Dialogue Editing

Cue Sheets (Rerecording Logs) 307
Cue Sheets (Rerecording Logs)
When fi lm sound was edited on mag, mixing was a very physical affair. The
day before the mix was scheduled, the sound “units”—roll after roll of mag
stripe and sound fi ll—arrived by truck. When it was time for a reel to be
mixed, the machine room crew threaded its sound units onto countless
dubbers. These were interlocked playback machines, controlled by the rerecording
mixer, that moved synchronously with the projector and were each
patched to a channel strip on the console. If you needed to change the sync
on one track, you could disengage the dubber holding that track, slip the sync,
and reengage.
Many facilities had controllers that allowed the mixer to slip the sync on
individual or groups of dubbers—all from the comfort of the mixing desk. If
an editorial problem spanning several tracks cropped up, the elements had
to be taken off the dubbers and either fi xed “on the bench” in the machine
room or sent back to the cutting room for repair. Given the hourly rate for a
mixing room, such scene overhauls were wretchedly expensive for the production
and humiliating for the editor.
In those days there were no visual cues to tell the mixer what to expect from
the scores of tracks playing in the back room, so the cue sheet, a matrix displaying
each track and its contents against time, was developed. (See Figure
17-1.)
For each track, a typical dialogue cue sheet will display an event’s start and
stop time, the cue name, including the character name, and often the fi rst and
last words spoken during the cue. This information allows an experienced
mixer to navigate through the morass of tracks you’ve presented. Track overlaps
are easy to spot, so the mixer knows how much time is available for
crossfades. ADR and alternate take options are clearly indicated.
Information-rich, easy-to-read cue sheets that show off their maker’s creative
fl air and aesthetic penchant have long been a source of pride for assistant
sound editors. Even when computer-generated cue sheets became available,
many crews turned to them only as a source of information, hand drawing
the fi nal versions for greater legibility. It took a long time for mixers to accept
cue sheets printed by computers.
Cue Sheets in the Digital Age
In today’s dialogue premixes, almost everyone plays mix tracks from a workstation.
There’s a monitor right in front of the editor and probably another in