ADR'ing

A couple months ago we shot a commercial, during the evening, in the centre of Medellin. The dialogue sound was ruined by noise from the adjacent bars. We had to convene the actors to do voice dubbing, also called ADR (additional dialogue recording). We don't have our own sound studio, so we have gone to three places: a university's radio studio, a tv studio's sound booth and today a radio station's studio.

Echo is the enemy at ADR'ing. Yo don't want any echo, and if you do, you could better add it as a digital effect. But I discovered not even the radio station had really isolated surfaces, their walls were textile, but their floor was hard tile. Not good, that produces echo. A sound studio should have a sound-isolating material in their floor like textile or a semi-soft material. But anyway, since the scene is an outdoor one, the slight echo is drowned by noise. Added noise. Only this time, it is controlled. Basically, mixing sound for a noisy outdoor scene is deconstructing everything and then building it up again.

I was pretty happy with how the voices sounded at the end, although I'd love for a professional post-production sound mixer to give his opinion on it.