Brief Summary
EdiLoad is a tool which can speed up tasks which when done manually can be both laborious and time consuming. If you work with dialogue you should know about EdiLoad and how it can help your work. Award winning dialogue Editor Korey Pereira explains.
Going Deeper
When working on student and low budget films, picture editors generally keep all available mics in the timeline when they deliver to sound. As a dialogue editor I then asses each track and choose the best bits to piece together my edit.
The first time you are hired onto a production with a production sound mixer that delivered a proper mono mix track to a classically-trained picture editor, your AAF timeline may look a lot more sparse. On bigger productions, you typically only get the mono mixtrack in the AAF and you as the dialogue editor (or the assistant sound editor if you are fortunate enough to have one on your show) will then need to “assemble” the timeline linking back to the original production sound rolls.
In some cases you might be able to use the Field Recorder Workflow in Pro Tools to create your assembly, but the results can be a bit hit or miss and leave you with a good amount of track cleanup before you can get down to editing. If you find yourself in a situation like this for the first time, don’t panic. The new EdiLoad v5 Assembly window from Sounds in Sync is your new best friend.
Sounds in Sync was founded by veteran dialogue editor Mark Franken whose credits include blockbuster giants like The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers and Return of The King, District 9 and Mad Max: Fury Road. This is not some software giant, but a working dialogue editor who somehow found the time to build tools from the ground up to fulfill the specific needs of his fellow sound editors.
What Is EdiLoad?
What EdiLoad does is give you the ability to feed it an EDL, AAF, XML or even a Pro Tools Session with whatever your picture editor is able to supply. From there, EdiLoad will “clean” the list of any duplicate files and reduce your timeline to the minimum number of tracks possible. On the last picture I assembled, this knocked 17 tracks in a messy dialogue AAF down to just three tracks! From here, you can then point EdiLoad to your folder of raw production sound rolls supplied from set. With the hit of a button, EdiLoad will then find all the matching takes. In some cases, it may find multiple matches or no matches at all for some clips. Some projects are easier than others when it comes to making these matches, but when things aren’t matching right away, you can dig into Mark’s tutorials or user guide to unlock more advanced workflows to make the match.
Once you have whittled down your list of unmatched clips to just things that will not have a match from production (bars and tone, temp ADR or other adds from the picture editor), you can create either a Pro Tools Session or an AAF that is ready to drop into your session or hand off to your dialogue editor to get to work. Assembling a dialogue reel can take up to two hours if done manually. With EdiLod, that can easily be cut down to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5-20 minutes. With this kind of time savings, it is easy to justify the expense after just a few uses.
While assembling dialogue is the primary reason most editors pick up EdiLoad, it is not all you can do with it. Once your EDL, AAF, XML or Pro Tools session is loaded into EdiLoad, you can export a picture cut or scene change track as a Pro Tools audio track containing clip groups.
A picture cut track is great for when a picture editor does not burn the scene and take into the video file and you need to identify what shot is on screen. The scene change track is incredibly helpful when cutting backgrounds or setting up reverbs as you can quickly and easily identify when you are changing locations. Mark has added the ability to import a PDF version of the script that will even derive the name/location of each scene.
Re-conforming
The last way many editors use EdiLoad is to keep up with picture changes. Picture lock is not a reality on most productions. When an editor delivers a new version, you have to re-conform your work. EdiLoad gives you the option to compare an old and new list (derived from an EDL, AAF or XML) and use the comparison to automate the process of updating your session to the latest cut.
If you assemble dialogue as part of your workflow, EdiLoad is a must. To learn more about the software, be sure to check out this great series of video tutorials Mark has created:
EdiLoad v5 - New Features
EdiLoad v5 - Introduction
EdiLoad v5 - Assembly Window
Visit the Sounds in Sync website to learn more about EdiLoad and start a trial today.