Hey guys, I’ve been cleaning up some of the dialogue in Hollow Girl, and I thought I’d share some tips for ADRing1. ADR is usually employed to clean up dialogue, but we were able to use it to rework the story, by modifiying Max’s lines. Whatever reason you are ADRing, here are some tips I’d recommend for the best end result:
- It is going to be one of the last things you do with the film and certainly if you do end up doing ADR make certain your edit is 100% locked. In our case we had a lipless character2, so we could change anything he said after the edit was locked. If you are in similar situation, then make sure their dialogue is locked too!
- Maybe ADR can be done cheaply, but cheap sounding dialogue is likely why you are ADRing in the first place. Dig into your pockets and go somewhere that has a proper sound booth to get clean audio. We used The Bright Room up at DKIT. It is a dry hire suite, so you’ll need to find an engineer who can work pro tools. They can usually provide a few leads.
- At the very least you’ll want a to take a copy of your film so the actor can hear the lines they are re-recording, as well as hear how they delivered them. It can help for them to see their performance too. An up to date script will be welcome too.
- During the re-record, break down your dialogue into managable section, and anytime there is a pause of anything more than, say, a second, try to record them seperatly. At this stage you want to get it sounding as similar as possible to the original delivery – same tone, inflection, etc. The closer you can get it to original in terms of tempo, the better too. But you may find that no matter how hard you try they won’t sync perfectly – fret not!
- For that is where the kind folks at Synchro Arts come in. They have created a program called VocAlign which will magically align up your ADR track to your guide track (the original dialogue). The below example isn’t so much for ADR, but for syncing the voice of the Hollow Girl to Max.
Check it out before being sync’d:Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Dialogue is clean, but out of sync. Well some VocAlign tweaking3 and:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Pretty saucy eh?
- Drop your newly aligned ADR track into your audio editing software and get it into place. If you are using one of the plugin versions of VocAlign you won’t have to do this, but I was using the stand-alone version, so I did.
- Listen and watch back over it all to make sure it’s all in the right place!
- Crack open a beer and praise yourself for a job well done – you should now have wounderful sounding and perfectly in sync dialogue!
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1 Automated Dialogue Replacement
2 Max. Obviously 
3 It is easy to use software, so I’m not going into it, but let me just say that you want to make sure any sizable gaps are removed from your audio. You won’t be able to sync up dialogue properly if you have any dead space before, during or after the recording on either your guide track or dubbing track.
