The most important goal of the dialogue editing is to help the film to use a clear and understandable language and to support the dramaturgy. In a complex and detail-intensive process, the dialogue is worked out from the original sounds, or if necessary replaced by voice dubbing. The work steps are:
- Checking production sound for technical defects and comprehensibility (so-called original sound check, sometimes with the mixing sound engineer in the presence of the director and ADR editor)
- Creation of the synchronization list based on the original sound check or the wishes of the director
- Cutting discrete sound clips to ensure clean, understandable dialogue, consistent levels and ambience coverage at all times.
- Exchange of technical defective or dramaturgically unsuitable sounds with alternative takes, ADR- or Foley recordings.
- Removal of external/obstructive noise: This can be a noisy environment, technical noise artifacts (undesired or extreme cloth rustling on lavs) or other external noise sources like car or aircraft pass-bys that ruins the take.
- Checking levels for a healthy structure taking into consideration the medium (TV is typically less dynamic than cinema), point of view of the actors in the scene and clarity of dialogue.
- EQing or filtering of excessive frequency content as preparation for a balanced mix.
- Sensible track distribution for the mix. All clips should be blended into each other with cross fades.
- Creation, mix and design evocative atmospheres for all positions in the film. We need to “bed” the dialogue into fitting ambiances to gain credibility, depth and to set the emotional tone in the mix of the film.
Now a quick overview of tools typically used in post production: Fades, EQ’s, declicker, decrackler, denoiser; deesser, etc.
- EQ: Correct excessive frequency content, match consecutive clips that differ in sound; Find and eliminate resonances and interference frequencies.
- De-clicker: Remove repeatedly or randomly appearing transient heavy noise artifacts.
- De-crackler: Get rid of a group of dense clicks (eg. crackles).
- De-noiser: Effectively remove disturbing static background noise without altering the foreground sounds like dialogue too much. Be careful of thin-sounding results of watery artifacts that typically appear when too much de-noising is applied.
- De-esser: make sounds sound less harsh, reduce sibilance in speech.
- De-Hum: Get rid of static low-frequency noise, typically coming from electrical devices as a result of bad grounding, weak electrical contacts, poorly isolated wires, increased electrical resistance, etc. There are two basic types of hum: Low harmonic or high harmonic noise.
- Low Harmonic hum: In the US (and in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, the Philippines and about half of Japan), electrical ground hum is around 60 Hz. In the EU (and rest of the world) its around 50 Hz.
- High Harmonic hum: RF-noise, complex electrical magnetic fields.
- De-rustle: Specialized tool to remove rusting noise. The problem with noise events that we would characterize as “rustling” (typical cloth rustling on lav mics), doesn’t have a specific nature, characteristics or even exact description. It consists of randomly appearing events that provoke excessive noise in a certain frequency area (it can be a fairly broad frequency area though). It’s a multi frequency dynamic type of noise.
- De-Plosive: Helps smoothen harsh and excessive plosive sounds and strong and abrupt air flows that hit the microphone membrane when pronouncing certain letters pretty close to the microphone.
Comments are closed.