• Location: Your imagination
  • Joined: January 5, 2015

Topic: How do you organize your dialogue?

I'm trying to find a new way to organize all the dialogue for my projects. Before I start animating, I've always just labeled the audio files "1", "2", etc. to correspond with the order that the lines of dialogue appear in the film. While this has worked fine for some smaller projects, it starts to get confusing when organizing all the dialogue for a larger film and I often find myself losing files just because they're so hard to keep track of.

Any tips?

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AnimatorUnknown's Website

  • Location: Somewhere in time
  • Joined: January 4, 2017

Re: How do you organize your dialogue?

It's an interesting question and one that I personally don't have a single answer for. You could write the beginning words of the dialogue to jog your memory,  you could do something closer to what you already do which is to sort things by scene/location, act 1/2/3 take 1/2/3 etc. they might be a bit tedious if you are dong several recordings in one go (the former idea may not be too practical if your pieces of dialogue are especially short). I have only used my new microphone (snowball) twice so far, both for short brickfilms, so I did the dialogue for them all in one go and then labelled the recording with the title of the movie, which may be viable option if you are in my situation, but looking at it now I too am probably going to have to find a new method.

I'm interested to hear how other people do it mini/smile

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Dragon Brick Studios's Website

  • Joined: March 28, 2014

Re: How do you organize your dialogue?

I generally just keep all the audio for a character in one track. For example, all of Bob's voice is in "Bob.wav" and all of Mary's voice is in "Mary.wav". I split it up in the video editor as need be (since I have multiple takes usually and the best way to figure out which is best is in context with other lines surrounding it).

Then, I might render out the specific lines into a temporary folder so I can animate to them in Dragonframe. Or, I might render the whole film's audio track and put it into dragonframe and drag it around. It depends on how long the track is.

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rioforce's Website

  • Location: Germany
  • Joined: April 5, 2017

Re: How do you organize your dialogue?

I put all the audiofiles for one character in one folder and name them after the beginning of the sentence.

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The shiny Knight
  • Location: New Jersey
  • Joined: March 22, 2012

Re: How do you organize your dialogue?

Mine is a complex process, because I always have a lot of dialogue from many voice actors.

I create a folder called RAW, and make a subfolder for original copy of each character's lines, as a backup.
I make a second folder called PROCESSED, and again contain the RAW files, sorted with subfolders by character.
I make a THIRD folder called COMPLETED.

One by one, I go through the PROCESSED folder's files and process the audio so the takes I don't like are removed, when I get multiple takes per line.  I also set the volume levels to they're consistant with those of the other actors.

After this is done, I make a blank file in COMPLETED, and cut & paste the lines in the right order, leaving about 1/5 to 2 seconds between lines so I can splice and edit the time between lines as I wish in post-production.

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