As a part of a project for my Desktop Publishing class, I set my sights on dubbing a portion of a 1987 crosstalk performance by Ma Sanli and Wang Fengshan. Crosstalk (相聲/相声/xiàngsheng) is a Chinese comedic tradition in which two people perform a dialogue, in a way that is something in between standup and Abbot and Costello. Of course, it’s not the sort of thing that you’d generally expect to be dubbed; it’s barely suited to translation, and if you must translate it, subtitles are objectively a better option. But still, there’s nothing like a good challenge!
Here’s the original video (my portion is from about 5:10 to 10:10):
And this is my dub:
The Project
The main tool I used to create my dub was Pro Tools. This was mostly a decision of convenience, since I already owned the software and could work on the project on my laptop wherever and whenever. Of course, it’s more than just that. Using a digital audio workstation on my own computer and not in a decidedly non-recording-studio computer lab meant that it was possible for me to record and rerecord straight into the program. This made the whole process much easier than just trying to get one perfect take on a file recorded elsewhere and then bringing it into the DAW to be edited. Because of this, and because I was making the recordings myself, I was able to focus on getting the best takes for each line, which is generally better practice. When working with audio, it’s always preferable to start with the best recording you can get, because there’s only so much you can do to make a bad recording or bad performance sound better after the fact. I did my best to adhere to this practice, although my performance lacks comedy, I didn’t try very much to sound like two people, and I was speaking quietly in small spaces to not disturb people around me. (Ma Sanli and Wang Fengshan have distinct voices and incredible tonal range, so when you don’t find it very comedic, blame my performance and not theirs. The two of them are hilarious, I promise.)
Recording
The first thing I did was give myself two scratch tracks as a guide, one for each performer. I set the window to scroll so that I could see the original waveforms coming and time each line to be at least approximately where it needed to be.
Here you can see here the first scratch track I put down (in purple), and by the waveforms you can tell that it’s close, but not quite the same as the original. Once I had both my scratch tracks ready, I went back through it, keeping what was already usable and rerecording everything else one or two lines at a time. This was made possible by selecting the exact time for the line (seen below in the start and end fields) so that I could start recording exactly when the line starts, and set a short pre-roll so that I could still hear what comes before and be prepared.
Unfortunately during this process, I fell somewhat short of Very Best Practice, since I recorded on different days in two different places, and even after the rest of the process, this difference is still audible. Garbage in, garbage out.
Extras, Editing, and Mixing
Getting all the lines recorded right was a big process, but only the tip of the iceberg. I added the sounds of the audience’s laughter, shuffling, and coughing from recordings purchased online. For the laughter, I used markers to denote when and how people laughed in the original recording, and then found laughter in my new samples to match.
To make everything nice and smooth, I compressed and normalized the dialogue tracks independently, and then put more compression and gain on the master track to keep the whole thing up at higher levels without clipping. (A project like this requires different and less intense compression than music, however.)
Challenges
As I mentioned earlier, this particular project presented unique difficulties. The first was simply that the rhythm between the two performers is rapid and flexible, which was not easy to recreate. This is one of the things that made being able to go line by line so important, and by the same token it was unforgiving, leaving almost no margin for anything to not match up exactly with the original.
The biggest challenges in this project, however, were mostly due to the nature of the original recording. This isn’t something recorded and produced in a studio whose process is easily recreatable, where the sound of the environment on screen is just a believable illusion. This is a live recording made with what looks to be five microphones, not necessarily close to the performers. They sound the way they do precisely because they’re really there. So, I had a lot of work ahead of me to make my dub sound like it happened on that stage and in that room. In the original, there is a relatively high noise floor from how hot the mics are and a broad stereo sound, even if Wang and Ma are generally in the center. There was only so much I could do with my mono recordings, but I carefully calibrated reverb to create space and spread each speaking track more broadly. I also duplicated the background noise track, offset it, and panned them left and right to create a general sense of space for the speaking tracks to occupy.
In the end
I would like to be able to devote more time to this or a similar project one day, but just like translation, audio projects aren’t things that you ever finish, you just stop working on them. I achieved what I think was a respectable result and when replacing the original audio track (bottom track) with mine (top track) in iMovie, it was clear I managed to replicate the original track pretty closely and got to similar levels generally with fewer clipped peaks where the recording goes above 0 dB.
