Voiceover novice inquiry

[Mark Suszko]

Wow, that’s a lot of questions. I can only touch on this briefly.

A booth would be great, obviously, but any place that is acoustically “dead” will work though. You can come up with workable “guerilla” recording spaces if you think outside the carpeted box. A large closet, full of clothes on hangers, will absorb echoes and reverb. Likewise I know of guys with really good, quiet cars, that park the car in the garage and record inside it (facing away from the windshield). Just standing a roll of carpeting on end and unrolling it into a corner can create a boothlike space that might work for a quickie session. Use your imagination to find an expedient space. Music stores often have practice rooms for rent that are heavily soundproofed. Just don’t go when the drummers are there;-) They might be able to set you up with a mic and simple recording setup all in one easy package, for not a lot of money. Whatever you choose for a space, you want to listen out for the things we train our ears to ignore in daily living, but that jump out when we make a recording: air handler noise, motor noise from fans, compressors, office machinery, pipes, traffic, that kind of stuff.

Mic wise, you can use a stick mic or a lav. I would look for a more directional mic, so as to exclude more background/ambience from the recording, so I’d be looking for a stick type cardioid or hypercardioid-pattern mic over a lav, unless the room was really quiet, visit the web catalog for TecNec, Markertek, or the like for notes on mics and their properties. Generally with mics you get what you pay for. If you have a pro video gear rental place or music instrument store near you, you might be able to rent a really nice mic for ten-twenty bucks for the day.

Don’t use an on-camera shotgun mic from a consumer type camera, unless you can disconnect it from the camera and use a cable to distance it from the noise of the camera. Use a proper mic stand, Radio Shack sells them for under ten bucks. My guide to proper mouth to mic distance is to open up and spread out the fingers of your hand, as wide as you can, and put the thumb on your lips and the pinkie on the mic, to get the proper distance.

Set the recording device’s levels close to, but under, the peak. What you absolutely want to avoid is clipping with digital recording, too low a level can be normalized or brought up, but that also brings up the background noise level. Higher levels give a better signal to noise ratio, making a cleaner recording, but again, you risk going over into clipping and distortion. Analog recording is much more forgiving of over-peaks, but at some point you still have to digitize it, so look for levels that get a good saturation but that don’t peak too high. I can’t advise in more detail without knowing what you’re recording with. As a beginner, you might try using automatic level control, but beware this can get you into trouble if the person pauses…Shatner-like…. in their reads or wavers a lot in their output, it will tend to pump up the noise during pauses and breaths, leading to distorted or clipped sound at the beginning of new words and etc.

You should definitely be there when the recordings are made, if at all possible, to have some say in the timing, phrasing, and continuity of takes. Are you cutting the narrations to fit a pre-edited video sequence? Then you’ll need a silent stopwatch or other way to time the takes. Slate each take with a page and paragraph number and take number as you record it. Listen with headphones on. Check each good take off on a copy of the script as you go, drawing a line thru each paragraph as you get a “keeper” take for it. That will speed you up in post.

Also record a minute of “room tone”, the sound of the person just sitting there doing nothing, before they begin reading. This may come in very handy later when tweaking the audio.

Regarding machines and media, use whatever you can, FCP is very flexible on it’s own, and the audio tools budled with it add even more control… Be careful to match up all your sample rates unless you want to chase bad timing/ lipsynch issues later (well, it’s voiceover, so that may not be a real problem this time, but it never hurts to get into good habits early).

Good luck!

[Scot Walker]

Answers:

1. Anything is possible, but my clients expect me to handle the VO.
2. No. They can do it straight into anyone’s computer and then send you the audio file via the Internet or CD.
3. I wouldn’t do it in your office since you have a lot of noise (computers). Get it done professionally.

There are pros who do VO and do the recording in their home studio. You can listen to them reading your script on the phone. The guy I use most often, Gary Williams, is a pro. I listen to him over the phone and then when the session is done, he edits it together and then uploads the file to my server. It’s $425 an hour for that.

Many people go into professional studios, which charge around $125 and up per hour with engineer. You set up a time and have the VO talent and your client show up with the script. They read it and it gets recorded and you leave the studio with a CD of your audio.

Believe me, having a pro do it will make your project much more polished. And getting union talent will save you time in the studio. Gary Williams reads entire pages without flubbing lines. He does pick-ups quickly too. Pick-ups is the term used when you have a change in the script and you need your VO talent to go back and read just a line or two. Clients can’t seem to stick with a script and make changes often. It’s like they aren’t even paying attentioni until you are right up on the deadline. 🙂

Good luck.

[John Fishback]

I couldn’t agree more with Scot. Have it done professionally. A lousy track will subjectively tell the audience the program is lousy. All the VOs people hear on radio and TV are professional. This is what they expect and when they don’t hear it they think something is wrong. A pro will not only save you time he or she might also save you a client.

John

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[Saya Hillman]

Thanks for all the input guys, I appreciate it —

Client is a non-profit, so has no $$ for a professional. They’ve done
the VO in the past and want to do it again. I’m doing project out of
goodness of my heart (no $$ for me either), so want to find the most
efficient/least time consumming way for me, but that still yields relatively good quality.

I’ll take all your suggestions into consideration, thanks again!