Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures

CHAPTER 12

Damage Repair

You’ve smoothed your scenes, and your dialogue tracks, although still unmixed, sound quieter and more pleasant. Your control over perspective has added new depth to the scenes, and it’s possible to hear nuance in your massaged tracks. What you probably don’t notice are the endless noises populating the recordings. Your brain wants to hear content, so it filters out most noises and leaves you with the relatively “low-baud” information: the words. So what’s the problem? After all, you understand everything.

You can hold a conversation at a loud dinner party or even in a dance club. Under such taxing conditions you lose nuance and perhaps a bit of information, but you usually figure out the missing words thanks to context. ...