Dialogue editing and ADR direction

Use this skill when spoken audio must carry story, brand, instruction, character, or accessibility. Treat dialogue as a performance and an editorial contract, not just a waveform. The job is to preserve intelligibility, intent, continuity, and rights while leaving the mixer, captioner, localization team, or downstream video agent with unambiguous material.

Evidence posture

Documented facts below come from professional standards, official platform guidance, official tool documentation, or rights organizations. Volatile platform/tool/legal facts were checked on 2026-07-10. Empirical observations are limited to listening/QC behaviors an agent should perform on the actual project; no universal audio-processing result is assumed without auditioning. Production heuristics are practical defaults to test against picture and delivery specs, not laws of audio.

First pass: decide what kind of dialogue problem this is

Classify each line or section before touching it:

• production-edit: usable source audio needs cleanup, smoothing, fill, conform, or comping.
• performance-fix: the words are technically usable but the read, emotion, pronunciation, emphasis, or timing fails the scene.
• ADR-replace: production sound is not intelligible, has unrecoverable noise/clipping, contains changed script, needs a legal/brand correction, or must match a new cut.
• localization-dub: new language or regional version must preserve meaning, performance, timing, and picture sync.
• VO-style-dub: original voice remains partly perceptible or intentionally dipped under a localized voice-over.
• synthetic-rerender: a licensed synthetic voice or generic TTS voice must be regenerated, edited, or directed.
• caption/transcript-handoff: text assets must represent the final heard audio accurately and accessibly.