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What do you think of this future?
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[Richard Herd] “Imagine how much that will cost to have unlimited access to a voice for forever, but yeah I guess you could write a contract that way.”
Ask Susan Bennett:
https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2108-i-am-siris-voice-4-bizarre-realities.htmlBut it wouldn’t always need to be unlimited access to a voice forever; we license media for specific uses/timeframes all the time.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Richard Herd] “Me: Let me just type in the new script and use the talen’ts audio sample….ok done. New VO read.
Talent: Hey you! You stole my voice, you owe me MONEY.
Me: I’m sorry. here’s your money plus damages.
Client: We don’t like that phrasing, so we have a new script.
Me: Sorry. we have to re-record and PAY the VO talent.
Client: what about last time?
Me: Yeah about that, I got sued and lost, so now is there any way I can get that compensated.
“The real next conversation is…
Client: You know, this VO stuff is all just too much freekin’ trouble. I hear there’s a guy in Copenhagen who’s digitized voices off of old “out of copyright” stuff and has it all broken down into formants and phrases – his software costs $19.95 and you just load your script up and the voiceover pops out ready to go.
Lets just use that.
And so it goes.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Richard Herd] “What massive time savings? This will be a time nightmare and extend and extend and extend re-edits.”
I agree that the paperless office was an illusion, but I’m sincerely not getting that you’re not seeing this as a true breakthrough, in a good way.
The problem of providing excuses for endless edits that you note is a real one, but no different than we’ve been dealing with in NLEs for 30 years. And it’s not like the film-ness of film stopped people from insisting on new edits…
….but I know you’ve done a ton of VO editing. I know I did documentaries and news magazine stuff, so VO was constant. I’d have added years to my life if I hadn’t had to drag people back into the studio to accommodate a script change, missed cue, or some other absolutely normal, perfectly rational situation.
A colleague of mine is wrestling with this now on a project. The company offers continuing education for medical specialists, required by licensing boards. Precision is a must.
For this one recent project, a doctor did a GREAT job on the VO, as good as any pro I’ve heard…BASICALLY. But there were just enough tiny errors that… well, let’s just say you can imagine why a presentation to doctors about cutting-edge treatment might need to be razor sharp.
There were also some pieces of the script that were based on older information that was updated between when the project started and now — not the first time this happened. There were also a number of mis-speaks that are endemic to multi-hour recording sessions that they THOUGHT could be edited around, but when it came down to it, couldn’t be.
No biggie, except that the narrator is a DOCTOR, a very busy specialist with a large clinical practice, who’s also an in-demand speaker, and who lives far away. Swapping out narrators isn’t an option, for reasons.
Even just getting the doc in front of a proper microphone has been waiting for weeks. It might be months before it actually happens, plus however much time it’ll take to process the whole thing, make the vocal sessions at least plausibly match up in post, etc etc etc.
Pray that the doctor, reading the revised script, remotely, gets it close enough that a third take isn’t necessary.
Or my colleague could have done made the edits and added the tweaked new information in an hour or two, a month ago.
How is this not massive? Assuming that it works as well as it appears to in the demo, I can’t think of a single scenario where a VO editor won’t be delighted. This is one of those examples of what Arthur C. Clarke observed about a sufficiently advanced technology looking like magic. This looks like MAGIC, with demonstrably practical applications.
And really, if the worst you can say about a technology is that it’s too advanced to trust your colleagues and peers to use it ethically, well, take responsibility for yourself, and don’t worry about the other guy’s ethics any more than you already do. There are already plenty of ways for unethical people to be unethical, and it typically happens far, far before this part of the production process.
It’s certainly understandable to me why people might be hyper-tuned to this issue these days, but I ain’t buying the miniscule risks of this as outweighing the exponential rewards.
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You’re all talking about the the content business but there are other businesses in the world with other content needs like goverment, law and justice politics security spooks all over the world that could use this technology both for good and not so good. If this code gets out and nobody knows that it did or its stolen the world will certainly change before our very ears and the world woud be clueless.
Ricardo Marty
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Too late – it’s out in the wild, in a version without any watermarking. it’s inevitable.
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Maybe it has been been used. How would we know?
Ricardo Marty
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All of this amazing technology and After Effects still crashes all day everyday.
Get off my lawn kids.
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[Tim Wilson] “And really, if the worst you can say about a technology is that it’s too advanced to trust your colleagues and peers to use it ethically, well, take responsibility for yourself, and don’t worry about the other guy’s ethics any more than you already do. There are already plenty of ways for unethical people to be unethical, and it typically happens far, far before this part of the production process.
“I think the production process would be the least of concerns.
On the upside, I’m glad it’s Friday.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “[Tim Wilson] “There are already plenty of ways for unethical people to be unethical, and it typically happens far, far before this part of the production process.”
I think the production process would be the least of concerns.
On the upside, I’m glad it’s Friday.”
Yes, my exact point. This kind of tweaking doesn’t even make my list of issues in the scheme of things. I’m more of a “glass is 42% full” kind of guy than anything else (things are just shy of “okay” at best), but this time, I’m saying, “What glass? I don’t see any glass, relatively speaking. This is AWESOME.”
But yeah, I’m glad it’s Friday. Saturday means the phone doesn’t ring, so I can work even longer hours. ????????????
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[Tim Wilson] “enough tiny errors that”
New technology will create more “tiny errors.” It will not end them. It will create new management techniques for those specific things — whatever they are.
The ethics are not the worrisome part, for me, per say, nor the tech itself. I believe in contract law and agreements between people and so on. So I think that it can be managed. I just can’t imagine a VO talent agreeing to those terms, unless it’s pretty expensive, and/or exploitative like the link Walter S shared about Siri.
In the hands of an artist, this tool could be fantastic. However, I will probably make famous people make fart sounds. 🙂
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