144 Hours

Having just finished John Purcell's wonderful book on dialog editing I've come to a thinking. Suchwise:

I think the fundamental difference between the way dialog is edited on big features and the way we have to do it is that on big movies the M & E's come second, with the English-language mix coming first.
We really can't afford to work that way. Our M & E's have to really and truly sound just like the English language full mix -- just without any actual dialog in them. And they are a first deliverable, not something we can wait on if and when more money mysteriously arrives.

So for us doing a dialog edit is really doing the prepping for the Music and Effects mix.
What this basically means is that the dialog tracks themselves get stripped and noise-reduced down to their barest elements. Ruthlessly so.
See, normally a dialog editor works on making a smooth dialog track by fading in and out of each microphone, and leaving the tone up between pieces of dialog so the scene has no jarring cuts of background tone coming in and out.

Big crossfades between dialog tracks are fine, but how do you build an M & E out of this?

Then they fill the spots in-between with room tone.
This doesn't work for me. Why? Because what happens when you mute those dialog tracks?
The scene's audio disappears. All you have left is your Foley and any sound effects you've cut in.
Now, there's a thing called the P-FX track. That's where you put all your production sound effects which the mixer may or may not use.
But the fact is we can't deal with waiting around to try to figure out how to make the mix work without the dialog after the fact.
So what I say is:
1. Strip that dialog clean with dead-on noise reduction and then add room tone to the entire scene.
2. Those "PFX" tracks? turn them into actual effects tracks. Make a decision then and there (during the dialog edit) what production sounds are going to be sound effects in the movie. Drag those production effects down to one of your sound effects tracks.
3. If you're going to use room tone from the actual scene and loop it, that's fine. Just deal with it right then.
4. Now, during the dialog edit, you need to decide on sound effects during the scene in order to make the scene work. Why? Because some of those sound effects will have to sit on top of the dialog. In order to know if your M & E's will actually work you have to deal with that immediately.
5. The PFX track gets a new function -- it (or they) is/are muted while running off the full English mix. This is because the only thing on the PFX track are sound effects which take place right on top of dialog where the dialog track already has the effect on it.
For instance, if you're happy with a line of dialog where the actor says his line but also scuffs his shoe at the same time, you'll need to put another "clean" shoe scuff at the same place on the PFX track. This way when you mute the dialog tracks and unmute the PFX track, the scuff will appear in the same place, just without any dialog over it.
Obviously this isn't the ideal way to handle dialog tracks so I try not to use any of these kinds of PFX tracks if I can help it.

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As unbelievable as it may sound to someone who has no idea what I'm talking about, the above system actually does make sense. But what it means is that the person doing the dialog edit on a reel is also making sound effects decisions on that same reel. Because every edit in the dialog requires a careful consideration of the Music and Effects tracks (well, really just the Effects tracks).
This means that a "dialog editor" has to have a bank of sound effects available. They have to have a sampler and a keyboard available. They probably need to have a recording booth available. All to do the "dialog" edit.
Are there effects that can be done as a "second pass" or by another person at another time? Yes. Yes there are.
For instance, any noises created by a CG element like a dinosaur or robot can be presumed to not exist on the dialog tracks so one need not worry about them while preparing the dialog tracks.
Footsteps which don't exist in the production tracks (especially in scenes which were shot MOS.)

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So, how many hours should this take? I'm glad you asked. The answer is 144 hours.
That's three days for all the dialog editing (including ADR), all the sound effects (including Foley), on each 10-minute reel for a 90-minute movie. Some reels will take a bit longer, some a bit shorter. And of course you'll schedule your ADR to happen in chunks so you will be spreading the ADR recording over a few weeks. But basically? 144 hours.

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Me? I'm gonna write all of this up and put it in our Wiki.
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ADR

We had a couple noisy locations on this picture and there really wasn't any option other than some ADR to deal with them.

Sarah Schoofs doing ADR in the studio.

 I've been using an Oktava 012 microphone -- the same we'd be using on set (except that this movie was almost completely recorded with wireless lavalier microphones). And there's a bit of distance on the mic (you can't even see it in the picture above.)
It seems that for most people, seeing the picture while they record isn't terribly helpful. So we've abandoned having a picture monitor in the booth. I'll play the line three times and then go into record. No bloops or leader or anything.
I think this makes it easier. You just need to memorize the cadence of the original and you're not distracted by picture.
I do try to line up each line for sync immediately after they record the line. Just to, you know, make sure.
There's a standard impulse response in Samplitude -- a 1.1 second "garage" reverb. I've been using that to give a bit of controlled distance and room on the ADR. Honestly I've lost all perspective -- literally and figuratively -- but it seems like the right sort of sound for ADR. The tail of the reverb doesn't do weird things the way the tail of a reverb which is more appropriate for (say) guitars and pianos would be.
We have two more actors we need ADR from. And then (hopefully) we will deliver final picture.

CALM Down

You are utterly fascinated by relative broadcast levels of dialog, aren't you? Yes. Yes you are. 

The Angry Sound Professional explains the CALM act and what it really means. Here's part 1.

We used to have one of these jackets. It was stolen out of my car. 

In part 2 we go deeper into the meaning of dialnorm as Vince Tennant explains how the Act works. I suspect that part 3 will show how the act doesn't work but we're still waiting.

Dialnorm

Dialnorm is like a briefcase full of bunnies. 

You are having trouble with Dialnorm, aren't you? Yes. You are. You're mixing for TV broadcast and you have questions about these new silly standards. You say "why can't we just make sure our peaks don't go above 0dBfs and be done with it?" Silly girl, you can't do that.

So... dialnorm. The idea is that we want to have all the dialog levels be the same across all kinds of television programs and stations.

Here's a thread about it.

Dialnorm is just the averaged perceived loudness over the course of the program. Dolby later refined their measurement method with the "Dialogue Intelligence" algorithm, but every program, with dialogue or not, has a perceived loudness.
You can use Audioleak to find the A-weighted Leq. This will be your dialnorm.

You want to know what LAeq is, don't you? Heck, Answers.com even has an answer:

LAeq is pressure level measurement parameter. Full form of LAeq is " Equivalent continuous A-weighted sound pressure level". It is widely used around the world as an index for noise.L_Aeq = 10*log[1/(t₂-t₁) * Integration of (P²_A/P²₀) between interval [t₁ t₂]]
where
L_Aeq = equivalent continuous A-weighted sound pressure level [dB]
p₀ = reference pressure level = 20µPa
p_A= A-weighted pressure [Pa]
t₁ = start time for measurement [s]
t₂ = end time for measurement [s]

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_a_LAeq#ixzz1HWm0D8BO

None of that is particularly helpful, is it now? No. It isn't. I tend to mix my dialog slammed into hard multi-band limiters peaking at about -12dB FS. The real question is where is the average level in the program? And that isn't something I bother to measure. I'm not saying it's good that I don't measure it. I'm just saying we don't do that here.

DM&E on Rye

Every filmmaker I know (who has had at least one movie get distribution) has had to turn into a sound mixer at some point because they've had to deal with splitting out DM&E's or "Dialog, Music, and Effects" tracks.
Creating DM&E's is fantastically annoying and difficult. The trick is that you have to deliver music and effects tracks which sound just like the full mix but without dialog. You'd think "Well then I just put dialog on the first four tracks in my digital audio editing program and then I run off a copy with those tracks muted and that'll create my M&E's."
You can think that, but you'll end up being surprised at just how many extraneous sounds are on those original dialog tracks. Sounds you can hear in the full English mix.
So you have to do a lot of: foley, creating new hard effects to mix on top of the sounds already there, and/or creating identical sounds and putting them on a track on your audio editing/mixing program which is muted during the roll off of the English mix and unmuted when you roll off the "M&E".
But the worst worst worst mistake you could make is to accidentally leave a piece of dialog in the M&E tracks. Because although a distributor in a non-English speaking company might forgive that the M&E tracks are missing the sound of a scrape of a shoe or a crumple of paper under the English mix, they will not be able to deal with the wrong language suddenly showing up in their dubbed version of the movie.
So today I'll be listening to the DM&E's of all of Day 2. Lucky me!

Speaking of Day 2, here's a longer trailer for a picture which is similar (The Battle of Los Angeles -- I posted a previous trailer earlier). The movie looks great. I think our picture has a better idea though, but of course I'm prejudiced.