ADR: what is it?

 One of the things that you might not encounter as a sound designer is ADR. ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement. This is usually done by an ADR recordist in most big budget films however for aspiring sound designers you might be working on student films or home made films currently and do not have an ADR recordist or the budget to hire one. So the responsibility may fall upon you to correct the audio. ADR is used when the dialog from the location audio can’t be used. Reasons for this can range from unusable audio, maybe it clipped and there’s distortion, a plane flew by and its on the type, someone was talking and you cant get rid of it, basically anything that is distracting or not intended to be recorded.

The way to efficiently record ADR is through a process called looping. With this process you basically create a portion of the film that you want to track the new dialogue over and loop it over and over again until the actor gives you the right take as well as the right synchronization.

One problem that I have noticed with ADR done by beginners is not the synchronization of the lines over the visual. It has to deal with the emotion they capture. As an ADR recorder it isn’t enough for you just to record their lines and make sure its in time, your job is to basically direct them to give you the performance that matches up with the scene. Imagine it’s a chase scene and the actor does his lines perfectly everything is in time but he sounds bland like hes not even being chased, it will pull the viewer right out of the moment. So when doing ADR go for the performance!