6 Replies Latest reply: Feb 8, 2014 11:44 AM by JZuck RSS

    Help Creating an M&E Delivery

    JZuck Community Member

      Greetings!

      I did a search but came up empty. I need to deliver a full M&E track to a distributor and I was wondering if there were any resources specific to this. For example, if I keyframe all of the SFX out of the dialog track, is there a way to invert the keyframes to create the SFX extracted track? Should I be using the healing brush instead so I retain room tone? Should I be trying to remove room tone from the dialog track? Anyway, just some thoughts. I welcome guidance before I set upon this task!

       

      Jonathan

        • 1. Re: Help Creating an M&E Delivery
          SteveG(AudioMasters) Community Member

          Essentially all they want is the dialogue gone. If the dialogue has room tone on it and it isn't separately available, then that has to go too. Usually this is for a foriegn language dub, and these inevitably end up as something of a mess anyway.

          • 2. Re: Help Creating an M&E Delivery
            JZuck Community Member

            Thanks Steve. i guess I understand the desire in principle but wondered two things. First, if we're not being asked to do a 5.1, how clean is the dialog track expected to be and second, is there an easy way to create two tracks from the dialog track, one with no sfx and one with only the sfx. In other words, if I go through and find all of the sfx, is it possible to pull them all out and put them in another track at the same time? I just read about a new feature which is inverted selection that might work but if you are anyone has any experience with this rather tedious task, I'd appreciate it.

             

            When you say they end up being a mess, don't they need to pass QC?

            JZ

            • 3. Re: Help Creating an M&E Delivery
              SteveG(AudioMasters) Community Member

              How easy this is inevitably depends on whether you have the original separated tracks available, and every time I've ever done stripped-back versions, I've had the raw unmixed versions, and created stem mixes from them. Most material where it's known that it's going to be language dubbed is prepared in post with this in mind, which makes it a lot easier. Expectations about how clean the track should be will vary - I don't think that there's any real standard there; it all depends on what you have to work with. Personally if I could get the dialogue out, I wouldn't worry about the SFX - send them what's there. And you should send them the original dialogue track too if they haven't already got it - then at least they have some sort of idea of what they have to replace in terms of delivery, etc.

               

              One of the more interesting issues with this is when you have main dialogue easily separated, but additional dialogue mixed in on other tracks - sometimes with crowd scenes, etc. Do you need to remove absolutely everything? Personally, I wouldn't bother unless it was seriously detrimental to the action.

               

              The reason that it ends up as a mess is that the replacement dialogue invariably doesn't lip-sync  very well when you look at the end result. Which is hardly surprising, really... and no amount of QC can fix that!

              • 4. Re: Help Creating an M&E Delivery
                JZuck Community Member

                Yeah, managed to keep all the dialog on one track. I guess the challenge is that it also contains the room tone in most cases as well as some random SFX (door closing, etc.). So I'm guessing I should find a way to get room tone into the SFX track along with the random SFX stuff otherwise, whomever is doing the foreign dub will need to also generate room tone for each scene (or is that easy for them to do?).

                • 5. Re: Help Creating an M&E Delivery
                  SteveG(AudioMasters) Community Member

                  JZuck wrote:

                   

                  So I'm guessing I should find a way to get room tone into the SFX track along with the random SFX stuff otherwise, whomever is doing the foreign dub will need to also generate room tone for each scene (or is that easy for them to do?).

                  Ideally whoever's doing the dub won't want to be playing with the background tracks at all! It really would be best if you can give them everything except the dialogue. Chances are that they won't get sympathetic room tone anyway, and what you have will be better. Do you still have the RT and SFX separated anywhere?

                  • 6. Re: Help Creating an M&E Delivery
                    JZuck Community Member

                    Yeah, no. Room tone (with some exceptions do to repair, etc.) is all in the dialog track. Hmm. Well I might have recorded room tone someplace that we recorded on set. I guess I could put that into the SFX track then.