Dialogue Editing

30 NO ONE WORKS IN A VACUUM
so more is used. You don’t care about this unless you have a piece of the fi lm’s
profi ts. However, there’s a sound issue to consider. Shooting and posting at
25 fps doesn’t cause a problem until the fi lm is fi nished and its time to screen
the print—at 24 fps. Not only will all action be slower than you’re used to
seeing (not much you can do about that), but the sound will be heard at a
lower pitch. This may not make a discernable difference with dialogue
(although everyone will sound a bit sleepy), but you’ll notice the difference
with music. Everything will be fl at, and those with perfect pitch will howl
like dogs when hearing “impossible” chords.
The solution? After the mix, during the print mastering process, you can
raise the pitch of the entire mix by 4 percent. The 25 fps print will indeed
sound sharp, but when played at the world standard 24 fps, the pitch will be
correct. Again, however, we have a downside. When pitch-shifting a full mix
with dialogue, music, and effects components, you run a decent chance of
encountering glitches. Many supervising sound editors forgo the pitch-shift
altogether, preferring a certain pitch error to an uncertain artifact problem.
A classic no-win situation. If you do choose to pitch-shift, make a copy of
the print master prior to pitch correction. This will be your TV audio master,
which will of course run at 25 fps. There’s nothing dumber than starting
with a 25 fps master, pitching up for the fi lmprint, and then pitching down
for TV.
If your project is intended for 24 fps fi lm release, the head plop for each reel
will fall two frames later than you expect it to. If this is a TV-only project,
the plop will go at its normal place, two seconds before the beginning of
program.
Shooting Film and Recording Sound for PAL TV
It’s possible to shoot fi lm at 24 fps for 25-frame PAL television, but it’s not a
director’s fi rst choice. The 4 percent additional fi lm stock cost may not appeal
to producers, but the nasty PAL 24 → 25 frame speed adjustment or the
even more unseemly and noticeable bumps means that most PAL fi lm-fortelevision
productions are shot at 25 fps.
This is good news for the sound department, since it leaves little room for
silly mistakes down the production line. You’ll record at 48 kHz with EBU
25 fps timecode, and unlike its feature fi lm cousin, you can sync the sound
directly to the Betacam dailies so that everyone can hear the sync rushes. If
the picture department chooses to load the Avid with the sound from the
Beta telecine masters rather than from the original DATs, you’ll have to do a
PostConform (or equivalent) after picture editing, as the sound on the Beta
will result in a compromised OMF.