Dialogue Editing

38 A QUICK LOOK AT PICTURE EDITING
her. Typically, bins are organized by scene. To make editing easier, you can
add text descriptions of each take to the existing metadata. 3
The First Assembly
The picture editor screens and logs the shots. He then selects the shots that
best serve each moment of the scene to construct an assembly. This fi rst
assembly is often numbingly long, but it allows editor and director to see for
the fi rst time how the shots interact.
Nonlinear picture editing workstations like Avid and FCP allow endless versions
of scenes, so editors can easily play with the story, saving different
interpretations to present to the director. Such fl exibility comes at a cost:
Unmanaged, this wildly growing collection of versions becomes unwieldy.
To combat this disarray, editors and assistants apply standardized naming
schemes to the fi les. 4 So, for example, a fi le including the editor’s fi rst cut of
scenes 33 and 34 may be called “033-034 v100.” The second editor’s cut would
be “033-034 v101.” The “v101” tells you which screening the version relates
to. Typically, “100” denotes the editor’s cuts; “200,” the director’s cuts; and
“300,” later studio or public screening edits. Other editors rely on dates to
keep track of versions, since the Avid’s bin view is easily sorted by date. The
specifi cs of version codes vary by production, but there must always be a
means of knowing what the edit refers to. 5
Sound Enters the Picture
As the editor and director work to fi nd the story and eliminate narrative dead
ends, doing their best to hide bad acting and feature the good stuff, many
versions are created, all of which are logically (hopefully) logged and saved.
Often, an editor will add temp music and temp SFX to the Avid cut. Temp
music will almost never survive to the fi nal soundtrack, since few smallbudget
fi lms can afford John Williams or Led Zeppelin. It’s there to provide
3 These bins may later save your life. If for some reason you can’t access the original
sound rolls, you can create OMFs (Open Media Framework fi les) from the Avid bins that
contain all of the takes. From these OMF fi les you can create sessions and extract correctly
named soundfi les from them. It’s not the easiest procedure, for you or for the picture
department. But it’s good to know that this option exists.
4 This is the naming scheme discussed in The Film Editing Room Handbook, Third Edition,
by Norman Hollyn (Los Angeles: Lone Eagle Press, pp. 167–68).
5 Learn from this fi le-coding system. When you save versions of your work, apply a
meaningful name that refers to the tape version, the sequence number of your work, and/
or the date of the last edit. More about this in Chapter 6.