should i consider dubbing a whole feature with minimum dialog ?

My point was to show that though it can be done realistically, it takes a lot more time. And it also depends on your skill as an audio engineer, as well as the skill of the actor. My actor took waaaaaaayyy too long to get it. If you have your ducks in a row with equipment and skills, and you don't mind the extra time it can be done. But why you would plan to make more work for yourself when a well placed lav would solve the problem. You know you need a decent original vocal track to make VocAlign work. DSLR audio from 10 feet away will leave you scratching your head. Study vocalign and maybe test it before you do a real shoot.
 
Matt Harris said:
This might get your juices flowing to ADR:

My friend claims (said he saw it on a Blueray BTS) that James Cameron dubbed all the lines for his early movies (Terminator, Aliens etc.) because that's how he liked to work with his actors. I have since tried to find proof of this online but have found none.
Click to expand...

we gotta get this proved :)
interesting.
 
Chadfish said:
My point was to show that though it can be done realistically, it takes a lot more time. And it also depends on your skill as an audio engineer, as well as the skill of the actor. My actor took waaaaaaayyy too long to get it. If you have your ducks in a row with equipment and skills, and you don't mind the extra time it can be done. But why you would plan to make more work for yourself when a well placed lav would solve the problem. You know you need a decent original vocal track to make VocAlign work. DSLR audio from 10 feet away will leave you scratching your head. Study vocalign and maybe test it before you do a real shoot.
Click to expand...

the reason i was considering ADR in the first place was that i have the ability to spend time in editing and sound posting, even if it takes a year..
i just can't have the actual shooting take too long.
but nevertheless, getting excellent production sound can be very thrilling and fun to work with.
i'm sure all of you pro audio people are melting with enjoyment when you get sweet sound to work with.
 
Well you have the nfo now, so you'll do what you want with the knowledge of what it takes.

And I think Cameron may have dubbed Arnold because of his accent, but also a lot of his scenes have loud action going on, so that's where it's necessary. I do remember some early Arnold movie called Hercules or something, where they had to replace his lines with an American actor due to his terrible accent.
 
Chadfish said:
Well you have the nfo now, so you'll do what you want with the knowledge of what it takes.

And I think Cameron may have dubbed Arnold because of his accent, but also a lot of his scenes have loud action going on, so that's where it's necessary. I do remember some early Arnold movie called Hercules or something, where they had to replace his lines with an American actor due to his terrible accent.
Click to expand...

Anothe example is "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan" where all of Andie MacDowell's dia was re-voiced by Glenn Close.
 
roei z said:
we gotta get this proved :)
interesting.
Click to expand...

I sincerely doubt this is true.

As I mentioned before there are a few things that get confused. First films like the Spaghetti Westerns I mentioned had no ADR in them, they were dubed, it's not the same thing. Nobody expects lip sync in a dub.

Second a lot of the BIG ADR legends are actually about the amount of ADR recorded not the amount used.

I worked on Titanic and we recorded something like 95% of the dialog (actually because it was a longer cut when they shot the ADR it's probably more like 110%). But the amount USED was pretty small, say 20% - 30%. Cameron doesn't like ADR so I doubt that he deliberately used a lot on earlier films.

ADR is very rarely used as a choice. The big exception being that a lot of actors "singing" voices were replaced in musicals. That wasn't exactly a choice either since it was because they were lousy singers.

WElls european films were probably a case of dubbing rather than ADR. It's only ADR if you are rerecording the same words.

Casseveties films, if memory serves, sounded awful. But a lot were shot on 16mm and 16mm sounds awful and there isn't much you can do about it. It's a mono optical track with no noise reduction and an extremely limited bandwidth. And it's noisy as hell. But to quote a friend from theatre "that you can't fix becomes artistic choice".

The gist of the info on this thread is that if you are trying for the polished "Hollywood" style big screen sound ADR is a handicap that you should try to avoid. If your aiming at something else then YMMV. Certainly "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" would not have worked with smooth believable dubbing.
 
yeah I meant Cameron used ADR, not dubbed, bad choice of words on my part.

I think you should just do a 2 minute test of each. one where you shoot some actors and then go ADR it, then one where you record the sound correctly.
find out for yourself which you prefer.
 
Noiz2 said:
??? You mean Wells here?
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LOL, i think we're lost in translation. i don't know what you meant, or who Wells is, but the fact that you worked on Titanic, i thank you for posting about how Cameron works with sound. I can now tell my friend he was wrong. Unless he shows me the Blueray supporting his claims.
 
roei z said:
huh... found some clips on youtube.. now that i know it, she does seem pretty dubbed
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Hey Roei z,

You are getting some good advice in this thread. One of the things I do professionally for a living is ADR, so if you ever have any detailed, specific questions, I'd be glad to help.

I think the general gist of what most people are saying, which I agree with - is that you CAN do it all in ADR after the fact, but it's risky and takes a lot of work to do it properly....
 
"Mit out Sprechen!" was often written on slates and camera reports.

" Mit out Streudel " = only donuts and muffins available on the craft services table

Until recently, in Hong Kong, almost all movies were shot MOS for speed of camera set ups. The movie industry was considered so unimportant compared to normal commerce, sometimes it was hard to get a permit to close a street,etc. Even some elaborate car chases for major movies were shot without permits. And most of the action movies were going to be re-dubbed anyways in two or more Chinese dialects.
 
trickhog said:
Hey Roei z,

You are getting some good advice in this thread. One of the things I do professionally for a living is ADR, so if you ever have any detailed, specific questions, I'd be glad to help.

I think the general gist of what most people are saying, which I agree with - is that you CAN do it all in ADR after the fact, but it's risky and takes a lot of work to do it properly....
Click to expand...

danke. message recieved.
 
Oscar winner (1980) Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears was done with ADR, as were almost all big (and small) budget Soviet films.
 
after testing with the DR100 ADR seem like a lot less fun :)
getting production sound like this to work with is just heaven.
i'll try to avoid ADR unless i'll get faulty dialogs, and record all the set sounds and room tone i can for non dialog.
i just need some tips on recording ambiance and room tones. just use the shotgun ?
or use the DR100 mics (stereo? mono? )
the DR100 mics can be problematic, unless the DR100 body is standing untouched.
 
To get room tone, you just keep all the same mics you were using to catch the actors. You just want everyone to stand still and not make a sound while your mic is in the same place it was for dialogue. Try 30 seconds of tone, then you can loop that over and over as you need it. That way when you need to cut out some of the dialogue track you aren't left with an absolutely silent bit that sounds wrong. That's when you just drop in a few seconds of the room tone recording and it all blends nicely. It ain't rocket science. Pretty simple really.
 
roei z said:
after testing with the DR100 ADR seem like a lot less fun :)
getting production sound like this to work with is just heaven.
i'll try to avoid ADR unless i'll get faulty dialogs, and record all the set sounds and room tone i can for non dialog.
i just need some tips on recording ambiance and room tones. just use the shotgun ?
or use the DR100 mics (stereo? mono? )
the DR100 mics can be problematic, unless the DR100 body is standing untouched.
Click to expand...

Here's the thing about recording room-tone. Recording a couple minutes of tone between takes or after the final take is great (you should record it exactly the same way you record the takes - same mic, positioned the same way, to the same recorder) and it will match pretty closely. But often it doesn't match close enough, because during the actual take, machines are running (cameras, recorders, etc.) creating slight hums, actors are on the set and their bodies can change the acoustic environment, and the microphone(s) might be pointed in a different than during the actual take.

So more often than not, when trying to fix dia and/or making fill for ADRed lines, you end up trying to steal fill from within the take itself, because it matches perfectly. So one bit of advice I can give you -- after everyone is rolling and the camera is set, pause a few seconds before calling action, and/or at the end of a take, when the actors are done speaking, pause a few seconds before calling cut. Those few seconds of room-tone can be much more valuable to a sound editor than a room-tone track recorded after the fact.

But the room-tone track is nice to have, as well.
 
I would also strongly advise to record and use ambiences and backgrounds. RT is important but more for cleaning up the dialog than for anything else. Think about it, does your story take place on a film set? If not you should go and record the sounds of where the story does take place and add them into the sound track. RT alone will leave you with that thin "empty" low budget sound.
 
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