lose its cloaking ability. The
cleaner you make the tracks sound, the more this editing technique will
betray you.
Aside from being ineffective, this technique makes for noisy tracks. Throughout
the scene, at least two tracks of room tone are playing. Twice the room
tone, double the noise fl oor. The original problem wasn’t within the shots but
only at the transitions, so why should we add unnecessary noise to the
middle of perfectly respectable shots? This brings us to the fi rst fundamental
rule of thumb for dialogue editors.