Dialogue Editing

Working with More Than One Channel of Dialogue 161
her lines, fi rst extend the room tone bridges. If this doesn’t work, it’s likely
that the room tones are too dissimilar, either in volume or in texture, and
you’ll have to try a different approach. Read on.
One Shot, Two Mics, Similar Room Tone—Dialogue Overlaps In the real
world, people often interrupt each other. Sometimes it’s an aggressive or
excited attempt to make a point, but more often it’s just part of the rhythm
of speech. As if by some mandate from above, movie dialogue is much more
serial—one person speaks, the other responds. It certainly makes for easier
dialogue editing. When one character does interrupt another in a fi lm, it’s
called an overlap. Usually, but not always, it’s a problem.
When a character’s track is corrupted by the sound of her conversation mate’s
voice, you’ll likely have to replace the end of the on-mic line as well as the
beginning of the incoming line. At least that’s the rule. However, when you’re
cutting back and forth between reasonably well-balanced and isolated microphones,
overlaps don’t always cause you grief. If there’s very little crosstalk
between mics, you can play both tracks for the duration of the overlap and
hope for the best. The power of the interruption’s attack will often mask the
doubling of tone, so you won’t notice a noise increase. If both sides are clean
and on-mic, you can probably get away with playing both tracks for a few
words.
Sometimes playing both tracks during a two-microphone overlap doesn’t
work. The increase in ambient noise due to room tone doubling may be
audible. You may encounter strange coloring of the voices from the interaction
of the two mics. Or you may hear a doubling of words if the two characters
are far enough apart to create a timing difference but not so far as to keep
them off of each other’s tracks. In such cases, you must reconstruct from outtakes
both the end of the corrupted line and the beginning of the interruption.
(See Figure 10-31.) Chapter 12 discusses techniques for locating the
alternate take material needed to salvage these overlaps.
Boom on Track 1, Radios on Track 2—Similar Sound Occasionally a boom
and a radio microphone will crosscut surprisingly well despite common
sense telling you otherwise. Try using the cross-cutting technique shown in
Figure 10-32. Odds are good it will work. If not, continue reading.
One Shot, Two Microphones—Dissimilar Room Tone Sometimes it’s not
possible to crossfade back and forth between the two microphones of a shot.
At each crossfade you hear a wave of changing room tone energy and the