Issues with a new style of dialog editing (in Premiere)

I had a very strange day trying to deal with what seems to be a new style of dialog editing by picture editors using Premiere. I come from the school where dialog editing means you edit the clips of dialog, shaping the cut by moving the start end end of a given clip until it's where you want it. This has been how every project of any kind I've done over the decades has been exported to me from the picture NLE. Today I got a cut in which the editor would checkerboard the roughly cut clips of dialog without topping and tailing them, and then used breakpoint volume control (one form of PP's volume automation) to do the fine edit shaping. This involved a lot of steep volume curves ("rocket takeoffs and plunges") to make the cut work, with no, like zero, clip levelling done at all. Thus all the music clips (which were all library cuts) had the breakpoint auto at about 5% level under dialog (since the orig levels were maxed--to 0 db). Have I missed a sea change in editorial style? This method sucked pretty completely for me--all that breakpoint auto was turned into fader automation on import (via OMF), so the mixer faders were screaming all over the place. The only thing I could think to do was nuke all that automation, do all the clip edits the way I thought they wanted them and then do all the clip levels and then EQ etc etc. I got through the dialog with only a few things I missed that the filmmakers wanted from the editor's cut, but the music editing was so weird this way that I ended up rendering out the editor's cut+mix to a new stereo file to make sure I hadn't bolluxed their music edits by not being able to sort out what was happening in this wacky editing scheme. PLEASE tell me that this is an anomalous way of working, that Adobe is not recommending this method to editors…



philp