Dialogue Editing

216 DAMAGE REPAIR
Cut and paste the appropriate sections from the alternate takes onto the
blank track, more or less in sync with the original.
Start syncing each subsection with your rough assembly of the new
line.
– Get the length right. The best way is to try editorial nips and tucks
to adjust the pauses. Do this before you begin any VocAlign or timestretch
processing. You can shorten and lengthen during pauses, but
if you lengthen a bit of “silence,” make sure you don’t introduce a
loop by repeating a tick, click, smack, or other recognizable noise.
– Don’t be afraid of cutting in the middle of a word. Contrary to
common sense, you can actually trim in the middle of the certain
word sounds. Your two greatest friends when syncing alternate
takes are hard consonants, such as T and P and B, and sibilants, such
as S, Sh, F, and Ch. Use the hard consonants as visual benchmarks to
tell you where you stand. Use the sibilants as convenient cutting
locations within words. You can almost always cut within a sibilant
sound—to shorten or lengthen—and get away with it.
– Do as much manual editing as you can before resorting to the
length-changing tools. The easier you make life for the processor,
the better results you’ll achieve.
Listen to what you’ve constructed. Watch the alternate line in sync
with the picture, then compare it with the original. Although it’s great
to be able to match waveforms, you can easily forget what this is all
about: convincing dialogue, solid sound, and language a normal
person (as opposed to a computer) would believe.
Do your time-stretching work. Use a word-fi tting tool or just a time
expansion/compression plug-in, whichever you have and whatever
makes sense to you. Be sure to logically label the resulting regions.
Slide it over the original when you fi nish the line. Fix the fades and
move on to the next fi x.
Overlaps
People interrupt each other all the time. Sometimes out of excitement, sometimes
out of anger or arrogance, actors are always stepping on each other’s
lines, and such “overlaps” cause ceaseless headaches. Let’s return to our
friends Alfred and Elizabeth and see what can happen to movie sound when
people step on each other. Here, again, is the list of shots for scene 88:
88—master shot (wide) with both characters
88A—single shot of Alfred