Help Creating an M&E Delivery

Question

Greetings!
I did a search but came up empty. I need to deliver a full M&E track to a distributor and I was wondering if there were any resources specific to this. For example, if I keyframe all of the SFX out of the dialog track, is there a way to invert the keyframes to create the SFX extracted track? Should I be using the healing brush instead so I retain room tone? Should I be trying to remove room tone from the dialog track? Anyway, just some thoughts. I welcome guidance before I set upon this task!
Jonathan

Answer 1

How easy this is inevitably depends on whether you have the original separated tracks available, and every time I've ever done stripped-back versions, I've had the raw unmixed versions, and created stem mixes from them. Most material where it's known that it's going to be language dubbed is prepared in post with this in mind, which makes it a lot easier. Expectations about how clean the track should be will vary - I don't think that there's any real standard there; it all depends on what you have to work with. Personally if I could get the dialogue out, I wouldn't worry about the SFX - send them what's there. And you should send them the original dialogue track too if they haven't already got it - then at least they have some sort of idea of what they have to replace in terms of delivery, etc.
One of the more interesting issues with this is when you have main dialogue easily separated, but additional dialogue mixed in on other tracks - sometimes with crowd scenes, etc. Do you need to remove absolutely everything? Personally, I wouldn't bother unless it was seriously detrimental to the action.
The reason that it ends up as a mess is that the replacement dialogue invariably doesn't lip-sync  very well when you look at the end result. Which is hardly surprising, really... and no amount of QC can fix that!