Dialogue Editing

Using Room Tone When Editing Dialogue 151
The new room tone must come from within the same shot as the material it’s
supporting. Using another shot’s tone won’t solve your problems. What do
you do?
1. Make of copy of the region for which you’re trying to create room
tone. Paste it onto one of your work tracks.
2. Open the handles of this region all the way to its boundaries.
3. If you’re working on a Pro Tools, enter Shuffl e mode. On other
DAWs, use a mode that allows you to ripple tracks while editing.
(Take note: One of the main reasons you created work tracks was
to have a safe place for ripple editing. If you use Shuffl e mode on
a “real” track, you’ll lose sync on all of the track’s downstream
regions.) Remove all dialogue and noises from this region. The
region will become increasingly shorter and you’ll be left with room
tone only. You can actually remove most of the words and noises
without listening to the track; let the graphic display and your gut
be your guide.
4. Make a couple of fi ne passes, each time removing more and more
unwanted noises, breaths, and rustle. You should end up with a very
smooth chunk of room tone, devoid of recognizable landmarks. The
process is much like making a reduced sauce—you cook it for hours
and hours until it becomes a small, perfect concentrate.
5. You can automate the process of isolating room tone with Pro Tools’
Strip Silence function. (See Figure 10-19.) This feature, equivalents of
Figure 10-19 Pro Tools’ Strip Silence dialogue box.