Dialogue Editing

218 DAMAGE REPAIR
be careful of the off-mic contamination from one of them. There’s no free
lunch.
Fixing the Acting
It’s not unusual for actors to slip in their diction, slur a word, or swallow a
syllable. Often you can fi x these problems the same way you remove noises—
go back to the alternate takes and fi nd a better word or phrase. Of course,
you’ll copy and put aside the original since that little “slip” may turn out to
be the reason the director chose the shot. Also, when replacing a line because
of an actor’s problems, you’ll keep it to the bare minimum so that the spirit
of the line is unaltered.
The hardest part of “actor cleaning” is remembering that you have the
resources to improve the line and then overcoming your natural laziness,
which keeps telling you, “What’s the big deal? That’s the way she said it.”
Removing Wind Distortion
Location recordists go to great lengths to avoid wind distortion. They protect
the mic from the wind using shock mounts and screens with all sorts of lovely
names (including “zeppelin,” “wind jammer,” “wooly,” and “dead cat”).
Regardless, it’s a certainty that sooner or later you’ll curse the location mixer
for “not noticing” the wind buffeting the mic on the Siberian blizzard wide
shot.
You can often remove this very low-frequency distortion in the mix with a
high-pass fi lter set to something like 60 Hz. As with all fi ltering issues, you
should talk with the rerecording mixer or the supervising sound editor about
how to proceed. If you’re really lucky, the mix room will be available and you
can listen to the scene in the proper environment. You can also do a poor
man’s test by running the track through a high-pass fi lter in your editing
room and playing with cut-off frequencies between 60 and 100 Hz. Keep in
mind that wind distortion will always sound less severe in your cutting room
than on the dubbing stage, so don’t get too excited by the results.
If, God forbid, you decide to fi lter the tracks yourself in the cutting room, you
must make a copy of the fully edited track before fi ltering and put the original
on a junk track. Many a time I thought I was doing my mixer a favor by
“helping” the track a bit with a high-pass fi lter, only to have the mixer stop,
turn to me, and ask, “What were you thinking?” What sounded like a vast
improvement in my little room was now thin and cheap. Plus, the energy
from the wind noise was still evident. The mixer gently reminded me of the