Preparing Production Audio in Feature Film Post

The most fundamental element in film audio is dialog. It’s all about the story. The evolution of film dialog has seen days of mixed production audio and ADR into complete ADR replacement of all production audio in effects-heavy movies (Star Wars, the prequel episodes, Lord of the Rings) and now into the return of more production sound as budgets shrink and camera equipment gets less noisy, etc.

Note Production audio is the term used in the film industry to denote audio that is recorded during filming (during production) as opposed to any audio recorded or created after filming has taken place. For the most part, this is limited to dialog recording.

When the dialog recorded during filming becomes unusable for any reason (too much background noise, a jet flies overhead, etc.), then a system known as Automated Dialog Replacement, or ADR, is used to re-record the actors in a studio environment as they say their lines while watching the film so as to mimic their performance.

There is a resurgence of the use of much of a film’s production dialog as location recorders improve in quality, mics get better, and the environment can be quieter when using smaller, digital cameras that make no film-handling noise.

With that in mind, dialog editing has become more a process of using a great deal of the production sound in a film. This usually requires that much of the ambience and background noise must be stripped out and the dialog isolated so that the sound designers can control and create all the background sounds.

Modern digital field recorders are capable of recording more tracks than ever, allowing the production sound crew to capture more sources than ever. In post-production, these extra channels must be combed through to find the best recordings of the dialog and retain them for the mix.

In the past, film mixers relied on sophisticated mixing consoles and automation to create a smooth dialog track for the movie. As DAWs have taken over the film sound industry, their mixing limitations have made it necessary to use a great deal of tracks to make it possible to mix a movie with the same level of control and detail possible in a traditional dubbing facility with a console.

Today, those limitations have been lifted by the state-of-the-art automation system implemented in Nuendo, allowing mixers to use the same techniques to create smooth dialog with fewer channels. We will talk about the automation system in Chapter 15, “Automation.” and Chapter 17, “Film Mixing.” But for now, this helps us outline a dialog editing scenario that is complementary to this ability.

Strip Out the Dialog

The first step is to strip out the dialog lines from all the background noises. You can use the detect silence feature, but often this is not sensitive enough to catch every detail. Going through the film with a script and manually editing all the dialog lines down is the best method.

The idea is to be left with nothing but the actual script lines and then rebuild all the nuance and details in sound design and foley work. This method gives you the power to overcome issues such as traffic noise and planes; anything that does not fall upon the actual dialog line is eliminated.

Organize Dialog by Characters

As you strip the dialog lines down, place them on a few tracks to provide mix control later. These could be mapped out like this:

Principal A. This is the star of the film. She gets her own special track.

Principal B. Another special track for the secondary character or co-star.

Principal C. This might not be necessary unless there is a strong supporting character or a true third main character in the film.

Support A. All of the rest of the dialog can be placed on this track.

Support B. Adding a second supporting dialog track allows some flexibility when several nonprincipal characters are in one scene, allowing you to go back and forth between Support A and B as needed.

This keeps things relatively simple for editing. During the mixing process, there are enough tracks that automation can be used to make all changes necessary to bring the dialog together into a smooth, cohesive track. Barring any extreme onscreen moves, all of these tracks will be heard primarily through the center channel of a 5.1 mix.

Note You could keep all of the remaining production audio on a separate track in case the director calls for something later or just for reference. This track can be disabled if not needed to avoid wasting CPU resources.

This is, of course, but one method of dialog editing, and each production will dictate how you should approach the dialog for that project. Episodic TV and reality TV will require a different methodology because the source material is much different and delivery schedules will warrant another approach. Happily, Nuendo gives you the tools to decide how you want to approach any film or video project.