Editing technique for multi-track dialogue sequence

C

chabashvili

New member
Hi Guys,

I'm editing the sound at this stage. I have several tracks of dialogue from one scene, one mic per each actor, total of 4. I have good sound per each track, but still there is a difference between the ambient sounds (hiss, and room tone) per each mic. My question is following:

1. What is a general technique of working with audio from one scene but having different tracks per each actor? Should I stack them together and leave all four on or should I leave only the tracks that correspond to the actor talking at the certain time?

2. What are techniques to minimize the ambient noise difference between the mics? Is this a job to be done in post, or my sound recorder just got little lazy?

3. What is a general rule for sound levels for dialogue, ambient tracks and music tracks for film? Or you just leave it when it sound good?

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Cheers, David
 
First head over to
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?174562-Compilation-of-Post-Audio-Information
and "all will be revealed".

The "right" way to do it is to track each actor on their own track and cut out everybody but them on their track.

Take their room tone and fill it in so each track plays smoothly with out jumps and hiccups.

This is your Dialog sub group.

You then will add to the project background tracks , and SFX tracks, and Foley tracks, and maybe ADR tracks, and finally music tracks.

In the mix you are going to fade down unused dialog tracks so your over all noise is as even as possible. That is all going to get masked by your background tracks, etc.

In the no-budget world you are going to split out tracks as above clone and mute them (so you can go back) and only fill holes IN lines and not all the space when someone else is talking. You are going to do some noise reduction to minimise the BG noise in each clip, and maybe add some Noise Reduced room tone if a hole is obvious.

You will do the background tracks as above and at that point you shouldn't notice any editing i the dialog. If something stands out you may have to add some RT to smooth things out but generally after some light NR on the dialog the BG tracks will mask all the edits.

No your production mixer was probably not lazy. Mics with different placements in different places in a scene are going to pick up different stuff. If one is really bad maybe, but if they are just different that is normal.

You don't want them all playing because you will get a phasey echoey sound because of the distances between the mics. Plus you are don't want all the noise from all the tracks all the time. Sometimes you really need to have the overlap because they are talking on top of each other and you really can't pull them apart. But do that as little as possible.
 
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