Apple Final Cut Pro 6 User Manual
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Change the pace of off-camera dialogue.
As long as the speaker is off camera, you can make other dialogue changes as well. For
example, you can easily change the pacing of what’s being said, making the sentence
sound more or less dramatic. The key is to have footage you can cut away to that will
seem plausible. An audience shot or another actor listening are two examples of
plausible cutaway shots.
Remember, if you create any gaps as a result of editing your audio, fill them in with
room tone.
Use the video from one take with the audio from another.
Sometimes you’ll have multiple takes of a particular shot, each with something good in
it. For example, suppose you have a series of takes of an actor saying, “Wow! That’s a
big piece of pie!”
Each take is shot from a slightly different angle, and there’s one visual take that you like
more than the others, even though the dialogue in it isn’t that great. In another take,
the actor said the word “wow” really well. A third take has the best version of the line
“That’s a big piece of pie!” If the actor was good and the pacing of each of these takes
is roughly the same, it’s fairly easy to combine all three clips into one good take.
Be careful when combining dialogue from different takes.
People use different intonations as they speak a sentence, and it’s important to listen
for this. Sometimes, you’ll be unable to combine two sentences because they won’t
sound right together.
For example, suppose you have two clips of someone talking. In one clip the actor says,
“I’m going to throw that suitcase out the window!” In a second clip, he says, “Should I
put the box in the closet?” You want to cut from the actor to a shot of the closet when
he says “that suitcase” so you can combine the line “I’m going to throw that suitcase”
with “in the closet.” Unfortunately, the second sentence is a question, so the two pieces
of dialogue don’t really sound right together. Because the difference is jarring, you’ll
have to try something else.