Once you have all the recordings, it's time to start massaging the lines into place. If the naming of the files was done correctly and you have the marked script in hand, finding the lines should be very quick and easy.
A quick word on monitoring: unless you have a really quiet room to edit in and a decent set of studio-grade speakers, it's best to do this (and any dialogue editing, for that matter) on headphones. High-quality headphones, that is – not those Walkman-style flimsy things. If you can invest a bit over $100 on any piece of additional gear for your system, make it a pair of great headphones, like the Sony MDR-7506. You will always find them handy and they will save your butt many times.
In your master dialogue session, import all the files, including the takes that weren't marked as keepers. You may need to have alternate choices ready in case the director changes his or her mind. Create two sets of mono tracks, one for the chosen takes and one for the alternates (if the director didn't choose 'alts', you will need to choose one take per line that will be your alt take). The number of tracks will depend on how many lines overlap each other in the timeline. Have the same number of tracks for each set and name them ADR 1, ADR 2, ADR 3, ect. and ADR ALT 1, ADR ALT 2, ADR ALT 3, etc. After pulling the corresponding files into these tracks, make sure these new ADR regions are lined up to the original sync dialogue regions as closely as possible by using the waveforms as a visual reference.
Next, you have a few options. You can zoom in, cut the waveforms at zero-crossing points (where the waveform crosses the horizontal line in the middle of the track) and manipulate the pieces using the Time Compression/Expansion tool in ProTools. This requires a great deal of care, as you want to keep the lines from sounding unnatural or choppy. Another option is to get a hold of a trial demo of VocAlign (it's fully-functional and good for a few days – you can download it and the manual here). VocAlign speeds the process significantly by analysing both the original and the ADR lines and matching the waveforms automatically. It takes a bit of adjusting for each line, so be sure to read the manual to get the most out of it. As a side note, VocAlign comes as part of the DV Toolkit 2 package from Digidesign, which is good to get if you plan to stick with ProTools LE (although a bit pricey, in my opinion).
When every ADR line looks perfectly lined up to its sync counterpart, listen closely to all of them. They need to look and sound like the actor is actually saying them, obviously, but sometimes I've found that when shooting, some actors tend to speak without moving their lips much, and a perfectly clean ADR line will look funny, even though it's precisely in sync. The solution is to move the selected ADR take to an alternate track and look for a different take that is a bit less enunciated, more mumbled.
If you have done the rest of the dialogue edit, be sure to not delete any sync dialogue from the timeline. For every line you have replaced with ADR, there should also be an alternate ADR take and the original sync take. I recently worked with a seasoned dialogue editor who has done many films, and on this project he decided to give me just the selected ADR takes, with no alternates or the original sync takes. Of course, at the final mix, the director went ballistic because he wanted to try and use a few of the sync takes and they weren't available. So I had to pull up the uncut OMF to get to the original sync sound, phone the dialogue editor to ask him to bring me a folder with all the ADR alternates, and then edit the sync and alternate takes into my mix session. This was a huge waste of time, which could have been avoided by simply keeping those takes in, in the first place.
Later I will talk about mixing sync dialogue and ADR together to make them sound as similar as possible.
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