Dialogue Editing for Video Productions - Part 1: The Challenges

In addition to recording singer-songwriters and composing music for audio visual projects I am often called upon to provide audio post-production work for independent video projects usually as the re-recording mixer or sound-designer; lately I have been involved with dialogue editing. While I have edited many vocal performances within songs, editing dialogue used in a film is something I have limited experience doing.

Independent videos that are low budget in nature often have poorly recorded production audio; the job of editing the dialogue tracks is most often an exercise of cleaning up the audio as best I can. Common challenges I have faced are:

• No room tones to help create seamless transitions between scenes or between different character shots in the same scene.
• No alternate takes to create clean, crisp lines of dialogue.
• Very low dialogue levels in relation to background sound and noise.
• Differing sonic-signatures between characters in the same scene.
• Distorted words and phrases.
• ADR dropped into messy production sound.

Each of these problems can create havoc for a dialogue editor trying to assemble a good dialogue track and it's very unlikely to get everything to sound perfect. Time and money just won't be there. Knowing what tools to use and how to treat each of these problems only comes through experience. All the tools in the world will not make up for experience; trust me.

One of the hardest things to accept is that you’re not going to get rid of or fix all the things that you think you need to, especially if you're stuck with less than ideal dialogue. The key is to do all you can to correct it but not make one scene perfect and the next not perfect. It'll be painful for the audience to keep adjusting to different amounts of problem. Once the audience adjusts to a given level of imperfection they'll accept it over the course of the picture much more readily than having to constantly re-adjust.

A layered approach works best: First pass make it sound okay. Next pass make it sound good. Next pass make it sound great.

My next posting I will talk about my approach to editing dialogue.