What do practitioners say a sound editor must do to prepare tracks before the mix (separation, premixes, scratch mixes, M&E), and what goes wrong when they do not?

Craft-side preparation, as distinct from delivery specs: split dialogue by mic angle; keep families on separate tracks and premix them into manageable elements; have the major effects and clean-ups ready by the first scratch mix; record the full soundscape under dialogue so an M&E exists; decide with the composer, scene by scene, whether music or effects leads. Documented failures include sketches frozen by a director's liking for the scratch mix, a composer/effects logjam in the final mix, and a live-performance compromise (Philadelphia) that left dialogue and aria on one track. Curator qualifications: All ten excerpts verbatim in pinned bytes (S1 decoded as UTF-8; S2 as cp1252). The composer/effects logjam failure in the summary is supported by Thom text adjacent to E7, although no evidence row cites it. Attribution: S1 is a 1995 Cineaste article by Elisabeth Weis quoting practitioners (Kirchberger, Bochar, Murch), not a first-person practitioner text. Findings citing it are practitioners' statements as reported by Weis. E8 (Touch of Evil stems) is offered but used in no finding. It is a positive example: separate dialogue/music/effects stems allowed a buried effects track to be recovered decades later. It supports the separation finding and is not a failure case. Add the Thom logjam sentence as an evidence row for the summary's 'composer/effects logjam' claim. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.filmsound.org/synctanks/",
      "note": "work/sync.html (equals pin): Elisabeth Weis, Sync Tanks (Cineaste, 1995) reprint; Dialog, Scratch Mixes, Rerecording sections; work/randythom_whatliesbeneath.htm (equals pin): Randy Thom interview; work/murch_evil_ (equals pin): Touch of Evil re-edit"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.filmsound.org/randythom/whatliesbeneath.htm",
      "note": "work/sync.html (equals pin): Elisabeth Weis, Sync Tanks (Cineaste, 1995) reprint; Dialog, Scratch Mixes, Rerecording sections; work/randythom_whatliesbeneath.htm (equals pin): Randy Thom interview; work/murch_evil_ (equals pin): Touch of Evil re-edit"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.filmsound.org/murch/evil/",
      "note": "work/sync.html (equals pin): Elisabeth Weis, Sync Tanks (Cineaste, 1995) reprint; Dialog, Scratch Mixes, Rerecording sections; work/randythom_whatliesbeneath.htm (equals pin): Randy Thom interview; work/murch_evil_ (equals pin): Touch of Evil re-edit"
    }
  ]
}