Cueing and recording ADR is an essential part of film and narrative television production. ADR sessions are expensive to run, so going into one as organised as possible makes a huge difference.

In this article, Korey Pereira shows a great free app from Pete Gates that helps to create the necessary ADR cuesheets, required for a smooth-running ADR session.

What Is ADR Cueing?

There’s an art to capturing the performance of an actor or artist in a recording studio. An important part of this creative process is removing obstacles and solving challenges that may be present so that the actor may be at ease and deliver their best.

When it comes to capturing ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement), otherwise known as Post Sync Dialogue, one of the ways to make it easier to run an ADR record session is to have accurate ADR cuesheets that detail exactly what needs to be recorded and why. It’s the job of the ADR supervisor to prepare the ADR cuesheets and bring them to the ADR record session.

If you only have a small number of cues, one can create an ADR cuesheet using Google Docs or Sheets. However, on a more involved project with multiple actors and potentially hundreds of ADR cues, this process becomes more daunting.

How To Create ADR Cuesheets

There are several fantastic tools out there, like EdiCue from Sounds In Sync, which offer a full suite of tools for the professional ADR editor or facility. However, they are quite expensive, which makes them unobtainable for many freelancers, small studios or independent filmmakers who may only need to make ADR cuesheets a few times a year.

Cue the free tool PG PT Session.

If you have been using Pro Tools for a while, like me, you are probably already familiar with PG PT Prefs, which is a handy tool to manage Pro Tools preferences on your system. I have been using this for years. The PG in the name stands for Pete Gates. Pete is a sound editor for a number of projects, including the 2020 television hit Brave New World. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend giving it a watch. 

If you visit his site, he has a simple and straightforward mission statement:

“I write software utilities to fulfil my professional needs - I use Avid Pro Tools exclusively so this software is orientated around that. 

The software may be clunky but is hopefully useful! There’s no support, no forum, no blog, no Twitter feed, no Facebook page… The upside is everything that appears on this site is and will remain free (and no third party is permitted resell it in any form). 

Donations via Paypal are welcomed via the Donate button below but they are entirely optional.”

In 2017 I found myself editing dialogue on a series of low budget projects that required me to cue the ADR. Not able to justify buying EdiCue yet, I did a quick Google search for “free ADR cueing software,” and up popped this thread on the Avid DUC.

Pete Gates had created another amazingly useful (and free) tool, PG PT Session. Originally designed for creating music cue sheets, it has evolved into a powerful tool for generating ADR cuesheets.

The software uses cleverly formatted clip groups in Pro Tools to cue the foley, which can then be imported into PG PT Session when you are ready to generate your cuesheets.

Here is an excerpt from that DUC posting detailing how to manually format your ADR tracks and clip groups…

PG PT Session could already read Pro Tools ‘Session Info As Text’ files and export them to text or Excel files. It can now convert clips/region groups to ADR sheet PDF files too. It recognises and uses the common naming and tag scheme. For example, a track with a name of the form:- KLAUS[KLA]{Actor Name} - is recognised as…

Character:KLAUS
Character code:KLA
Actor:Actor Name

Note that Character/Character code/Actor aren't limited to any particular length, though really long ones may get messy on the printout.

Clips of the form:- "Text for ADR"{note text}[R1][P2][TBW] - are recognised, with anything after the initial text being optional. More esoteric tags/features aren't there yet.

When it comes to "the adr text itself"…
{any director/editor/actor note} - these can be suppressed on output
[R1] Reason 1 - (can be 1-9) - this can be suppressed on output
[P2] Priority 2 - (can be 1-9) - this can be suppressed on output
[TBW] To Be Written flag - this can be suppressed on output

You can export tracks individually or select multiple ones and do a bulk export - you choose a filename and the Character Name is appended to the respective files.

You can export tracks that aren't ADR cue tracks as such. There are no MIDI or Pro Tools control features yet - and probably some other useful things are missing (if you need those features you probably need one of the commercial offerings)!

Over the years, Pete has continued to add features to make the software more comprehensive and easier to use. The one that really got me excited was the addition of the PT Remote, which adds a floating window that lets you easily program information into clip groups in your Pro Tools session. 

I have used PG PT Session on a number of projects over the years and have no complaints. It just works. Because all the cue information lives within Pro Tools, it is easy to have the cues follow through re-conforms.

If you are someone that is responsible for cueing ADR or generating cuesheets and are not yet able to shell out the $645 for EdiCue (which is fantastic software, don’t get me wrong), then I highly recommend downloading PG PT Session and taking it for a spin. To get an idea of what you can expect, I have included an ADR cue session and corresponding ADR sheets for a short film I supervised and mixed, Start With a Song, by director Sebastián Bisbal I created using PG PT Session.

Demo Session And Cuesheets For You To Download

I have put together a demo Pro Tools session to show how PG PT Session works. You can see each actor has a track, with the ADR line as empty clipgroups in the place on the timeline where they are needed.

If we look at the close up of one section, we can see the lines for Cop1 and Cop2. Below, are the ADR cuesheets that I have outputted for these 2 characters to show what the ADR cuesheet from PG PT Session looks like…

Born Out Of Necessity

I have to say, like Kraken Dialogue Editors Toolkit, Pete’s PG PT Session was born of a necessity of a fellow soundie who happens to be willing to share their talents as a programmer with the rest of us.

For the price of free, you can’t go wrong. If you find the software useful, be sure to show your gratitude and send a little cash Pete’s way to buy him a virtual pint, coffee or proper feast for making our lives as editors a little easier without breaking the bank.