The Editor's Blog

On Tuesday I began to receive the audio files of the actors performances from Patrick McCray – 10 tracks to date. 

The first task was to sit down and listen to all of the tracks to ensure that the takes were ‘clean’ enough to be used.  When I say ‘clean’ I mean that I check for things like background noise on the tracks, excessive hiss, problems with the mic set up, or things as simple as the performer moving positions during a take, sometimes this will have a contrasting effect on the quality of the recording or may affect the consistancy in of the sound levels of the performance. If I do find any, they are normally addressed through various methods such as noise reduction, hiss removal and adjusting the levels on part or all of the track to compensate. The worst case scenario is that the performer will be asked to retake the line as a pickup.  If this is necessary I normally add a ‘temp track’ to the multi track editor and color code it to ensure that I swap out the old track for a new one, enabling production to continue without having to wait around for the new lines to be taken.  Sometimes, I will use a temp track for lines that I don’t have yet from the performers, and this may require me to record a section of dialogue myself - if I do this, I try to pace the dialogue as I believe the performer would, so that the intended dialogue can be dropped in at that point without too much difficulty.

Once the ‘mastering’ process is complete, the tracks are then posted electronically to the editing team to be used within the production.

Stay tuned for more updates soon…