Dialogue Editing

Using Room Tone When Editing Dialogue 153
Figure 10-21 Consolidate the tone into one manageable region. Trim off the
region’s outer edges (seen here beyond the highlighting) before copying to leave
“wiggle room” for crossfades and edit point positioning.
9. If you’re working on a Pro Tools, return to the Slip mode. If you are
using another workstation, leave the ripple enable mode and return
to normal editing.
10. If you’re going to immediately edit with your new room tone (which
is usually the case), trim away the beginning and end of the soundfi
le before copying it to a track adjacent to the one you’re editing,
from which you’ll cut and paste as necessary. Trimming the top and
tail of the soundfi le provides a handle you can use to fade or trim
any new edit. (See Figure 10-21.)
Using All Takes to Create Room Tone
If, after you cull the words, noises, and other unwanted irregularities from
your expanded take, there’s not enough room tone to work with, you can
extract what you need from all of the takes of the shot.
Find all of the alternate takes of the shot in question, including the one
used in the fi lm. (See Chapter 12 to learn how to do this.) String the
takes together, one after another, onto the work track.
Follow the procedure described earlier for extracting quality room
tone from the takes. When fi nished, consolidate and name the new
room tone fi le.
Dealing with Changes in Room Tone Pitch or Volume
Small, recognizable sounds—that tiny click, the miniscule footstep, the
quiet lip smack—will betray you when you repeat a section of room tone.
Plus, it’s not likely that the click, step, or smack riding along with room tone
will happen to fall in an appropriate spot in the scene. Get rid of such
signatures.
However, sometimes it’s not enough to remove the telltale noises. Say you’re
looping a piece of room tone that rises in pitch over the course of its 5-second