The dialogue edit is arguably one of the most important, if not the most important element of the overall soundtrack. Making sure it is audible, balanced with the atmos and SFX and in sync is absolutely crucial.
I took on the dialogue edit for Remember largely by myself, after having made sure prior to this that everything was in-sync with the picture.
There were two tools I used to complete the dialogue edit. The first in Izotope RX , and the second is Pro Tools built in 7-band EQ.
RX grants access to some incredible tools. The most important being the de-noise. By routing audio into de-noise, you are able to adjust the threshold and amount of reduction to eliminate any background noise. This means that your original recordings from location can be “rescued”, meaning that any ADR shouldn’t be required.
You can however push things too far, and totally destroy the original audio. To ensure we always had a copy just in case, the original dialogue recordings were left at the top of the session, and copied down into place before editing. That way, if we did use too much of the de-noise, we could delete the track and start again.
The second tool is the 7-band EQ. This was used almost globally, as a few mistakes whilst on location, be it not pointing the boom quite right, slightly off-mic speaking of talking straight down into the radio mic often meant that some of the dialogue takes had either a lot of low end or sometimes too much mid-range frequencies. The EQ meant that I could notch out certain frequencies to tidy up the dialogue. In most cases, a high-pass filter was enough to clean things up. In some cases though, more detailed EQ was required.
Another really useful tool for dialogue editing is RX Ambience Match. his is a really useful plugin to analyse a piece of audio, and return just the background noise. In some scenes of Remember, the de-noise couldn’t remove enough of the background noise before the dialogue started to become broken up. This meant that it was easier to add back in the background noise as an Atmos track to hide the noise in the location recordings.
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