Suppose you’re shooting a movie. The actors do their work, and you also record their voices while they’re acting. Additional audio stuff like music and sound effects is added later.
But now suppose you want to dub the movie in another language. You can’t just slap music and stuff onto the project, but you (somehow) need to remove the voices of the original actors and then slap those of the new voice actors onto the film. Except if you cut that out, you’d also have to cut out all environmental noise, etc. And if you do that, you’d basically have to recreate every single sound required.
So how exactly does this work? Are movies shot with and without sound simultaneously? Or is there some technological means to separate the sound from the image?
In: Technology
When mixing the sound for a movie, the dialogue, music, sound fx, and Foley are all on their own tracks. When a final mix is created, they also export what are known as “stems”.
These stems are the final mix of every individual sound, exported into the aforementioned layers (dia, sfx, Foley, music).
When the movies or shows go to another country, the dialogue track is removed and they have the sfx, music, and Foley. They can then add the voices in the languages of choice.
* I’m a sound utility in Atlanta, and I went to school for sound engineering for film at SCAD
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