Dialogue Editing

Recording the Premix 315
same for all tracks, so they can be treated together. Conversely, each track
has small, or not so small, quirks that will usually be individually sorted out
in the console with the EQ and dynamics processors on each channel strip.
For the “common” problems, the entire scene is usually bussed to an auxiliary
mono chain that may be routed back into the console or to an external
processor such as a Dolby Cat.43, a Cedar noise suppressor, or a Urei
dipper.
Recording the Premix
As we saw in earlier chapters, fi nished dialogue is overwhelmingly mono.
Nevertheless, you’ll premix it to 6 or 8 or 16 record tracks. Remember, a lovely
dialogue mix is only one of your goals. The other providing quick, easy,
logical options for the fi nal mix.
A week or so before the mix, talk to the mixer or supervising sound editor
to fi nd out whether you should plan the recording strategy yourself (before
the mix) or if the mixer will map it out. If you’re not responsible for engineering
this strategy, read no further, but if you are, you need to understand the
logic behind record tracks.
During the mix, you’ll be playing your 20-odd dialogue tracks from a workstation.
Each output—analogue or digital—will be patched to a channel input
of the console, mixed, and fi nally recorded onto hard disk. Let’s say you’re
recording onto 14 record tracks. There are many ways to design these tracks,
and unless you have a very good reason to object, defer to the mixer—he’s
the one who’ll have to live with the consequences. Table 18-1 shows an
example of what he might come up with.
The wider you spread the dialogue premix recordings, the more fl exibility
you’ll have in the fi nal mix, but you’ll pay for it in the time it takes to reroute
the mix to different record tracks, especially if your outboard processing
equipment is limited. It’s easy to print to separate record tracks when all of
your processing is within the console. Just route each channel to the record
track you want and record everything in one pass. (In some premixing
models, the number of record tracks is the same as the number of playback
tracks.)
If, however, you’re matching shots using the console’s EQ and dynamics but
bussing the entire scene through one Cat.43 or digital noise reduction device,
you’ll have to print each record track separately. This is time consuming and
a common birthplace of mistakes. What’s the “right” number of record tracks?
Of course, the only answer is “It depends,” so talk with the mixer and the
supervising sound editor. The following are a few guidelines.