Sound Advice: Slick Tricks (page 2)

It's relatively easy to edit dialog and narration, removing bits and pieces to tighten a performance. But how do you make a character or narrator say something you never recorded? In scene #144 from Breaking Ten, we had that exact problem. Two characters are talking on the phone, but the caller never greeted the other person. The only way to fix this error was to create the dialog from other bits of his performance. Since the segment was short and the caller could be off-camera, it seemed easy enough. Unfortunately, that two-second audio clip took almost an hour to assemble, edit and massage. Start by timing the empty section, and then go through the recorded performances to find individual words or phrases that can be repurposed. You can do a rough edit of the new dialog in your video editing software and export the audio to your audio editing software. Now the fun starts. The perception of natural speech is a combination of pacing and inflection. In some cases, pacing can be accomplished by tight editing of the dialog. But if you study the flow of the talent's speech patterns, you'll find some words are slurred together, and sometimes certain vowels and consonants are glossed over. Simulating these patterns requires some work. In a multitrack audio environment, you can put each word on its own track, shifting them until they flow properly. Inflection is tougher. To create the proper rise and fall of a person's voice, you can apply some pitch shifting to words. Audition offers both static and progressive pitch shifting, allowing you to set start and end pitches. Another alternative is a pitch correction plugin. These beauties let you draw the desired pitch changes over time. In any case, it's a challenge and the results may not be perfect, but it's cheaper and easier than a reshoot.

After a little time and practice, these techniques will become standard tools in your box. Just keep telling yourself, "this was impossible ten years ago," and now you can easily do it in your living room.

Contributing Editor Hal Robertson is a digital media producer and technology consultant.

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