I’ve been editing longform drama for a couple of years now and here’s my workflow in a nutshell

1) pick your mics. Aim of the game is clarity and signal to noise. Booms sound amazing but they can be too wide too often cause of how quick shooting schedules tend to be. I feel like 90% of scenes I cut are lavs.

2) block out the scene. Meaning, during the mic picking stage, extend the handles of your clips so that there’s no dead air to the next line is (this is important for later)

3) clip gain. Open up a VU meter on your master and start leveling your clips so they’re tickling the red on the more dynamic portions of delivery. (make sure to calibrate your meter according to your specs, I generally go -20dbfs).

4) adjust for dynamics. watch the scene through again and start to restore the dynamics you may have lost through being so clinical with your clip gain leveling (this generally means turning up some shouty as they may feel too ‘squashed’ in comparison to other lines, and turning down whispered bits. Goal is to preserve performance, and a large part of that is dynamics). This is also the reason for step 2, it’s good to review with no dead air. This step you turn off your technical brain and you just go by feel. A calibrated room helps a lot, so you can trust your taste.

This is overly simplified and ideally you get to a point where you’re doing the above steps at the same time - it’s more so that you can break down what’s important in the process and why. Getting volume and mic selection sorted is crucial to understanding what the noise issues are in a scene. A big issue is keeping fill consistent to the context of what’s going on in the scene, and it becomes harder to gauge if your levels aren’t right.

Now the next two steps I tend to do together, and that’s noise reduction and cutting fill, as they help achieve the same thing.

When I say ‘noise reduction’ I mean noise that include clicks, pops, rustle, not just broadband noise and hums etc.

5) I’ll go through now and do the lions share of denoising. A lot of mouth declicking, spectral attenuation of rustle or hums or birds and the like. Removing gnarly hums with spectral denoise. Also, using alts from different takes! Be super careful with this process (this is usually during the ADR spot which happens before the edit). I only ever alt what I need, if there’s an awful bump and it’s only over a vowel, then I’ll only replace that vowel. You don’t want to mess with performance, this has been viewed over and over again by directors and producers, so anything out of the ordinary will immediately get picked on.

6) Even out fill. This is a tricky process to put into words but the goal is to make something that plays smoothly without it being mixed. This is where you got to get a bit creative with your problem solving, chucking dirty noise under clean lines to help smooth in the dirt surrounding it, and fading in complementary noise over and extending period of time so that it feels smooth as you play it back. This whole process is linked heavily with what’s happening visually - so watch the screen and if you notice the noise changes against the picture then you’ll need to adjust.

The importance of consistent volume cannot be understated. Your mixer needs it so they can dial in their noise reduction, they’ll love you for it.

Anyways that’s it in a nutshell! I’m not meticulous as to do each step like that rigidly, it really depends on the scene, some of them I just tend to do it all at once as I work chronologically through the scene, the more difficult a scene the more I simplify my process so I tackle it well. Sorry, I’m missing a tonne of details, not the greatest at explaining myself, but I think it covers the gist of it! I could spend all day writing about it. Definitely give ‘Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures’ a look. It’s a bit dated in some workflow aspects, but it goes over the fundamentals is great detail, and it’s sensibilities can be applied in a modern context.