Audio Post Production for Film 101 - Dialog Editing pt.1

hey guys it's tom thanks for tuning in for audio post production on this feature film or at least a scene from this feature film so in the first episode we covered session setup to include opening an aaf some of the field recorder guide track workflow it's always a mouthful as far as uh getting the original production sound synced up and even picking the mics and going through a little bit of session layout as far as splitting the audio by the the take and by the microphone so we do take for boom and mic for the labs this is just my way of doing it there's many ways to skin a cat and everybody will have their own way but to me this makes a lot of sense so we are going to get started today on the actual dialogue edit which is taking all these little pieces these cuts and making them seamless making it to where this whole scene plays front to back with no bumps and it just sounds like it really happened with all the mistakes removed so before we dive in this is something that will come up every step of the way story drives every decision so when you're making a decision or you're asking what do i do here you always come back to does this help or hurt the story because really it all starts on the page with the script from you know the idea coming to the shoot and the actors to the picture editing sound editing sound mix scoring all that stuff it's all about telling a story so that'll come up pretty much every step of the way now we've got our session here from the first episode and i've got my field recorder track up here let me make these a little bit bigger this will come in handy for if we need to go and check out any other mics i make a lot of mistakes you will too nobody's perfect and you might end up picking a mic to begin with and be like nah actually i need the lab for this or let's check the boom out so it's just nice to keep that i also use this as my work track and you see it's color coded red which is kind of like safety on a gun you know you don't want to have any edit up here this is just for working and for singing stuff up so we've got a dialogue one through six b dialogue one through six two two pfx two temp adr and two temp sound effects now i've saved this as my naming convention which is just tom b app aaf makes sense to me i'm going to save this as dialog edit and what's great about that is i can go back if i mess anything up and i need to backtrack i've got you know versions of each step along the way you can also do this some guys will do a backup every day or prefer versions based on you know a client tells you to try something different you do version one version two you do what works best for you because we're just working with one scene here i'm going to delete the b dialogue tracks just to make it easier to show you guys that's nice uh and then the other thing i'm gonna do is depending on whether i'm working on headphones or speakers speakers you can calibrate to 79 to 82 decibels headphones it's really hard to do that and it's also just hard to judge relative volume on headphones but i need to make sure that the dialog is at a at a level that is mix ready if it's too low the mixer is going to have to bring it up you know 10 to 20 db which sucks because that's you have to figure out do you do it on the clip gain do you do it on your makeup gain and your compressor you know how do you do that or if it's too hot then you know they're gonna have to globally bring everything down you want them to be able to play the tracks at zero with no volume automation and have them be pretty smooth that'll also help you make decisions on room tone level and clip gaining individual lines down or up depending on if they're yelling or whispering or whatever you have to do but it's important to have everything set up to where you know it's at the right level so i'm going to add a stereo master fader bam that's set to the same output as my tracks very important and then i'm going to add a metering plug-in if you have isotope you can use insight there's a free a free metering for loudness called julian you can check this out on our website julian loudness meter it's really nice costs zero dollars um and it's got different presets so i'm just gonna take this and check a section here to see hello it's me kitty the french alex is going to kill me if he finds out i called ranucci to make a deal i did it for my baby calm down don't tell me to calm down i got the hair away you got what the heroine who else knows eddie and now ranucci just bring it down here where's alex let jackie take care of it so that's just a little chunk you can see the integrated that you know this is the average it's pretty hot um but you know there's a lot of dynamics which we'll be smoothing out but it's not it's not so far off you know it's there and there's also a lot of raised voices and it's fine for them to be over i try to target the average to minus 27 i think when i play the whole scene back it'll be pretty close to that already which is great the recordist did a great job and we're already halfway there so we've got our loudness meter set up the other thing that helps to do if you haven't already go to preferences and go to the editing tab and look at your default fade settings so fade in i like to have set to equal gain just a nice straight linear curve up and for fade out i like to do the same and for crossfade i like to use instead of equal gain equal power this will help most room tones when you crossfade on the same track stay at their average level through the fade on some of the lower frequency room tones you will have to switch that to equal gain if it bumps over a fade and you hear the level go up change it to equal gain so those are set that's fine so because of the work we did in the first pass of picking the mics and putting them on their respective tracks with the wide shot being on track one alex coverage being on track two french jacks coverage being on track three so it's alpha and bravo and then we do have one charlie here which is a close-up that's on a separate track so you've got straight up a b c if there was a d you could keep going down and then we have five being french jack slav and six being alex's lav this will help us edit it's also going to really help the mix out because the mixer can just highlight an entire track for the duration of the scene get the settings punch them in which we'll get to on the mixing stage for now our first goal is just to fill and fade and make sure the edits are good so let's take a look at the top of the scene right off the bat here's the cut into the scene right there it's a dolly past the wall great transition and i like to do two frame cross fades over a scene break one frame at the beginning and one frame after the cut so two frames with the cut centered right in the middle so this up here this is a loop and that's been cut in now i have the 103 take 4 down on the pfx track because there's a nice lighter click there which is great but i can already hear the room tone difference between these two tracks so in alpha it's it's low and then straight up it's it's really loud makes sense boom's further away the recordist probably had the gain up to match the signal level but that creates a room tone difference that we need to correct with editing and clip gain and all kinds of stuff so i don't know if i like this sound here i'm going to mute this this loop that was cut in let's just see what's at the beginning of the take okay so that's why this was cut out and this tone was cut in by the picture editor there's the director and there's also a off-screen drawer slam we don't want those in there so we're going to need to find some tone let me just hit a on my keyboard to trim that garbage out of there and i'm going to control option click drag it up to my field recorder track which like i said i also use a work track because we've synced up the original production sound we've got access to the entire take it's about two minutes long so we can go in here and we're looking for stuff like this that's just a nice stretch of tone we only need three seconds and a couple frames so there's a shortcut that i like to use which is i highlight that region i hit command u which brings up the strip silence tool and now i bring the threshold up until it starts to trim out all the stuff i don't want which is going to be words and some breaths the tail end of this stuff it's going to keep in because i don't have any pads so just bring that pad up until it starts to cut out the tail you can change the duration too and it'll start trimming out shorter pieces i actually wonder why it's not trimming that out let me bring this threshold up a little bit more okay that's probably good okay so now that i've got that i can extract strip will take out all the silence but if you do extract it'll actually grab and keep the silence now here's a really cool trick so i've got these they're all spread out which i don't want what i can do is i can highlight them here and it'll highlight them here if i make sure in my clips this is set to timeline drop order left to right watch what happens when i drag these to my work track it creates a whole the whole the whole series of clips but they're all right next to each other so i can delete this i'm going to solo this field recorder track move my windows background and listen to this tone and see how much of it's usable okay so i can delete this piece probably want those breaths out of there there's a breath in here there's a breath here and i'm going to do tab and then control click to sync these slide these over there's some there's a breath in here don't want that and there's a breath here i'm going to cut that out so i hit a slide that back so that chunk right there is basically all we need i might need this later in the scene so i'm going to mute this and bring it to the head of the scene and if i need to edit it more i can but for now i'm just going to save it and use this section here and go like that do option command v to fill paste and look i even lucked out and got it right where it needs to go unmute it and listen to it let's see okay so i'm just doing some fades i'm going to move this one over a bit good that's a pretty seamless edit now i'm going to show you the wrong way to do this because that's to me the right way that's the old-fashioned way and what some people would do which i've seen in a couple tutorials is they'll be like oh i need this to be tone right here so let me go audio suite ambience match output ambience only learn render bam i'm done sign my check but listen to it it doesn't match it's got all the hiss in there and what i found with ambience match is nine times out of ten it doesn't work so i just go old-fashioned hunt for the tone keep some motion in there keeps the movement and the actors performance you know it's from a different part of the take but it just feels more natural one downside to that tone is it's got a little breath in it um which depending on how picky the m e process is they might flag it but generally they flag heavier efforts like labored breathing as hey you can't have that in your money little stuff like that is usually fine now at the end of the shot there's some swallowing so that works i think for french jack but then this stuff at the end is too much yeah that sounds almost like crew movement that's fine and i want to see so i've got a transition here from this wide shot audio which does play over his close-up it's totally fine to do that into alex medium close-up so let me see what's at the head of this take so i think i'm going to start the fade in on this here what i would normally do is highlight both of these the same length and hit f but because there's a cut in the middle you can't do that so what i'm going to have to do is make an edit here highlight this edited region and do option command g to group it and i can rename this if i want uh maybe i'll just rename this tone so now i'm going to park the cursor here hit tab shift click to park it on these two tracks combined shift tab and f that'll create my default fades across these two regions so now we can hear what the transition sounds like it's pretty good this tone is obviously louder so i have to decide am i going to bring this down am i going to bring this up what's the fix for this i'm going to bring this down that way we're starting the scene off with that at minus three see if that fixes the problem it's pretty good you can still hear a little bit of a drop but it's pretty subtle but the nice thing about having everything laid out on tracks like this okay i brought this down three so this up here is the same take this is our wide shot this is our wide shot it's just on pfx to make the m e easier so i brought this down three i can do this for the whole take now that whole take should be better balanced with the other coverage let's keep going so i see there's a cut here i don't know why but i'll do a cross fade so this is an example of where the tone bumps and it's hard to hear it when it's short but if it's longer you'll hear it better hear how the tone went up that's because this is in phase with this so where you cross fade it is bringing that transition up so it's a great place to use an equal gain fade now it's better okay there is a location change here let's make sure that's where the edit is so now i'm going to do fade i'm using the smart tool so top of the region gets your fade so i brought that fade over two frames and then nudge it over one frame make sure your nudge here is set to one for to use this technique and i'll do the same with this scene making sure that the midpoint of the fade is right over the cut okay and i need to do the same with this this sound yeah it's super noisy there's some hum and it's way off mic but i don't need to deal with that right now i'm just i'm just trying to get things smooth filled and faded where there's no gaps and no bumps i've got two tracks here i've got french jack his lav luckily it's labeled from the field recorder and i've got the boom so let me listen to this lav it's really not much useful in there except for this so i'm going to trim it and fade it so a is to trim ahead of the cursor s is to trim behind it and then fade i really just need that breath and then do two frames there move it over to where the fade is right on over that cut and let me mute these temp sound effects now there's all kinds of nasty stuff in here but i am not worried about that right now that'll come on my second pass i just want to get everything smooth and filled out this cut here i don't know if i want that throat noise it doesn't really match anything let's see what this is and there's a shoe squeak in here dolly grips man they're always moving around so i need a little piece of fill for that so i'm going to control option drag it up try to find something that looks a little bit like that command t to trim it bring it back down i want to keep not that that's the shoe squeak i want to keep this inhale here that is going to lead into his line really nicely so let's try that and there's a little something that's bad what is it it's okay it's in here there's a little breath so i know there's tone on either side of this so i'm going to do control and then minus or plus actually to slip the content in this region i can see right here there's something i don't want there's a click in there and there's a a swallow too that might be okay though you should have seen that i think that's okay you should have seen that french fox face explode come on jack pick up okay let's look at where this cut happens that's already lined up so two frames nudge it one frame over but we've got a prelap here which is where the audio comes in before the cut and we've got two layers this top layer is just footsteps come on jack pick up and that's the really grimy temp adr on jack pick up so i'm gonna fade in on that breath i'm gonna try to do the same with the footsteps on the back side of the cut that should be a hard cut so i'm gonna do f and then right arrow to nudge it over explode come on jack pick up explode load so there's an issue here the t the d of his explode is right over the sea of her come on face explode come on jack pick up now obviously the editor spent a long time on this and we don't want to just destroy their work but moving something a couple frames that's two three four if there's no sync you know because we don't see your face and it helps the timing go for it face explode come on jack pick up let's do two more frames explode come on jack pick up all right that lets him finish and it lets her start clean his face explode come on jack pick up it's a better rhythm too so here we've got our first example of really where there's strong signal on the boom and on the lav and the reason i picked the lav and boom here the boom sounds like this you're playing with fire you're playing with fire so on fire he starts to go a little bit off mike you're playing with fire and the lav is you know doesn't change position so it stays the same i'm going to do control shift and scroll wheel up because i can hear that this is is pretty low so to make any kind of decisions we really need to have them be close to the same level you're playing with fire so now the issue is that there's some phase cancelling going on and it's most people wouldn't probably notice it but you have to fix it so to start with i'm going to do fade and nudge it over so that the edit happens where it needs to and there's a hard way and an easy way to do this so the hard way to do this is make sure your nudge value instead of being a frame is set to one subframe and highlight the audio that you want to shift i will normally use the boom as the reference so i don't move the boom because even though it's it's just a slight amount of difference i do like the fact that the boom is usually matching the camera angle and so there's there could be actually a delay from the boom and um the labs just because of physical distance and the sound having to travel further and i kind of like i think that's cool i always like when i see the lightning flash and then hear the thunder in a film not right synced up because that's real life so i'm gonna i'm gonna nudge this live mic over and if i zoom back in on the waveform highlight and then do control plus sorry control minus just to try and get these peaks and valleys to line up so right about that looks pretty dang close and the way to tell us just to listen you're playing with fire so it's good until he says fire and that's because he's moving so it is a it's a dynamic phase shift and this is why the hard way can be really hard because then you've got to go in and make cuts to try and try and fix that so this needs to go boy this is okay this needs to go the other way try that seems good yeah so just imagine doing this for a hundred minute feature this is why it used to be kind of a no-no to use the boom and lab at the same time i only made one cut we'll see nice thing it's it's on an f f's you can kind of cut wherever you want you're playing with fire all right that's pretty good you're playing with fire so that's the hard way the easy way let me put this back where it was the easy way is to use a tool called auto align post this will automatically do this for you at the click for button you just set up where do you want it to use the sync reference i will always set that to my work track because i know i got to put stuff on there for this to work it's not just going to grab the wrong mic i will control option drag up the boom so now i've got a region on there this is going to go into this plugin then you just click render if i zoom in you'll see the change if i hit undo okay so this is the affected result and there's the original so it at the click of a button has fixed the phase for me i'm going to delete what's on my work track and listen to it you're playing with fire bam basically the same as what i did just a lot faster don't forget to change your nudge back to frames and i'm gonna get out of his lav a little bit early okay so we're going from his shot to the wide let's see what this is the basic rule with editing within a scene is that you don't want to have your cuts where the camera cuts are that's where you start to hear the seams of the edits that's a nice scrape there but those are more resolute so we'll keep those another great trick for cutting is using sounds spiky transient sounds to motivate a cut so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to park the cursor right before the transient in this footstep and then trim this audio file before his footstep we don't want any traveling violations you're playing with fire it's always an easier cut you're playing with fire hello it's me kitty so let's figure out where there's the picture cut now this one is good to land on the picture cut because it's a different location so we got a couple options here with his hello hello we could let it ring out in the room and just count it as a creative choice hello or we could put it on a futz track so i'm gonna hit command e to make an edit there and this is where the default fades really help so i did an equal power fade there and now when i drag this down to a fuzz track it keeps my two frame crossfade right there let's see how this sounds with him over the phone now hello it's me i kind of like that hello it's me so having him be on the futz track instead of finishing on his regular dialogue track we'll just add a little bit of texture to this cut and i i think it'll work hello it's me kitty the french now here they cut out of her temp adr could be they just didn't care but i'm gonna fix it that breath is okay there is an inhale though which i don't want it starts right there i don't need much like two frames okay hello it's me kitty the friend now this is a this is an example where story will drive the decision so i'm just gonna stop editing play ahead just a little bit french alex is gonna kill me if he finds out i called ranucci to make a deal i did it for my baby so let me make this bigger so you can see this bench alex is gonna kill me if he finds out i called ranucci to make a deal okay so he's he's quieting him down he's telling him to stfu with his hand here so we maybe don't want to have alex voice futs through the phone so even though we did it here story wise it makes sense that she is not able to hear him that might affect this we might decide to put that back on the regular dialogue track and take it off the futz track but that's something that it's always good to run that by the director and see what they think hey kitty but for now all i'm gonna do because this is another pre-lap kitty is i think i can fade up on that breath since she's finishing her line me kitty the french alex is gonna kill me if you find okay right here we've got kitty who's the the girlfriend on the phone she's talking to french jack over the phone now they had to cut this out probably because somebody's reading it or they didn't want oh take a breath calm down okay so they just wanted to add some time here that's why they cut to alec give her time to speak so let's start with editing just her phone call audio okay so this i did a little different i edited instead of linearly just going through frame by frame i did it uh like one side of the conversation the reason i did that is because there's some holes we'll need to fill right here the french alex is gonna kill me if he finds out so like here i called ranucci to make a deal okay they cut the production sound out because they added some time here and they didn't cut in any sound from this shot because it's probably french jack talking so we need to find i could easily plug this in this this will work the problem with it is it's it's boring there's nothing going on so that has some phone handling in it the cool thing about this is it there's no script supervisor reading the off camera lines oh there we go that's the piece we need so i'm going to do command t because i found found the piece that i need this was the phone handling the cool thing about finding something like this for the production effects i could cut it on the dialog tracks but the mixer might not want it so i'm going to put on pfx and i'm going to turn it down about 6 db from where it naturally would sit reason for that is i don't want this tone to add up with whatever tone i've got here oh take a breath oh that's a continuity error oh he's got his foot up there i've never noticed that before that's funny he puts his foot up here so we definitely don't want the sound of his foot landing if he does it twice if he finds out i called ranucci to make a deal i did it for my baby calm down don't tell me to calm down okay so that's all we really needed for that it's important to solo each side of something like this to make sure this isn't masking this calm down another whole crying about abortion yeah something like that okay now we're into the second part of the scene another whole crying about abortion issue with this is alec is off mic and it's something that i didn't catch when i was getting the mics so let's here it is lab sounds like another hoe crying about abortion it's actually pretty damn good it'll also help us with our tone disparity because we won't have to crank this up to hear the line and then have the tone go up with it so we will have to align this since i'm fairly lazy that's still set on auto align post i will hit render bam still got some handles to work with get the out of here it's definitely out of sync before we start making any sync decisions because there were a couple clips that looked out of sync to me i just wanted to go over this app called catch and sync by quiet art and uh you can check this out i i don't remember if it's for android 2 but you can watch their how-to videos on how to use it but you really need to check your system delay in order to figure out what to set your video sync offset to and i've measured mine at 10 quarter frames this will change based on a you know where i'm working if i'm in a dub stage or this theater that i mix out of it's a totally different setting take just a couple minutes to make sure that your sink is offset properly it'll change based on even the video type that you're using and just having that peace of mind that like yeah my system is locked it's in sync will make it to where you're not second guessing you know if it's your system or if it's the actual audio that's out of sync so the first thing to properly sync this up luckily we've got a b so there's somewhat of a hard sync point we need to find the part where his lips separate okay so right there so this should really be the b so i dropped a marker called it b and now i'm going to make this smaller again and look at the waveform here i got this so your mouth makes noise when your lips are open so the b is right about there so that is for measuring it five frames so this needs to go five frames to the left two three four five let's see how that looks get the out of here i got business to handle damn we're in sync so it's if you have a b or a p it's really easy to eyeball sync it but if you don't it's a lot harder it'll be better to fill this track than this track because we've already got a nice hard start on this one which will trick people into thinking that there's no edit there so i'm going to see what i can find if i drag this handle out there's the breath we want to get rid of some nice breathing there it's also nice because it's from alex perspective it's his shot so it'll keep a little bit more of him through this cut so it doesn't just fall off when we cut away from it we need the t on tonight if it's there i it's not there that cuts a little sudden so i'm going to make that fade longer get the out of here that seems pretty good night get the out of here i got business to handle [Music] and that's cool so this was something that isn't in the guide track you can see it up here him hitting the ashtray but it just glues that shot to the next one by carrying the sound over so we'll keep that we do have to be a little careful about room tone build up so i will do my equal power fade it's the handle [Music] well by dropping the money off that's the ball so here's another example of where we need to align this so i'm going to drag the boom up highlight the lav hit render desktop desktop i could probably bring that down a little bit since he's off camera yeah and don't forget to delete the boom off that's the mom i could watch it keep going there's a sharp cut so we can't have his off mic laugh but we can't have that guard guard let's try our equal power actually keep going i got my muscle watching it all night long still feels a little abrupt so i'm gonna take some of this breathing all right if i do that i can go down here and use that transient as a cut point i can watch it i almost made a mistake here so this is fading out before the new track comes in and you need to keep it going right up until this is at full volume i could watch it keep going i got my muscle watching it all night long besides i don't want junkies watching my cash this i think i'll keep his heavier breathing on the shot and just let this fade out underneath it that's my cash my cash my cash does mask his cash a little bit my cash to my cache like you don't use that seems to work pretty good you don't use don't use so i could just cut on the s or i could fill it out a little more that'll make it to where this edit i can play around with differently another great transient there the cigarette inhale that crack that will kill you this cut actually works without a fade we're gonna do a fade but it's just always a good sign when it works without a fade that shit'll kill you oh bad tom there's just the clip end of a word on this cut since i have that on pfx so if i park the cursor on both tracks and hit s it'll just slide that edit right over i should really using the p key go up to this track do the same that way the edits match i'm going i think this is just extra stuff no it's it's from the same take it might just be a different spot i don't know let me try it without this going i will try to just bring it down that's fine yo good night jack get out of here junkie so using two labs [Music] yeah first of all yeah i think this is just cut because the editor used the mix track and they wanted to clip gain it it's all one shot i'm going to copy the boom up to my work track highlight both of the labs grab my auto line post hit render delete off my work track yo good night jack there's some nasties in here yo good night jack but again we're leaving that for later get out of here get out of here i'm gonna do an equal power fade here there's some clicks in here off to clean out eventually get out might be able to actually roll this edit over get out of here junkie and i'm going to let his instead of cutting his lab short since it's the end of the scene and there's some nice scrapy footsteps in there i'm going to keep it live that way the tone doesn't shift

Channel: Thomas Boykin

Views: 17,776

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Id: v4M0Y4dUfXw

Length: 45min 2sec (2702 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021