M&E's dipped or undipped?

[c-post]

Hello, hello

I have built some very nice M&E's for a project and now I'm doing the English composite mix after. It's great to do it this way but my clients frequently don't have time or money for M&E's first.

My question is, does anyone put "dips" in a pre-built M&E track to accommodate the dialogue -- deliver the M&E with dips?? Or to put it another way, do these steps make sense to you??...

1. Build the fully-filled M&E track sans dialogue (except with as many fx as you can extract from source dial track)
2. Build the dialogue mix from the dialogue tracks (a separate process)
3. Selectively Integrate fx (and music, if available) from the M&E into the English mix, completing the English mix
4. In the process the fx (and music) are mixed against the dialogue.
5. Then go back and reconstitute the fully-filled M&E based on the dialogue parameters.
6. Deliver the fully-filled M&E element from step 5.

Of course, I could deliver the E element from step 1, which sounds terrific and has everything there, including fx which were extracted from the dialogue track in the first place...

This gives a foreign mixer the opportunity to mix the M&E against their ADR they way they want, instead of me second guessing the whole thing. On the other hand, with step 5, all they'd have to do is just mix their adr, without having to adjust the M&E in any way, and they're done. What do you think? There must be other threads on this exact topic but I didn't find them.

thanks

please direct me to any relevant threads on this topic

c-post

[trakbytes]

I do a lot of foreign mixes, and I get a lot of M&E's. They are always done after the English mix. They always have dips for dialog just as the English mix would. The only exception I can think of would be in a case where there is a VO or narration that may have triggered an automatic ducking compressor on the rest of the track. This would be a problem with a foreign VO where the VO wouldn't exactly match the "pumping" of the triggered track. This doesn't happen often; mostly with a commentarty mix or a VO mix sometimes used in the Russian or Polish markets. So, make your M&E like the English mix, but fill in the missing PFX and use the Foley that might not have been used in the original.

Bob

[tonmeistermat]

It depends on who you are delivering to, and what they want! 'M&E' has different meanings depending on the job at hand.

Some documentary makers for example insist on an un-dipped M&E, so that the narrator can deliver a natural speed reading in the other language and who ever is mixing the versions can dip around it, rather than having to shoe-horn a longer (or stretch a shorter) read into the hole left from the english. These types of delivery often also want the 'sync' sound, ie the interviewees original language dialogue, as they won't be replaced in the territories but will be captioned.

In film work, the opposite is true - every identifiable noise has to be removed, and the track has to sound identical in every language so the M&E must be dipped and filled to match the original mix.

When I'm mixing documentaries, I have a signal path that allows me to provide both a dipped and an un-dipped M&E, and it sounds like you have a similar arrangement....

Mat

[c-post]

OK guys, thanks for the tips. I did an odd and even numbered track arrangement for the fx this time, where odd are the fx for the English and even are the fx for the fully filled. Protools is such an awesome tool for duping tracks and copying and modifying automation. For M&E's it is unbeatable.

-c-post