I’m talking about actual fully fledged dubs where the original voices are completely gone and replaced with matching voice actors, NOT voice-over dubs where they lower the volume of the original audio and have someone speak over the video in a different language.
I’ve always wondered how the original voices were removed and separated from the rest of the ambient sounds. I know for animated shows, everything is recorded on separate tracks, for example for a scene where two characters are having lunch in a busy restaurant,
the conversation would be recorded on its own track,
the sound effects the characters make ( picking up forks and knives, glasses, drinks being poured, footsteps etc…) would be on a separate track
and the ambient noises (other customers talking, distant traffic sounds from the road etc…) would be on a separate track.
Now for the same scene being filmed instead of animated, wouldn’t all of these end up on the same track? The actors would be talking while creating their own sound effects by moving plates, pouring drinks and all that, the background actors would be talking in real time around them and everything so wouldn’t the microphones pick all the sounds up at the same time?
I’m rambling but I guess my question is, how are they able to isolate and remove ONLY the voices of the actors talking and leave the sounds of everything else around them intact?
Again sorry for rambling but I’m terrible at explaining
In: Technology
When filming they will install a lot of microphones and record their sounds individually. Things like two microphones per lead actor, microphones placed in tables and decoration that the actors will be close to, directional microphones aimed at specific things at a distance and ambient microphones that captures the entire sound picture. The clapper they use is to sync the sound from all of these different recordings. This means that they have different recordings of each actor as well as recordings of all the other sounds in the room.
But in general movie and tv editors prefer a silent set with no ambient sounds. You can always add ambient sounds from a folly artist but it is hard to remove. Even dialog can be remade by calling the actors back into the studio to record their lines again. So all the props used in the scene are made to be as silent as possible. Paper bags are actually made of cloth that looks like paper, ice cubes are actually rubber resin cubes, shoes have felt pads under them making them silent, etc. Most of the sound is added after the scene is recorded. This does also mean that they can provide a clean sound without any dialog and only ambient sounds for dubbing.
But this is not true for all movies and tv series. There are dubbed shows where they just lower the volume of the original sound during the dialogs and dub over it. Sometimes they make it very obvious as well. You can still hear the original dialog in the background and the original ambient sounds are harder to hear during the dialog. This is what they are doing for news interviews but I have seen entire movies done the same way, some are done better then others.
Latest Answers