Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 965)

178 Part I Media and Project Management
Cut away to another image to smooth cuts in dialogue.
If you need to remove a word or phrase from someone’s speech, you can use a cutaway
shot or B-roll footage at the same point. This allows you to change the audio without
viewers noticing an obvious jump cut.
One reason shots of the interviewer are included in documentary-style programs is to
give the editor the freedom to edit the speaker’s dialogue without introducing a jump
cut in the picture. That way, if the person on camera says the same thing twice, you can
cut it out without the audience’s knowing and make the subject sound better.
You can also do this in narrative programs. If you decide to rearrange an actor’s lines by
adding or removing dialogue, you can cut to a reaction shot of the person who’s
listening to smooth your changes to the speaker’s audio.
Change the pace of off-camera dialogue.
As long as the speaker is off camera, you can do other things 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, say 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.