Question about dialogue editing.

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ironpony

Carbonite Member
I read that if I have a line of dialogue that is distorted or it doesn't sound as good, that I should take the same line of dialogue from another take and substitute it. Which makes sense, but the thing is, is that the actors say their line of dialogue a little differently each time, which throws it off balance, with the mouth movements. Like if an actor takes half a second longer to say a certain word in a sentence, then it becomes out of sync. But I assume there is a way to fix that since it works for other movies? I am editing with Adobe Soundbooth. Thanks.
 
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One way is to substitute a shot of the other character reacting to the speech for the shot of the character who is speaking, ie, we see the face of character B reacting while hearing the voice of character A
 
It's very rare to be able to just import the sound from another take and find that it's in sync. Most of the time you only replace a few words, and if it's an entire line you have to manually change the tempo of the track by editing in it (different parts of the line can come from several different takes to match tempo, pitch etc). Here's a good article about dialogue editing from Jay Rose:
http://www.dplay.com/dv/0104edit/

He has also written a few books, and the one on post production has a chapter on dialogue editing. You can also look at the book "Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: A Guide to the Invisible Art" by John Purcell, that is very good but maybe a bit overkill if you just want to edit a few lines. For anyone doing dialogue editing for an entire project though, it's a very good read.
 
Is 100% of the line in question distorted? Or is it just a few words from it? You can try some noise reduction with iZotope RX and do multiple light passes of it. I've had some success with pitch shifting/time expansion (or compression) with alt takes to make it fit. That's my last option. If at all possible and if noise reduction can't fix it, then I'd do some ADR.

You can try VocAlign, but I know many people do it manually.
 
just a few words. I am new to this so I will read that article. I know I can cut to another actor but I feel I would have to do it perhaps too much in some lines.
 
ironpony said:
just a few words. I am new to this so I will read that article. I know I can cut to another actor but I feel I would have to do it perhaps too much in some lines.
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The article doesn't talk about noise reduction. It might be better to give iZotope RX 2 a shot. They have a demo period I believe. That way you can keep the performance and sync. How distorted is it?
 
You can use iZotope RX to possibly fix the clipping. I've had some nice results. Or you use an ADR plug-in like Voc-Align:

 
When you're shooting pix with dialogue, always include visual material for cutaways in cases where any speech has to be edited in some way. You'll see it on every TV news show.

PS when editing don't remove actors breaths or if necessary, leave space for a natural breath. That was a particular bug bear of an actress friend years ago .. she'd fume and call folk late at night, editors got scared of her.

Cheers.
 
I've had to cut up multiple takes, do some subtle time stretching or compressing, and some other magic to get things to work. It's not optimal, but it can work. I don't like being painted into a corner like that.
 
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