Routing to the Best Voice You Can Think of
By Ashleigh Mcenaney
Do a test run with a short sequence. Do micro and software work properly and are all settings correct? Be sure to listen to the test recording with headphones! Only then can you correctly assess the audio quality of the recording.
Another professional tip before the start: Take a few seconds of silence, this will help you later in the sound editing for the video. Let’s go. With the male voice actors you can expect miracles.
Attention, flap, The recording
Do you have your microphone at hand, open the audio program and have the script at hand? Then you are ready to start recording. Now your qualities are in demand as a speaker! Moderators and dubbing professionals can pick up some helpful strategies:
- Speak clearly and take breaks. Your audience will follow both your commentary and what’s happening on the screen. Give you enough time to process this information.
- Vary speech melody and speech tempo. A simple trick is to emphasize what has been said through facial expressions and gestures. Even if your audience can not see you, they will hear the difference. Your presentation will be more lively!
- Just repeat the last few phrases. You have promised or lost the thread despite script? That’s not tragic. Take a quick breath and just sit back in front of the spot. You’ll cut it later.
If you find it difficult to endure the sound of your own voice, that’s what even pros do in the beginning. You get used to it! The more you listen to yourself, the faster you will make friends with the sound of your voice.
Post-production
- Once the shot is in the box, it goes to the fine-tuning. Here you can, thanks to the audio software, achieve surprisingly good results with just a few clicks.
- Choose a good audio program to handle your voice-over recording.
- Cut out pauses, fags and breathers by selecting and deleting the sequences.
Remove the noise from your recording. For Audacity, this option is called ” Noise Reduction “. Highlight the silence you recorded at the beginning and let Audacity determine the noise profile. Then call up the Noise Reduction option again and execute “Step 2”. Audacity then applies the noise profile to the entire file.
For the advanced and adventurous: Edit your recording with compressor, equalizer and the Normalize effect to achieve the typical radio moderator sound. Here is a very short and crisp manual.
When you record your voice over, sound and picture are automatically in sync, and most of the time, you do not need to do anything else. If you recorded the sound with an audio program, you need to import the file into your editing program and then sync the audio and video tracks.
Conclusion
Voilà! Done is the first voice-over. Incidentally, there are two schools in terms of the order of audio and video recording: Some take the picture first and make the voice over with the video in mind. The others do it the other way round and tune your video sequences to the soundtrack. Try out what you can handle best. The main thing is, you are having fun – then it is your audience!
