Editing Voice Tracks

1
Editing Voice Tracks

• by Jay Rose
• DV Magazine April 2001

2
One View of Editing Dialog

• Look at waveform
• Find pauses where waveform drops to zero
• Edit during silence

3
Silence Method

• Simple
• Easy to describe
• May not be the best method
• Limits creativity
• Forces you to discard otherwise perfect takes
  when they have easily fixable sound problems

4
Silence Method

• Doesnt edit sound it edits pictures of sound
• Many audio details dont show up on a waveform
• Professional editors use waveforms only as a
  rough guide only
• They mark their edits while scrubbing and
  listening

5
Pro Editing

• Takes a little ear training and understanding of
  how sounds fit together
• Youll be able to replace individual syllables of
  dialog
• piece together difficult interviews
• and assemble VOs that are inhumanly perfect

6
The Ear is Faster than the Eye

• Film and video work because your eyes cant
  distinguish individual frames when theyre
  flashed quickly
• However, you can identify sounds that are much
  faster than a single frame
• Say these two phrases aloud
• The small pot
• The small tot

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The Ear is Faster than the Eye

• The picture shows the first phrase on the upper
  channel and the second one on the bottom

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The Ear is Faster than the Eye

• Only about a dozen milliseconds of sound - in the
  red circles have any significant difference
• Thats less than half a video frame
• but youd never confuse a cooking utensil with a
  small child

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Edit Like a Pro

• The ability to hear and understand fast sounds is
  built in to most of us
• To edit successfully you have to learn to analyze
  what you hear
• Say the small pot aloud listening very closely
  to your own voice while you do.
• Then immediately afterwards hear those three
  syllables again in your head
• Repeat this a few times

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Edit Like a Pro

• Now slow down what youre hearing in your head so
  you can hear the tiny changes inside each word
• In the small pot example you should be able to
  hear the definite transitions between /th/, /uh/,
  /s/, /maw/, /l/, /p/, /ah/, and /t/
• Dont give up if you arent hearing individual
  sounds immediately
• it takes a little practice, especially for
  visually orientated people

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What Youre Listening For

• We can predict exactly which tiny sounds are in
  the small pot because there arent that many
  ways humans move their mouths during speech.
• In the entire English vocabulary there are only a
  few dozen of these sounds called
• PHONEMES

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Phonemes

• Phonemes can be organized into groups that are
  useful to editors
• They dont necessarily correspond to letters that
  spell a word
• Theres no phoneme for C because its
  pronounced as /s/ or /k/
• but there are 16 phonemes for the 5 vowels

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Phonemes of Standard English

• Stop Consonants
• p (paint)
• b (barbell)
• k (cat)
• g (go)
• t (tot)
• d (dot)

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Phonemes Continued

• Friction Consonants
• f (food)
• v (very)
• s (silly)
• z (zebra)
• sh (shoe)
• zh (leisure)
• th (thin)
• TH (then)
• h (horse)
• t-sh (church)
• d-zh (judge)

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Phonemes Continued

• Nasal Consonants
• m (mighty)
• n (nap)
• ng (lung)

16
Phonemes Continued

• Glide Consonants
• w (willing)
• y (yes)
• l (locate)
• r (rub)

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Phonemes Continued

• Vowels
• ee (eat)
• ae (hat)
• eh (lend)
• ih (sit)
• aw (all)
• ah (father)
• o (note)
• u (bull)
• oo (tool)
• uh (up)
• er (worker)

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Phonemes Continued

• Double Vowels
• ay-ih (play)
• i-ih (high)
• aw-ih (toy)

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How the Pros Edit

• Listen to the phrase you want to edit, slowly, in
  your head. Identify any phonemes that might be
  useful for the edit you want to make, and decide
  which one will be easiest to use.
• Scrub slowly through the audio clip for the first
  half of the edit. Even though speech is
  continuous, you should be able to hear most of
  the places where one phoneme changes into
  another. Stop precisely at the beginning of the
  desired phoneme.
• What you do next depends on the program you're
  using. If you're scrubbing in an NLE's clip
  window, mark where you've stopped as the
  out-point of one clip. Then open another clip
  that where'll you'll be able to mark an in-point
  for the other side of the edit. (You can also use
  a tool in Pro Tools -- to split a single clip
  into pieces.)

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How the Pros Edit

• Do the same scrub-stop-and-mark for the other
  side of the edit.
• Join the clips together in the NLE, or press
  Delete in your audio editor, and listen to the
  result. If you've marked the start of the
  phonemes accurately, it should be fine. Sometimes
  there'll be a volume difference between the two
  pieces of the edit, but that's easy to adjust in
  any program. Occasionally there'll be an
  intonation difference that can't be fixed without
  special tools, and sometimes the two pieces are
  so radically different that the edit is
  impossible. But if you're using this technique,
  at least you'll have the comfort of knowing that
  no professional sound cutter could have done the
  job any better.

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Edit Tips Stop Consonants

• All of these are created by storing the flow of
  air pressure and then releasing it in a burst.
  There's a moment of silence in the middle of each
  stop consonant, right before the pressure is
  released. It can be as short as a third of a
  frame.
• If a stop consonant is followed by a pause, it
  usually has two distinct sounds one when the
  pressure is cut off, and another when it's
  released. But the second part isn't important.
  Eliminate it if you want to shorten the pause or
  go onto some other word.

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Edit Tips Stop Consonants

• If two stop consonants are next to each other (as
  in "The Fat Cat"), they're usually elided the
  closure uses the mouth shape of the first, and
  the release uses the mouth shape of the second.
  But when people are self-conscious, they often
  pronounce each stop separately for a total of
  four distinct sounds. Editing from one silence to
  the next will make your performer sound more
  relaxed.

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Edit Tips Friction Consonants

• With the exception of /h/, these are created by
  forcing air through a narrow opening between the
  lips for /f/ and /v/, between the tip of the
  tongue and back of teeth for /th/ and /TH/, and
  so on. This always makes a high-pitched sound
  that's very easy to spot while you're scrubbing.
• You can often edit from the start of one friction
  consonant to the start of a completely different
  one.

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Edit Tips Friction Consonants

• /h/ is also created by air pressure, but it's
  flowing through an open mouth. There's very
  little friction there, so this phoneme can be
  very quiet and not even show up on a waveform
  display. Be careful that you don't accidentally
  delete it while you're editing.

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Edit Tips Double Consonants

• These are actually two phonemes, one after
  another, that we usually hear as a single sound.
  But if you scrub through them slowly -- or have a
  well-trained inner ear -- you can hear the
  transition. You can also edit them separately,
  clipping the /d/ to turn my name into "Zhim" or
  borrowing a /t/ from the beginning of "chicken".

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Edit Tips Consonant Pairs

• The stop, friction, and double consonants are
  listed two to a line for a reason. Each pair uses
  exactly the same tongue and lip movement. The
  only difference is that the first in a pair
  relies on air pressure alone, while the second
  adds a buzzing from the vocal cords. Phoneticists
  call these 'unvoiced' and 'voiced' consonants.

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Edit Tips Consonant Pairs

• Unvoiced consonants don't carry any pitch, so
  they tend to stay consistent even if the speaker
  has a lot of tonal variety. This makes it easier
  to match them, even over a long speech. They also
  don't carry much that can identified as a
  specific voice you can often substitute one
  person's unvoiced phoneme for someone else's.

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Edit Tips Consonant Pairs

• Since the mouth movements are identical, you can
  occasionally substitute one consonant in a pair
  for its brother. Sometimes this may be the only
  way to build words that weren't in the original.
  It lends a slight accent to the dialog, because
  we're used to hearing foreigners confuse these
  pairs when learning English.

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Edit Tips Consonant Pairs

• When the consonant /b/ begins a word, some people
  start their vocal cords a half-second or so
  before the release. The result turns a word like
  "Baby" into "mmmBaby". Deleting the hum or
  covering it with room tone makes it sound better.

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Edit Tips - Nasals

• For these three consonants, air comes out of the
  nose instead of the mouth (try saying a long
  "nnn" as you pinch your nostrils together).
  That's not particularly relevant to editing, but
  can make a difference if your performer has a
  head cold.

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Edit Tips - Nasals

• The /ng/ phoneme is written that way because it's
  heard at the end of words like "ring". But it's
  not a double consonant -- there's no separate /g/
  in it. Many people say one anyway, as in the New
  York regionalism "Long Guyland". Feel free to
  delete the extra sound.

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Edit Tips Glide Consonants

• These change shape while they're sounding.
  They're influenced a lot by the sounds on either
  side, so they're more difficult to match during
  editing.
• The /l/ glide involves lifting your tongue from
  the ridge behind your upper front teeth. If the
  speaker's mouth is dry, saliva can stick and
  cause a tiny click in the middle of this sound.
  You can delete the click easily.

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Edit Tips Glide Consonants

• Some people have trouble with an initial /r/,
  turning it almost into a /w/. When this happens
  it's usually consistent throughout a take, so it
  may be hard to find a good /r/ to substitute. If
  you get a chance to re-record, ask the talent to
  add a tiny /d/ to the start of a critical word.
  This puts the tongue in the right place for the
  /r/ that follows. Then drop the extra /d/ -- it's
  a stop consonant, so it's easy to find -- while
  you're editing.

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Edit Tips - Vowels

• Practice saying them aloud, and learn to
  recognize them in dialog, because they're all
  different. You can't substitute one for another.
• Vowels and voiced consonants carry the pitch of a
  voice, which varies a lot during normal speech.
  After you edit them, make sure the pitch doesn't
  jump unnaturally. If it does, try moving the edit
  to a nearby unvoiced consonant instead. As a last
  resort, varispeed or pitch-shift a few words one
  or two percent.

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Edit Tips - Vowels

• Vowels and friction consonants carry most of the
  pacing of a voice. If a word is said too slowly,
  you can often make a small cut in the middle of
  one of these sounds to pick up the speed.
• When nervous performers pause before a word that
  starts with a vowel, they often build up pressure
  in the back of their throats. When they release
  it to say the word, the result is a tiny click,
  almost like a stop consonant. It sounds tense.
  But you can calm things down by deleting the
  click.

36
Edit Tips - Vowels

• There are three double vowels in normal English,
  similar to the double consonants. They always end
  with /ih/. (Say "Play" aloud and you'll hear it
  at the end.) Frequently, the two phonemes can be
  edited separately.

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BEWARE!!!

• Bad dialog edits grow on you. While you're
  practicing these techniques, don't make the
  mistake of listening to a questionable edit over
  and over until it starts to sound good. Instead,
  trust your first instinct -- or move on to
  something else, and review the edit a few hours
  later.