The Facts

I've been working on the score and sound design for a new movie made in HK and NYC. The scoring process was relatively painless, but the sound design and dialogue editing has been challenging.

The production track on-the-whole has been great but there were a few scenes with loud aircon and off axis mics..
I am writing this to remind myself in the future, that dialogue editing is EVERYTHING!!

It's vital to review the footage yourself and try to dialogue edit it to get a feel of the production track... then you know that it will be okay, or LOOPED!

There are some scenes that have a great deal of background noise that no amount of de-noising or EQ will solve.

Challenges

We had a lot of re-syncs to do due to edit changes. The edit changes were necessary, and they have improved the picture. But these changes lead to a number of difficulties.

 Re-syncing a movie takes a LONG time. Once the movie ahs been re-cut , often EQ is needed to blend in with the new edits.
Imagine doing this five or six times, Aalittle bit more EQ here and there and soon your dialogue track sounds rubbish! over-processed. It's hard to tell when you've been listening to it for ages.. your brina actually makes it sound acceptable!

The guy I'm working with as the main sound editor has done a great job, but his working style is a bit disorganized.

It's very hard to find files and we have spent up to 1 hour searching for work in the past! It would seem to me that organizing your files is a given thing, especially on a tight schedule.....Which it is always a tight schedule!

Solutions

Dialogue edit WELL at the beginning and give this smoothed dialogue to the Assistant Editor to sync with the edit. GET YOUR ADR SORTED EARLY while the actors are still in town. Output OMF so they can import and we still have handles to work with when they change the edit.

This takes time but in the long-run it will saves loads of headaches.

There will be more work on the film, 5.1 surround mix - extra music, DVD extras.. a great deal of work to be done!

I have learned a MASSIVE amount from this project. I am very grateful to the producers and director for getting me involved.

It's stressful, yes, but very rewareing.. Can't wait to see it on a big screen!!