Dialogue Editing

114 GETTING STARTED ON DIALOGUE EDITING
Figure 9-5 Delete one side of the dual mono pairs. At this point leave both
channels of the split track pair intact, even if one side is unacceptable.
Russian Ark, you’ll know the boundaries of a scene when you see them. If
you’re not sure when a scene changes, talk to the director or the supervising
sound editor (you may think it impossible not to know when a scene changes,
but some transitions are ambiguous and need to be addressed).
Dialogue editors have a special relationship with scenes, for within their
confi nes we try to make everything seem continuous, smooth, and believable.
At their edges, however, we usually want to slap the viewers a bit to tell them
that something new is happening. As a result, scene changes are almost
always quick and at times brutal. Mark scene boundaries before you begin
editing and your work will be much simpler.
Breaking the fi lm into scenes helps to organize the work and it gives
all of the editors a standard vocabulary when discussing the fi lm.
Mark scenes before you begin editing and you needn’t hunt around
for the right frame of the scene boundary while you’re passionately
editing. You can keep up a good creative pace.
Before you begin editing, the scene changes in your OMF will
probably be hard cuts, centered on the transition and easy to spot.
But as you edit and create crossfades, you’ll lose the location of the
original edit unless you marked it with a memory marker.
Markers make it easier to apply standard scene transition durations
(1 frame, 2 frames, etc.), since you have a reference around which to
build your crossfades.