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
Sound in movies are built in layers/channels. So on location, you want to record the actor(s) as isolated as possible. But in most movies, there is plenty of scenes where they need to record the dialogue again in a studio because of noise or unwanted sounds. You more or less have the actors dubbing their own dialogue again.
So, in the studio, you build up the sound with background noise, dialogue, effects and so on and can therefore simply disable the layer/channel the “real” dialogue is in and record it in a different language.
An example is pretty much every club scene you ever watched, they are recorded without music to get the dialogue clear enough and add the music later.
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