Dialogue Editing

10 NO ONE WORKS IN A VACUUM
standard of the fi lm industry. 8 Soon production sound was transferred to
35 mm magnetic fi lm, mag stripe, which could be easily handled, coded,
edited, and retransferred as needed. Dialogue and effects editors were now
free to manipulate tracks as never before. During the mix, edited dialogue,
effects and backgrounds, Foley, and music elements were combined and
recorded onto yet more 35 mm magnetic fi lm (fullcoat). (This system continues
today on fi lms edited mechanically.) With sound elements on mag, there
was no real technical limit to the complexity of the sound design or even the
number of tracks, although the cumulative hiss from the mag discouraged
playing too many tracks at once. When Dolby noise reduction was introduced
in 1975, even this limitation was surmounted.
The system of recording on analogue tape, editing sound and picture on mag
stripe, and mixing to fullcoat served the fi lm industry for more than 30 years.
It was predictable, stable, and universal, and its hunger for labor kept apprentices
and assistants—many of whom would be the next generation of editors—
near the action. Then, once again, it all changed. Enter nonlinear picture
editors and digital audio workstations.
Now, for far less than the price of a car, you can have unrivaled editing,
processing, and management power in a small computer. You can make
changes over and over, painlessly creating alternate versions of your work.
There’s no getting around the fact that the technology is massively better than
it was a generation ago, which means that you’re much more empowered to
make your own choices.
Therein lies the problem. Digital audio workstations and the hugely altered
workfl ow they bring about have turned sound editing on its head. What was
once a well-understood, widely accepted process has been given a huge dose
of democracy, if not anarchy. The way we work has changed in a revolutionary
way, not just in a few evolutionary adjustments. Crews are smaller and
roles are less defi ned, and even the basic workfl ow is no longer basic. The
way you work now depends on where you live, plus a thousand other peculiar
variables.
Different Formats, Different Processes
What makes for the present confusion is not that modern editing has been
digitized but rather that the picture almost always has to be transferred to
video, which has a different timebase from that of fi lm. Countless sample
8 Audio Engineering Society (http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/audio.history.timeline.html).