Dialogue Editing

Using Room Tone When Editing Dialogue 155
probably something wrong with it. Try again to fi nd a better match, since
“fake” room tone will come back to haunt you. Remember, it’s unlikely that
you can hear as well in your cutting room as on the mixing stage, so bold
processing of room tone clips will likely backfi re.
If all honest attempts at fi nding acceptable room tone fail, then all is fair
game. Equalize if you must, but listen to your work in a mix room—before
the premix—to make sure you haven’t fooled yourself into believing that the
edit works. It’s horribly embarrassing to play these tracks in the dialogue
premix—tracks you’re so proud of because of the nerdy manipulations you’ve
subjected them to—only to hear that they sound nothing like the dialogue
you’re trying to match.
Using Room Tone to Remove Noises in Dialogue
Location recordings are fi lled with small noises that often go unnoticed on
fi rst listening. The causes of these short nuisances are limitless, but the most
common are static discharge, cable problems, lip smacks and dentures clacks,
dolly track, and crew noises. Individually, these tiny sounds don’t amount to
much, but collectively they steal focus from the dialogue and leave the impression
that the set is much noisier than it really is. Thankfully, these transient
noises are easy to remove as long as they occur between words.
Small ticks and pops can usually be replaced with room tone, but fi rst you
have to fi nd them. The easiest way is by scrubbing until you pinpoint the
click. Then zoom in to the offending noise. Find a tiny piece of adjacent room
tone, copy it and paste over the click, and add short crossfades. (See Figures
10-24 and 10-25.) If you’re removing several clicks within a small region, use
a different piece of room tone for each replacement so it doesn’t sound like a
loop.
Techniques for removing such noises are discussed in more detail in Chapter
12, Damage Repair.
Figure 10-24 Often clicks are very hard to spot visually. The click here, indicated
by the marker, can be fi xed by replacing it with adjacent material. The selected
sound will be pasted over the matching part of the region containing the click.
Line up the sine curves to avoid making new clicks.