Dialogue Editing

280 ADR
If a vowel is terminated with a sharp consonant sound, you might be
able to shorten the end of the vowel using the attacking consonant sound
to mask the vowel glitch. Try it; it just might work.
Look for a shorter or longer vowel sound from another take. This isn’t the
fastest approach, but it may give you just what you need.
Use sibilants. Sibilant sounds are the “hisses” created by consonants
such as Sh, Ss, or Ch. They inhabit an enchanted land between vowel
and consonant sounds. Like other consonants, sibilants are easy to
spot; in fact, their familiar pursed-lip shape is the most obvious of all
waveforms. Unlike normal consonants, however, sibilants are longlasting
so there are usually many opportunities to make them longer or
shorter. Very tonal vowels are all but impossible to splice, but sibilants
are more like white noise than music so you’re rarely punished for
editing them. In fact, you can do (almost) anything: cut, fade, loop—all
within reason, of course. When you’re anticipating a diffi cult ADR
editing session, hope for lots of sentences like “Sally sells seashells by
the seashore.” Of course, as convenient as sibilants are, you’ll pay for
that convenience in the form of de-essing during the dialogue premix.
Tools for Fitting ADR
Most of the sound shaping for matching ADR into the dialogue (EQ, dynamics,
reverb) happens in the dialogue premix, so you needn’t bother with that
just yet. When you’re working with good ADR tracks, your concern is mainly
intonation, matching performance, and sync.
Intonation When combining takes, you may fi nd that one is pitched higher
or lower than its neighbor. The result is an unconvincing sentence that doesn’t
make sense, but it’s one that can be fi xed with pitch shift. Select that part of
the phrase whose pitch you want to change. Take a bit more than you need
by pulling out the handle and selecting so that you’ll have a pitch-shifted
handle available for crossfades.
Keep in mind that a little pitch change goes a long way, so experiment
with the parameters until you have the intonation you want. 5 On most
5 One reason to be cautious when changing the pitch of a line is that most pitch-shifting
processors change the formants along with the pitch. Formants, the peaks in the vowel
spectra caused by the various articulators in the throat and mouth, enable recognition of
vowel sounds and hence language itself. Pitch variations in a voice can be quite substantial,
yet the formants will remain consistent. A small change in formants will make a recording
sound like the wrong vowel.