Dialogue Editing

166 NOW, THE ACTUAL EDITING
Figure 10-37 Complete tone fi ll for two noisy, nonmatching tracks (top). Filling offmic
sections will clean room tone and help with articulation, but it results in a
noisy scene. Volume automation (bottom) reduces noise buildup.
hear the room tone changes. At that point, back off a bit with the level
reduction.
Before all these automation gymnastics, talk to the rerecording mixer.
There’s a chance he won’t want you to automate the tracks in this way
but to do just the editing. Usually the mixer appreciates all this work—
if it’s done well. Sometimes, your efforts are met in the mix with “Get
rid of all this silly automation!” Find out what to do.
Two Acceptable Tracks—Which to Use?
Rarely in life are you saddled with too many good choices, but this dilemma
does occasionally appear in dialogue editing: You encounter a scene recorded
with a radio microphone and a boom and, amazingly, both sound pretty
good. Which one to use depends on your access to the rerecording mixer. If
you can play the scene to the mixer (or, barring that, to the supervising sound
editor), you can get an opinion as to which way to go. Some mixers will ask
you to fully prepare both tracks so that the choice can be made in the mix.
Others will leave the choice to you.
On zero-budget fi lms, I prefer to make the decision myself. If I’m familiar
with the way the mixer works, I’ll move the unused track—unedited—to a
junk track. If I don’t know the mixer, I’ll prepare the unused track (up to a
point) and then move it to junk. I remove the unused source from the active
dialogue tracks since I don’t want it brought into play unless we encounter a