There's No Dialogue Fill to Pull From 😕

The bane of any dialogue editor's existence? The dreaded lack of static dialogue fill. You pull out your clip handles only to discover that the "silence" between spoken words is nothing but breaths, cloth movements, the producer talking offscreen, and/or misc noise. No pristine room tone to be found. Now what?

But don't worry, I got you. While a readily available room tone from the same shoot is the ideal scenario, there are resourceful ways to overcome this hurdle and craft seamless dialogue fills even in its absence.

Borrowing from the Past (or the Present):

The first line of defense is to scour your editing session. 

Is there another section featuring a similar environment and noise floor? Perhaps an earlier scene in the same location or a different take with a similar sonic profile?  

If you can find a suitable match, you've struck gold! Carefully extract a short segment of this "usable" room tone and utilize it as your dialogue fill.

The Frankenstein Approach: Building Your Own Fill

But what if the stars haven't aligned and there's no readily available perfect match? Don't despair!  

Here's where the real magic happens, and your editing skills come into play.  Focus on any available "downtime" within the dialogue track – this could be breaths, mouth clicks, slight rustles, or even someone talking off-screen.

Meticulously gather these tiny snippets, precisely extracting them from the whole file.

The Power of Crossfades: Creating a Seamless Tapestry

Once you've amassed your collection of audio scraps, it's time to weave them together. Employ short equal power crossfades between each clip to create a smooth and natural-sounding transition. Your crossfade shouldn't exceed 20 msec.

RX to the Rescue: Refining the Raw Material

Now comes the real artistry. With your Frankensteinian creation assembled, it's time to send it to Izotope RX via RX Connect. Then follow these steps:

Spectral Repair: Eradicating Unwanted Visitors

Using the Spectral Repair tool, you can meticulously identify and eliminate any unwanted noise that might disrupt the underlying room tone. Imagine zooming in on your audio like a microscopic battlefield, where breaths and extraneous noises are the enemy combatants. With surgical precision, you can eliminate these unwanted guests, revealing the pristine room tone beneath. 

Spectral Repair works best for short horizontal and vertical content. The stronger you make the strength, the more the natural room tone gets removed. That's not our goal. Just focus on replenishing the blemishes of the misc noise. 

Ambience Match: The Finishing Touch

But what about those longer areas where breaths and offscreen dialogue take up more space with the room tone, making it difficult to remove entirely with Spectral Repair? This is where the brilliance of Ambience Match comes in.

This powerful RX tool allows you to "learn" the noise floor of your meticulously crafted fill – essentially capturing its sonic fingerprint. Once captured, you can use Ambience Match to strategically "paint" over any remaining imperfections within your fill. Think of it as the putty you put over the walls when you're moving out of a rented apartment, ensuring a believable patch of room tone throughout.

The Art of Editing: It's All About Resourcefulness

Once you send it back to Pro Tools, if it's still not enough length, you can make a duplicate, reverse the clip, and then fade them into each (usually a longer fade to a bit more seamless).

And if you need even more fill after that. You can time stretch the clip by no more than 2 frames. It starts to break apart after that. 

This approach to crafting dialogue fills in the absence of readily available options highlights a crucial aspect of audio editing: resourcefulness.  

By combining meticulous editing techniques, the power of RX, and a touch of ingenuity, you can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and deliver seamless dialogue edits.

And if you want to follow along on this exhaustive process for pristine dialogue edits, join me at Post Audio Pro where this is the tip of the iceberg for my dialogue editing skills!

What about you? What do you do when there’s no production fill to pull from?