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Record audio commentary with commentator in remote locations.
Dear colleagues,
Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe.
I have a crazy idea. I’m authoring a DVD (yeah some people still use that!) of an old college performance for my client. My client would like to have a VOIP call (skype, zoom, etc.) with 2 of his former college mates and record an audio commentary while watching the performance.
I don’t really think it’s possible to record their voices without the performance audio.
If someone knows of a way or a tool that can somehow help us achieve this I’d love to know. I would then take the recorded commentary audio and mix it in post since the audio I have would be of much better quality and I could also do audio dips when they’re talking.
Thanks for any feedback!
Xavier
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5 Replies
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This doesn’t sound very different from recording a podcast episode with two remote participants. To get the best sound, ideally each of the former college mates would record their commentary into a good microphone into a recorder locally, but assuming that’s not possible (a good assumption), it could be done on your Mac. The tricky thing is creating a mix-minus, where each commentator hears the soundtrack and the other commentator, but not themselves (which would create an echo). There are a number of ways to do this. I use the Loopback app from Rogue Amoeba; I think Audio Hijack Pro (also from Rogue Amoeba) can do this; there are also online services that can host these kinds of three- or four-way conversations.
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@Brad Hurley
Unfortunately, LoopBack is great but I don’t think the commentators will want to pay the license fee for just this one use.
The other idea would perhaps be to have each commentator join the VOIP call using headphones (so as to confine the performance audio to just their ears) and record their voice using their iPhone’s Voice Memos app. Do you see anything wrong with this workaround?
I don’t know of any online services that can do this. Please send me some info about this if possible.
Thanks!
Xavier
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“Unfortunately, LoopBack is great but I don’t think the commentators will want to pay the license fee for just this one use. ”
They wouldn’t, only you need it on your computer. I’ve been using Loopback to record calls with three participants (me at the computer doing the recording, one remote participant on Skype, one remote participant on Google Hangouts). Using Loopback I can send them each a mix-minus so they can hear each other but not themselves, and all of our voices go on separate tracks in my DAW so I can mix them to taste later.
I’m tied up for the rest of the day but will see if I can dig up names of some of these online podcast services; if you do a Google search for “online podcast recording service” you’ll probably find them. What you want to do is very similar to recording a three- or four-way podcast with remote participants.
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“he other idea would perhaps be to have each commentator join the VOIP call using headphones (so as to confine the performance audio to just their ears) and record their voice using their iPhone’s Voice Memos app. Do you see anything wrong with this workaround?”
It could work as long as the headphones don’t bleed too much. Syncing them up to the video in post shouldn’t be too hard, since you won’t be filming them and thus don’t need to be super-precise.
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Hi Brad,
I looked into Zencastr and it looks like it will do the trick.
Thank you for all your help.
Stay safe!
Xavier
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