Okay, I didn't get to it last weekend but today I finally managed to do an edit of Alibi Phone Network that cut around the line we didn't like as well as fix a bunch of other little things.
The latter included some sound level normalization and removing a sigh noise that didn't fit because the audio was from a different take than the video and in the video you couldn't see any sighing.
There are a bunch of places where I used audio from a different take than the visuals. Mostly it's during an over-the-shoulder shot during a dialog. The clearest dialog is usually recorded from the person facing the camera, so when the person with their back to the camera is speaking, it's generally better to try to use the audio from the take when they were facing the camera themselves. Syncing is generally not too difficult because you rarely see their lips so you just have to sync to their general head movement.
Sometimes, though, you mix takes when the person is facing the camera (if the audio is much clearer on a take that is different from the one with the best performance visually) and that's what I did that resulted in the sigh. To fix it, I literally cut out one second and replaced it with a second of "silence" from another part of the take. You have to replace it with something to get the sound of the room.
The whole concept of using audio from one take with visuals from another would never have occurred to me had it not been for a remark Bryan Singer makes in the commentary to The Usual Suspects (the first director commentary I ever owned—and on video, long before I owned a DVD player). The commentary on The Usual Suspects was probably the single best lesson in filmmaking I've ever had.
So, I think the film is pretty much done. Now to send a DVD to Tom who's arranged duplication for festival submission.
The original post was in the categories: filmmaking alibi_phone_network but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.