Dialogue editing basics every filmmaker should understand

Dialogue editing is the stage where production sound becomes a coherent soundtrack. The editor works line by line, choosing sources, removing distractions and building a bed that the mixer can shape without fighting the material.

Boom or lav, line by line

The boom gives perspective and a natural sense of the room. The lav gives intelligibility and immunity from distance, at the cost of clothing noise and a chesty tone. Neither wins outright, which is why both are recorded and why the editor needs them as separate mono tracks.

Splitting by character

Each character gets their own track, sometimes several across a scene, so that equalisation and noise processing can be set once per voice rather than per line. This is why numbered channels are useless and named stems matter: track four means nothing, Lav_Marie means everything.

Cleaning without destroying

• Remove clicks, clothing rustle and off camera noises manually before reaching for a plugin.
• Patch every removal with matching room tone from the same setup.
• Fade every edit, even the tiny ones, to avoid clicks at the joins.
• Keep an unprocessed copy of every track, because the mixer may want it.

Preparing the handover to the mix

The mixer expects tracks organised by character and source, with consistent naming, all at the project rate and bit depth, plus a list of ADR cues and any lines flagged as problematic.

If the material arrives as poly WAVs, split it first. If it arrives as loose mono files that need to travel as one object, merge them back into a poly file with the channels in a documented order. Both operations should be lossless.