What Is ADR?

People who sit through the entire list of movie credits have no doubt seen a credit for ADR, Automated Dialog Replacement. It’s a technique used to replace the original production dialog in movies, television shows and even in commercials. Essentially the actor watches their performance on screen and listens to the original dialog. They then try to record each line with the same inflections, intensity and the exact same timing as the original.

The director might even decide to change the lines in the voiceover. This often happens when a movie is cleaned up for network television or viewing on an airplane. In any case when ADR is done successfully, the result is a dialog track that has great presence and to the viewer appears to be the actual sync audio.

In the early days of sound-for-film, the process was called “looping”. A loop of film would run interlocked to a loop of the production dialog for reference. The actor would get into a rhythm and record the single line onto another magnetic film recorder that was also interlocked. The process worked, but was tedious since there was a tremendous amount of set-up for each line.

In the early 1980s, the first SMPTE time code interlock system became available. The film could then be transferred to a videotape player, and the production dialog, could be recorded on a multi-track analog audio recorder. The separate audio and video recorders were kept in sync by synchronizers referencing a time code track on each machine.

The editor could program up to 200 cues with beeps and markers on a controller, so that when the actor came to the session, any of the cues could be located with a touch of a button. The process seemed highly automated, so they called it Automated Dialog Replacement, or ADR.

However, compared to ADR recorded on digital audio workstations today, this dual-system technique was as slow and tedious as looping was to the original 1980s ADR. There were usually 15 seconds or more of pre-roll required for both audio and video players to lock each time the line was played.

In the ADR sessions of today, the video and audio can live on a single computer. Cues can be located instantly and once a cue is recorded, the ADR editor can easily take parts from various takes and move them in the timeline to match the production dialog perfectly.

The reasons for replacing the dialog could be that the actor was too far from the microphone, or recorded at too low a level, or the line was possibly at too high a level and distorted. There also could have been some unwanted noise that got into the dialog, like an airplane overhead or even cicadas.

Form most films, generally three or four dozen cues will be recorded for each principal actor. However some films require more ADR cues. In October of 2007, I worked with Chris Ward, Peter Jackson’s ADR supervisor. He flew in from New Zealand to record ADR for Bridge to Terabithia, which was shot there earlier that year. Chris had worked on Lord of the Rings and King Kong, and told me that 90 percent of the dialog in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and 80 percent of King Kong was ADR!

We then recorded over 400 cues for Terabithia with Josh Hutcherson, the main character in the film! The main reason was that it was the time for the 17-year cicadas in New Zealand, and all the outdoor dialog shots have to be redone to get rid of the din of flying cicadas!

About the Author:
Jay Petach,Screaming Bob makes websites, e-learning applications, digital signage, kiosks, live presentations and more!