If you're like me, editing dialogue can become very tedious, so anything I can learn to make that job go faster is something worth remembering. Here's a quick tip on using Pro Tools' Strip Silence feature to quickly separate dialogue and room tone. I hadn't thought of using Strip Silence for this task before, but I found that it works pretty well. Take a look and see if it's something that would work for you.

In this example, I duplicated the dialogue track and used Strip Silence the standard way on the original track, and used Extract on the duplicate. Now I had the option to start editing all the extracted room tone and building it all up, without worrying about messing up the original track.

Another way I started using this technique was on a live recording, where I wanted to duck the on-stage spill from other instruments. Instead of setting up a ducking compressor, or manually editing the track, I did the same thing and just lowered the track volume on the duplicate "spill track", while still keeping the live feel. It took me all of 30 seconds, so I hope to keep finding useful ways of utilizing Strip Silence.