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Voice Over Booth Madness
Ok here is the rub. I have been charged with building a VO booth For Final Cut Pro. It has to support mics and playback monitoring for two seats of talent including monitoring for the audio playback of Final Cut, the talent mics in each other’s headsets and of course talk back for a producer. Originally I went with an apogee ensemble using fire wire to connect it to the Mac Thinking it was like avid and that it could record two channels of audio into the timeline and everything would be simple. I had planned to monitor FCP’s output through and old AJA Iola(on its own fire wire bus of course) and use a small Mackie mixer for monitoring and talent playback. Everything worked great and the apogee laid down some pretty impressive sounding audio. Then I tried to record headset number two and made a startling and maddening discovery. The vo tool in FCP will only record one channel in at a time. For some reason I assumed it was like Avid and Vegas and premier and could record at least two channels of audio at a time. Now I have to completely change the config of my setup and I have decided to go with the next best option, a digital mixer with routing capabilities.( its not as expensive as it sounds, hell the apogee was two grand!) I am leaning towards the tried and true Yamaha O1V69V2 however Persouns has a new mixer on the horizon that I hear a lot of good things about and it has a fire wire interface to boot! So if anyone here has any experience with such an endeavor I would be grateful for your input. (Seriously, ONE FRICKEN CHANNEL!!)
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12 Replies
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I’m using Soundtrack Pro for all my voice over recording these days.
Much easier setup and apart from a slightly stuttering picture (could be due to the ioHD I use) recordings are much easier.
I love the punch in and out functionality of Soundtrack as I can playback the last recording and punch the new rec on the same track on-the-fly!
To make it as smooth as possible I export the picture and sound as quicktime self-contained from FCP rather then sending the project over.
Maybe you should have a look as I’m sure you could use the Apogee as intended (don’t have one myself)
Cheers
Carsten
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I would never consider using FCP to record VO. A digital desk with built in talk back is a great idea.
I haven’t used STP as I have Fairlights here, but I would recommend using an audio tool with embedded QT playback rather than making a picture editing tool go beyond its scope. That goes for AVID et al. None of them are up to the task in my opinion.
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As suggested, use SoundTrack Pro. The VO Tool in FCP works just fine, but STP would be better suited to what you’re trying to do. With a very fast array, you could send the project into STP and then send it back to FCP.
I even record voice overs directly to Quicktime Pro when there’s no video required. That works very well and extremely easy. The audio is the same quality since it’s coming through our AJA Kona.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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I originally thought of using STP but I share an office with 7 other people that don’t know any thing about STP. Some of them I still have to beat over the head about matching settings. I could give it a weeks trial and see what happens. Maybe the people in my office will surprise me.
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You can always set up a Voice Over template project that they use each time.
A client of mine in Colorado does this with FCP. He records all of his voice overs directly into FCP and then uploads an AIFF file for us to cut with. He has a simple FCP Voice Over Project file that he always uses to do this.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Apart from exporting the sequence from FCP and setting up mics and audio mixer it takes about 1 min to setup STP for recording.
If your fellow office guys can handle the audio hardware they can handle STP! The only tricky thing is that you have to specify the recording directory in the preferences…
They might even start additional audio sweetening in STP 🙂
Cheers
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I have actually ran doing the VO in STP by a couple of my coworkers and while some seem Ok with it there are others (my boss) that don’t understand the first thing about Sound track. So the we decide to go with the audio board option. The Presonus Studio Live should give us the flexibility and quality we need while being familar enough to natives so they can have a basic understanding of whats going on. Lowest common denominator. What can you do. Thanks guys
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Other that ADR, I not found that the voice talent needs to watch the video for a voice over. Plus, your talent will often give a better performance without the video distraction.
I’m doing all my voice recording on Soundtrack Pro on a Macbook Pro, with a Mackie 1204 mixer and a creative labs USB sound card.
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Actually the content we are voice recording are one to two hour Racing shows that the talent has to call as if it was live for speed channel. (Yes, I know. We’re cheating!) So video viewing is a must.
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Hello Carsten
I’m picking up on your aged comment regarding STP :
I love the punch in and out functionality of Soundtrack as I can playback the last recording and punch the new rec on the same track on-the-fly!
When you punch in on the fly – how do you stop hearing the ‘old’ audio that is already on the track?
cheers
Mark
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