Later, video tape and then digital technology replaced the film loops and the process became known as automated dialogue replacement (ADR). Loading and reloading the film loops while the talent and recording crew stood by was a tedious process.
This was known as "looping" or a "looping session". For each scene the loop would be played over and over while the voice actor performed the lines trying to synchronize them to the filmed performance. In the early days of talkies, a loop of film would be cut and spliced together for each of the scenes that needed to be rerecorded, then one-by-one the loops would be loaded onto a projector. Methods Īutomated dialogue replacement ( ADR) is the process of re-recording dialogue by the original actor (or a replacement actor) after the filming process to improve audio quality or make changes to the originally scripted dialog.
Use of dubbing meant that multi-national casts could be assembled and were able to use their preferred language for their performances, with appropriate post-production dubs being carried out before distributing versions of the film in the appropriate language for each territory. In Western Europe after World War II, dubbing was attractive to many film producers as it helped to enable co-production between companies in different countries, in turn allowing them to pool resources and benefit from financial support from multiple governments. First post- WWII movie dub was Konstantin Zaslonov (1949) dubbed from Russian to the Czech language. In post-Nazi Germany, dubbing was used to downplay events in the country's recent past, as in the case of the dub of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, where the Nazi organisation upon which the film's plot centres was changed to a drug smuggling enterprise.
In authoritarian states such as Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, dubbing could be used to enforce particular ideological agendas, excising negative references to the nation and its leaders and promoting standardised national languages at the expense of local dialects and minority languages. In many countries dubbing was adopted, at least in part, for political reasons. In foreign distribution, dubbing is common in theatrically released films, television films, television series, cartoons, and anime.