CHAPTER 18

The Mix

A gymnast will spend years preparing for a 3-minute Olympic performance, a pianist will endure months of 12-hour practice sessions in preparation for a competition, and firemen repeatedly drill for something they hope will never happen. In comparison, dialogue editors have it pretty easy. Still, like the gymnast, for the past few weeks you’ve been preparing for one brief, intense experience: the dialogue premix.

Over the course of a few days, you’ll find out whether your editing decisions were sound and whether you constructed your tracks in such a way that the mixer (whom you may never have met) can quickly move beyond “making it less horrible” to using your work to breathe life into the film.

Each day during the premix, the ...

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