ADR, the process of re-recording dialogue from production audio that is not usable, is an important part of most film and television productions. Perhaps the most important part of running a successful ADR session is having well-prepared cue sheets for your actors, engineers and directors during the sessions.
Manual ADR - The Hard Way
In the most straightforward production, this may be an easy task. Perhaps you only have a handful of lines to record for each character. You can find an ADR cue sheet template on Google and edit it with Preview, Google Sheets or Excel.
EdiCue
When you start working on a production with multiple picture changes and hundreds of ADR cues, doing it manually doesn’t work. For me and many other post professionals EdiCue from Sounds in Sync is a must. It is not cheap but can be written off after your first project.
Using EdiCue
The process works by entering the character and actor names in EdiCue. EdiCue will then auto-assign abbreviations, or you can choose your own. The standard is three characters, but you can make them four or more if needed. EdiCue will then generate a Pro Tools session with a track for each character. Individual cues are then entered as clip groups in Pro Tools. The benefit of this system is that when picture changes occur, you conform to these cue tracks, and your cue sheets will change with the rest of your session through conforms. If you have a PDF shooting script, you can use this to extract character lines for cueing.
The real magic of this workflow comes with the Session Interface. When you find a line in Pro Tools (or Nuendo) that needs to be looped, you make a selection on the character’s respective cue track and create a clip group from the start to the end of the cue.
From the Session Interface in EdiCue, you can enter text, select reasons for ADR from a list of reasons, enter your own, and set a priority for the cue. Hitting “Set Clip” will write this info to the clip group in Pro Tools. If you need to adjust the cue, you can use the “Get Clip” button to import the cue into the Session interface, make the desired changes, and then hit “Set Clip” to send it back to your DAW.
When you are ready to generate cue sheets for a session, click “Load Session” from the main window to import all cues from your Pro Tools (or Nuendo) session. As of v3 of EdiCue, there is a new designer window to allow you to design all elements exported in the PDF cues sheets it exports. Clicking “Export Cues” generates PDF cue sheets that are session-ready with versions for actors, directors and engineers. The summary PDF can be helpful in seeing the total number of cues and estimating how long will be needed in the studio to record them.
If you are a dialogue editor or ADR / Supervising sound editor responsible for cueing ADR or running sessions, EdiCue is a must. As a large majority of engineers are using EdiCue these days, if you are a studio that records ADR, you should also look into EdiPrompt, which imports the PDFs generated by EdiCue to prep automated cue beeps and streamers for use during sessions.
To learn more about EdiCue, be sure to visit the Sound In Sync website
You can download the ADR Cue Session and ADR cue sheets from a project I supervised, SWAS.
Additional resources to learn more about EdiCue