What % of movie "exterior" scenes have overdubbed dialog? Vidiot?

It was much more obvious in older movies. I was thinking 90% is probably overdubbed. I assume the dialog is recorded anyway for reference. Just curious

 

I'm guessing closer to 99%- nearly all of it. is overdubbed by the time you see it in theaters.

 

The dialog nowadays looks spot on to me. Back in the old days, it was obvious when doubles were used and dialog was overdubbed. You could be in a windy environment and the dialog had echo or perfect acoustics.

 

I would say more than half. That's OK if it's necessary. How about when the characters are walking on sidewalks or even inside sometimes and it's overdubbed to make it sound like they're nearly tap dancing. I hate that.

 

Almost all, w/exceptions, location or outdoor scenes are over dubbed. This because of ambient noise such as airplanes, helicopters, traffic noise ect. In a scene with multible cuts it is almost impossible to edit if actual background noise is used. Certainly a must in period films & TV shows like westerns ect. Post production overlays all that sound from wind to crowd noise, horn honks and anything else relating to the location after the scene is edited w/the actors dialogue. There are mikes and a sound mixer present at location shoots recording the dialogue as a guide track for the dubbing sessions.

-Steve D.

 

I think it depended on the studio. The joke I had for years is that 90% of the dialogue for any Universal, MGM, or Warner's movie made in the 1950s or 1960s was dubbed -- even the interiors. It was just the style back then, plus the limitations of the equipment. And the sound supervisors were very, very picky about how the dialog had to be absolutely perfect, even if it sounded a little "phony."

What baffles me is very modern movies (the Harry Potter movies are prime examples) where even the interior dialogue scenes are all looped. Makes no sense to me, because you know it was a quiet studio set. My only guess is that they may have done it to improve the actors' performance.

Two interesting observation: 1) a lot of dialog today on TV shows is done with wireless mikes, which have made a huge difference in avoiding ADR. Wireless mikes don't sound nearly as good as a boom, but they still sound better than ADR, plus they have the advantage of capturing the original performance. It's not unusual for as many as 10 simultaneous wireless mikes to be used in a single complex scene, each with their own isolated track. This practice has spread to feature films as well, though it's really just a band-aid on the problem.

2) I disagree a little with Steve D. above in that nowadays, dialogue editors have tools (like iZotope and Cedar) that can eliminate about half the noise from bad locations, salvaging dialogue to a great degree.

The first time I was conscious of this was on the 2006 season of Lost, which I worked on, and I was stunned when exterior scenes I had seen in dailies -- in which the dialogue was ruined by distant jet noise or surf noise -- sounded fairly acceptable in the final mix. The results were not perfect, but after being tweaked by the re-recording mixer, they took "poor" sound and were able to make it "acceptable." You can never make it good, let alone very good, but even making it acceptable is miraculous.

 

One trick that's often done on sets: we shoot the scene twice, once where they're walking (or dancing or whatever), and then an extra take where thick carpets are laid down to eliminate all footfalls. The final on-screen result uses the latter dialogue, plus foley footfalls recorded separately in a recording studio.

We also often try to record "wild lines," where the actors go through all the dialog without moving, just go get everything 100% clean. Dialogue editors later go in and plug those words back into their mouths in the scene, and you can't tell the difference -- it's like a looped line that was still recorded live on the set.

ADR (automatic dialogue replacement), done months later in a quiet recording studio, never, ever sounds like the location. They get closer every year, but it still has an "artificiality" to it. And yet, there are some actors -- Johnny Depp high on that list -- who enjoys looping his lines over and over again, giving him the freedom to try a dozen different interpretations of the lines without giving the director costly delays on the set. Almost every line of dialog in an action scene in Pirates of the Caribbean (or similar scenes) are looped, because of wind machines, bad mike placement, water, set movement, footfalls, body sounds, weather, and other problems.

[Note that I did not mention what kind of cables were used to record the dialogue, in the interest of peace and harmony.]

 

Can you explain ADR further? Is this advice or plug in or a process. I also heard that in the 90's, some films reshot " clean" scenes for network showings. I remember half of Smokey and the bandit the lips didn't match mouths during profanity.

 

Sure. ADR is a process:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)

As is dialogue recording, editing, and foley:

Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures: A Guide to the Invisible Art

The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation

Smokey and the Bandit are good examples of 1970s films that were almost completely looped in post. I think it was just the style back then, plus the equipment wasn't as good as it is today, and (as I said) the sound supervisors were extremely demanding in terms of getting perfect dialogue quality (even if it sounded kinda artificial).

It is possible to do nearly-flawless ADR today when they have lots of time and money. They do a thing nowadays with digital Convolution Reverb that can precisely duplicate the acoustics of a real location, then apply that to a new recording in a dead studio, giving the dialogue essentially the same acoustic properties of the original sound. It's really a clever trick and is not 100% perfect, but it can work extremely well in many cases. A lot depends on the skill of the performer in remembering exactly how they did their dialogue on the set, months earlier.

There's a great scene in the movie Postcards from the Edge (which I worked on), where Meryl Streep is shown in an ADR session for a fictitious film-within-a-film. It shows basically how the process works, and is pretty realistic... though nowadays, they often use more than one microphone -- one close, one distant -- to record the dialogue at the same time, then the dialogue editor later decides which one to use (or a combination of the two for different lines).

 

At least two prominent examples of "clean" edits recorded by the original cast are Scarface (the anniversary DVD had a short, humorous documentary that featured some of the rerecorded dialogue) and A Few Good Men. Conversely, one of the most awful ones I can remember is the old edit of Die Hard with a "Bruce Willis" who did a painfully bad impression for all of the redubbed lines.

 

Hey, I worked on all the TV-version dubbing on A Few Good Men! I remember the TV alternate lines, which were problematic. My memory is that Nicholson wouldn't do them, and they had to get some actor/comedian in to imitate his voice.

The smart directors (like John Landis) will go in and shoot alternate "clean" TV scenes right on the set while the production takes place. That way, there's no dubbing -- they just splice in a whole new shot. On the other hand, this ain't gonna work with a Quentin Tarentino film, and he's violently opposed to censorship. I don't know how you would air most of his films on broadcast television; you'd wind up with a 55-minute version of Inglorius Basterds, for example. (Kind of like the TV version of Blazing Saddles, which is a riot.)

A few times, I've finished up a theatrical version of films in mastering, and then had the producer say, "hey, we now need the entire TV version," dumping the whole mess right in my lap. Figuring out how and where to make the edits is very difficult, even when we have the alternate scenes and a new TV-safe mix. I remember a project that had about 175 different edits from the theatrical version, and it was a nightmare to do -- this was with raw negative and outtakes. Nowadays, this would be handled in the digital domain and would be a lot more organized (one hopes).

 

I swear Jerry Reed did some of Jackie Gleasons and Burt Reynolds tv overdubs satb. So if you are good at impersonating, that could be a plus as a voice actor. Interesting stuff. I was amazed many years ago to learn that most live albums nada big portion rerecorded in the studio

 

Would it be correct to say that Johnny can only do this with the lines where you can't see his face, otherwise his lips wouldn't match his words?

 

IIRC, they actually had an ADR studio built on set for the HP movies, so they could do most of the ADR there and then.

True story, Emma Watson, had to come into our post facility (I no longer work there) to record one word: Harry. She laughed about it with the sound guys in the studio with her.

I think he means he would say the same lines but in a different way. He would be able to see the scene while doing the ADR work anyway so he could keep it in check.

 

I would think it would be harder than hell for actors to go in later and loop their dialogue. If they are speaking more than a couple of words, wouldn't it be hard to match their original cadence as it's shown on the film, assuming their faces are in the scene ? They can't really add a little pause, speed up or stretch a word ,etc., or their voices won't match the film.
I've seen examples of that of course but not as many as I would expect if looping is the standard.

The phony sound in films where the actors are supposed to be outside is about as noticeable as scenes supposedly outside but the lighting on the actors is obviously studio lit and apparently the sun never goes behind a cloud and there isn't any wind.

 

I have heard ADR referred to as All Day Re-recording sh**. I have never been on a looping session, but I'm sure digital has sped the process up somewhat.

I see bad looping all the time; the worst I saw in recent years was actually on a commercial for bathroom cleanser. The line was "the non-stick bathroom" and it wasn't even CLOSE to being in sync. I couldn't believe it had been ok'd for air.

Dan

 

He says the exact same words, only with a difference in performance. A technician goes in and nudges pixels until the lip sync is 100% perfect. And they do record a guide vocal track on the set, even if the actor is dangling on wires, being buffeted by winds, dunked under water, or whatever.

Yes, that's a relatively new thing that they're doing in LA as well, but mostly on TV sets.

 

Unless you just show the back of their head, or cut away in the middle of a line. There's all kinds of tricks they can use. I have seen cases where the producers and writers literally rewrote a scene (or at least a few key sentences) and made it work in the show. There's an art to doing this well, but sometimes it comes out of sheer desperation to make the scene work. This happened a few times in Lost, where something I saw in dailies was completely changed by the time the show aired, causing me to do a spit-take.

It's all part of the magic of movies. Some things you just have to buy into. If anything, I think they get better and better at hiding all the machinery behind the magic.

I have seen night-for-day scenes so perfectly lit, you would never, ever know that it was shot at 9:00 at night. You'd swear it was 12 hours earlier. It can be done -- it just takes a boatload of time, money, and talent. So can great ADR.

BTW, Avatar is another movie where I think about 80% of it is ADR, including the live-action scenes with humans. It's very, very well-done (and won an Oscar). You can argue whether or not it's a good movie artistically, but technically it's flawless, in my opinion.

 

wow! Couldn't the "Harry" word be sampled from another track or dialogue? I understand when you work with child actors their voices may change in a matter of weeks, but still...

 

Sounds like many Orson Welles films, where Mr Welles did a lot of the post dubbing regardless of who played the part.

 

I've noticed it more and more. I think they must shoot these commercials in one location and then use them for other countries. Some of them are so badly dubbed.

The weirdest thing was in the Uk they had one commercials with a US "star" but then overdub her voice. They still had an American accent but they did not use the voice of the actual actress. Very weird.

 

Very educational, thank you guys.

 

Great info. Some of the pharmaceutical commercials are terrible. Riding on a bike but voice sounds as if it is in a library.

Hal Wallis was filming Roustabout and wanted the back up singers track removed in a song used in a motorcycle scene. Elvis said he wanted it left alone. Hal asked Elvis..."you're on a motorcycle...where are the singers?" Elvis replied "the same damn place the band is"

I thought that was hilarious.

 

Yeah, good point. I'm not sure I can excuse any studio for doing way too much phony-sound ADR during the 1950s and 1960s; it was kind of the style, just the way things were.

Yes, the stereo mikes on the old Fox 1950s CinemaScope sets were bizarre. My old pal Rick Chace used to whine about panned dialogue in old movies, which he detested because he felt it called too much attention to itself and sounded artificial. I don't have a problem with off-screen dialogue from someone you can't see, and that's way over to one side. But having the dialogue bounce all around the screen depending on where the person is... that's not exactly the way we hear, because the human experience is so much more subtle. (And I agree with your comment: "The movement of the vocal is more distracting than the edit.")

This kind of thing still happens today. You'll hear an outdoor line, an outdoor line, an outdoor line, and then a line that sounds like it was recorded in a phone booth, followed by an outdoor line. Absolutely insane. Guaranteed, everybody heard that on the dub stage and just cringed and hoped the audience wouldn't notice.

At least now, they have digital tools that can stick a band-aid on it to some degree. As I said before, they can take a reading on location (using the sound of slate claps) to measure the precise acoustical characteristics, then process the ADR dialogue to sorta/kinda match it. It's not perfect, but it does make the dubbed dialogue better. This was done a lot in The King's Speech (to name one recent example), a movie that had a lot of location problems due to noise.