Preface

There are many books about film sound. There are books about sound theory and the role sound plays in a movie. There are practical books that teach you about sound editing, sound design, or sound equipment. There are books for film music composers or those who wish they were. And there are plenty of books about film sound theory. But you don't hear of many books about dialogue editing.

Every live-action film contains dialogue. Lots of it. After all, that's how most films tell their stories. When you, the dialogue editor, receive a film from the picture editor, the sound is a mess. It sounds bad, it's unorganized, it doesn't “act” like a movie. You have just a few weeks to untangle this mess, to create a believable cinematic flow, and to remove the artifacts of the filmmaking process. You have to fix what you can and rerecord the rest. During this short time that you work with a film's dialogue tracks, you must get to know them, cajole and seduce them, and get them to behave the way you want—this is dialogue editing.

This is a book for people who need to edit production sound for dramatic films but were never taught how to do it. Dialogue editing operates under a different set of rules than music editing or effects editing. There are some things you've simply got to know, but often there's no one to teach you the process. This book offers you that education.

Who Can Benefit from Reading This Book?

• Anyone who wants to edit dialogue tracks in a professional manner.
• Sound editors who want to better understand dialogue editing and how it fits in with the rest of the postproduction process.
• Dialogue editors who want to run a more organized cutting room.
• Film students and students of motion picture sound engineering.
• Picture editors and assistants.
• Anyone who sees dialogue editing as a boring, tedious chore and who could use a bit of inspiration.
• Amateur video enthusiasts who want their movies to sound better.
• Anyone who's wondered, “How do they do that?”

How a film was shot, recorded, and edited will dramatically influence the dialogue editing process. Much of this book, then, deals with things that at first glance don't appear to be dialogue. There's a lot of talk in this book about process—the overview of how things work. You'll find technical overviews of motion picture postproduction: Film, tape, Digital Cinema, and more. Since dialogue editors sit right in the middle of the film sound workflow, it's important that we know where our sounds—our babies— come from. So there are sections on location recording and picture editing. And, of course, you'll find the necessary techie stuff that makes all of this possible.

There's a lot of discussion about organization. If you keep your work organized, you stand a better chance of learning what the tracks are trying to tell you. A well-run dialogue editing room helps to make the process rewarding and fun rather than the dreary, repetitive, nerdy chore that some allege it to be. There's a section in this book that deals with managing your time and another about getting along with the picture department. Brilliant tracks and subtle manipulations aren't enough when you're miserably behind schedule or if you can't get what you need from the picture cutting room.

Film technique and technology developed together, and sometimes it's useful to understand how their intertwined stories brought us to where we are today. So throughout the book are short histories. These are meant to add some insight into today's way of doing things. However, if this isn't your thing, I've made it pretty easy for you to skip these sections and move on to matters more technical.

A Note about Word Choice

In an attempt to make this book as universal as possible, I've included English-language professional film terms used the world over. And in an attempt to be as fair as possible, I've used relatively interchangeable words, well, interchangeably. This is meant to prevent confusion, but like all good intentions, it may backfire.

For example, you'll find the terms “ADR,” “looping,” and “postsync” used almost indiscriminately. I do explain that looping is a specific process that is not the same as ADR (see Chapter 15). However, so many people use ADR, looping, and postsync interchangeably that once you know the difference between them, you might as well use the word that most easily rolls off your tongue and is acceptable to your colleagues.

You'll notice that I cavalierly exchange “sound designer” with “supervising sound editor” and “sound supervisor.” These titles do not mean the same thing, but depending on the crowd you run with, it is difficult to tell one term from the other. Out of fairness, I have sprinkled a bit of one term here and a bit of another term there. In general, I use supervising sound editor to describe the person in charge of a film's postproduction sound.

A “mix” and a “dub” are the same thing. From lifelong habit, I use mix, try though I do to be fair to the dub people. Practices vary by location, each film culture having its own system and terminology. The techniques and jargon described in this book have their roots in New York, but there's a smattering of Europe, Los Angeles, and the rest-of-the-world tossed in.

Avid's not the only picture editing workstation in the world. The professional film editing market is increasingly crowded, as Avid bumps elbows with Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro. Since it's silly to repeatedly write “Avid or Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro whatever else you use to cut picture,” I usually use Avid to mean “picture editing workstation.” Nothing personal, Apple and Adobe.

This book contains lots of screenshots. Although I've tried to be fair and show the workings of several audio workstations, the book is nonetheless very Pro Tools-centric. Examples must be described and shown on something, and Pro Tools' omnipresence makes it an obvious choice. Yet all this AvidSpeak isn't meant as an endorsement, and this is not a book about editing dialogue using Pro Tools products. The examples that specifically mention Pro Tools can be transferred easily to other workstations.

I've tossed around the terms “location mixer,” “sound mixer,” “location recordist,” and the like to mean “the person responsible for the location sound recording.” This rather clumsy randomizing of terms is due to two problems faced in writing a book like this. First, depending on where you live and how big your production is, a different term is used for the role. Second, wanting to keep you, the reader, on my side, I've generally tried to avoid gender-specific terms such as “soundman,” as well as assumptions about who does what on a sound crew. The English language doesn't offer elegant ways out of this pickle: He/she an awkward sentence stopper, and I'm not yet willing to accept “their” as a genderless option. So some of you may be put off, either by my goofy inconsistency or by my apparent unfairness. It's not that I didn't try.

Key Words

Every book like this has a glossary of relevant terms. There are many, many excellent books about film sound that offer outstanding definitions of “industry” terms, a few of which are cited at the beginning of the glossary. I won't try to top those. However, some words that apply specifically to dialogue editing are written in boldface when they first appear in the text. These words are defined or discussed in the glossary at the end of the book.

This book's objective is to tell you about those things you can't figure out on your own. Dialogue editing may be misunderstood, but it's not magic. If you stick to a few rules and don't lose sight of the needs of the film, you can create brilliant, interesting dialogue. This is a practical guide for getting the most from dialogue tracks, telling a story with production recordings, and making a huge invisible contribution to the narrative success of any film.

Appendices

Appendix A is an overview of the process of dialogue editing in outline form. At first glance, it may seem overwhelming with its many steps. However, as you learn more about the process of dialogue editing, you'll see the outline as more of a commonsense reminder than as an imposing mandate. Keep it handy when you edit dialogue.

Appendix B provides a suggested template for the dialogue tracks on a typical medium-sized film.