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Hi, welcome to FilmmakerIQ.com, I’m John Hess and today we’ll look at Automated Dialogue
Replacement or ADR and demonstrate how you can record clean dialogue replacement
with just a few simple tools What is ADR
ADR or Automated Dialogue Replacement is the process of re-recording dialogue in a studio
to replace the dialogue audio that was recorded on set. Now this can be done for
a number of different reasons: first, there may have been a technical problem with the
location audio - say a plane flew overhead on the best take, or there was too much
bleed through from another actor’s mic or maybe the actor just wasn’t on axis with
the mic during that take.
In some cases ADR is used to replace an actor’s vocal performance. This is especially done
in musicals with Marni Nixon supplying her voice to dub over Marilyn Monroe,
Deborah Kerr, Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood.
You may also have to ADR a scene to replace words to make a more television or airline
friendly cut of the film.
I have had it with the Monkey Fighting Snakes on this Monday to Friday Plane!!!
Or sometimes ADR is used for creative purposes. Marlon Brando is said to have purposefully
mumbled his way through his lines to force producers to ADR his scenes. During
the ADR session he could more finely craft his performance based on seeing the context
in the rough cut of the film.
But in the world of low budget and independent filmmaking ADR is always seen as some sort
of bogeyman - something to be avoided at all costs… but it shouldn’t necessarily
be. In fact, post production sound, if done with purpose, can actually be a crucial tool
for the low budget filmmaker.
See, at the beginning of the sound era at the start of the 1930s, there was no technology
of recording sound separately from the visual film - no way to dub in dialogue
or sound effects and music. When the studios were converting in mass to sound, they brought
in hundreds of radio broadcast and telephone engineers, many who never shot a
film in their life. As sound was the big new thing, these guys called the shots - dictating
camera placement and angles almost completely wiping away the stylistic
advances gained in silent film in the late 20s.
Selling sound films to foreign markets before there was dubbing was especially hard. Paramount
bought up a studio in Joinville just outside of Paris France for the
specific purpose of taking the same script and remaking it in up to 13 different languages.
Called Babel on the Seine, they would keep the same sets, props, and costumes
and just rotate the actors for each different language version of the script. This didn’t
work out so well and Paramount all but gave up on multi-language production by
1932.
But the technology of dubbing - called postsycronization or postsync was just around the corner. By
1935 the position of a supervising dubbing engineer was about the same
rank as the film editor. By the late 30s, most of the audio in studio films was done
in post - this freed up the director from the confines of the production audio -
allowing for the intricate art form that we enjoy today. Even now, it’s not unheard
of for a major motion picture to have most of the dialogue recorded in post.
Now when dialogue replacement was first being done, each line that had to be rerecorded
used a loop of film which would play over and over again in a loop - often calling
looping. Modern techniques use computers to loop the section which is where we get the
“automated” part of Automated Dialogue Replacement.
Talk to most independent filmmakers and they will generally agree that ADR is evil. And,
yes, perhaps if you’re on a tight budget, having one more unexpected expense,
especially if it’s because of sloppy location sound work, is a bad thing.
But the fact is as directors in the 30s found out, ADR and postsynchronized sound can be
kind of liberating.
To demonstrate a DIY way of doing ADR, I shot this parody of the closing scene of Casablanca.
Now I used a liberal amount of fog for this shot and you can clearly hear
the fog machine whirling away in the location audio track
So that track has to go. Unless you have a lot of experience working with audio or you
have really good location sound to begin with, I recommend replacing the dialogue
for the ENTIRE scene not just a line or two here and there. If you’re going to do just
a partial ADR, you need to try to get the same kind of mic, the same mic placement,
and try to replicate the reverberant space you originally recorded in. If you ADR the
entire scene you don’t have to worry so much about that. Besides audiences tend to
be pretty quick on picking up when a line has been dubbed over as many of my own YouTube
comments have spotted when I had to replace a word or two from previous lessons.
With this scene - we’re going to replace everything.
With ADR there are two common practices and sessions often use both of them depending
on the line that’s being dubbed.
Visual ADR is when you have the actor listen to the line of dialogu and then the actor
is asked to match dialogue while watching the performance on screen with no sound.
Audio ADR is when the actor listens to the line of dialogue and recites the dialogue
along the audio recording - again and again.
Audio ADR may give a more exact result - as the repetition forces the actor to divorce
the meaning from the sound words. The line becomes simply a series of sounds - the
speech to song illusion kicks in and it’s a matter or repeating the song.
But if you want to go for a different performance, you may just want to have the actor do the
visual ADR.
Now let me show you how to do a pretty sophisticated ADR with some basic tools. The first thing
I did was cut up my edit into small chunks of dialogue to work with - the
length varies but I like to try keep my segments about the length of a lyric or phrase.
Now I’ll add 3 seconds to the front of the segment and include visual and audio beeps.
Then I’ll take this chuck and duplicate it ten or twenty times and render it out as
a small video file which I’ll load on my iPad. This simulates Visual ADR, but
sometimes actors work better with Audio ADR. In that case I’ll just loop the line with
no beeps - the speech to song effect kicks in quicker.
Now all I have to do is have my actor watch the loop with headphones on and record the
performance into my digital audio recorder. We want to do this somewhere that’s
relatively quiet and in a room that’s doesn’t have a lot of reverb. The actor should be
in the same posture that the line was delivered in. On the Magnificent Ambersons,
James G. Stewart, head of post production sound had to loop a scene where 6 actors were
in a car. After getting sound that was too clean, he spent a week having actors
sitting on sawhorses as he bumped them about to simulate the movement of a car - the resulting
audio got the seal of approval from director Orson Welles. As far as the
mic, I’m using the RODE NT-1 condenser mic because it’s one of the cleanest sounding
mics I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. With this mic you don’t want to get
too close or the proximity effect will kick in and make everything sound really deep and
beefy. About 10 inches away will give us a really natural sound.
Once each chunk recorded it’s back into the editing suite to place the pieces of audio.
There are ADR assisting programs available that can stretch and squish your audio
so they fit over the original but you can also do it manually
After doing a rough align in Premiere Pro - I found it much easier to work inside Audition
to get the final mix. Now it’s really easy to get confused trying to watch the
footage and listen for a match so what I discovered is you get quicker cleaner match by visually
lining up the waveforms of the camera’s scratch audio - and yes, you are
going to have to get in there syllable by syllable and shift things around. You can
try Auditions built in Automatic Speech alignment - sometimes it works perfectly,
sometimes it’s just not quite right. Getting a good sync is time consuming but it’s worth
it as small incosistencies can destroy the illusion. I ended up doing two
sessions because I wasn’t quite happy with my directing performance in the first session
- hey practice makes perfect. I applied some EQ - taking down some of the low
range to compensate for proximity effect, added a delay filter of 10ms to dirty up the
sound with a little combing and dropped in very subtle distant reverb. Then it’s a
matter of adding in some store-bought tarmac ambiance and a sound effect of an airplane
passing overhead. I had a friend drop by and improvise some piano music and we
turn rather noisy sound location sound like this… into this...
You're getting on that plane.
No Richard, I...
If that plane leaves the ground without you on it, you're gonna regret it,
maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
But Richard, what about us?
We'll always have Paris. I'm not good at being noble but it's easy to see
the problems of three little people doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world
Where I'm going there's no part for you
but even though this is goodbye, you'll always be with me.
Here's looking at you kid...
I just sent you a friend request on Facebook.
What the...
So we can keep in touch, I'll update my status when I land and then I'll check in at Starbucks
on the way so you'll know what I'm up to.
Uh, I'm not going to install messanger...
That's okay I'll use SnapChat.
What the hell is SnapChat?
>>DING<<
Oh.
Oh...
See you online.
You know, I think this is going to be a beautiful friendship.
Recording natural audio on set is still regarded as the best way to capture the sound of a
performance, but we should not think of ADR as a technique only for fixing what
should have been fixed on set - ADR is a way to augment the production, to keep things
moving on schedule - for example, you have a scene that doesn’t allow for good mic
placement because of the camera angle or special effects, or a scene that can only be done
once and a reshoot would be really impractical for money or time reason. Those are good cases for ADR
Whatever it is. Practice ADR because you’ll eventually find yourself using it on the way
to making something great. I’m John Hess and I’ll see you on FilmmakerIQ.com