Voiceover Artists - clean up your messy takes!
As a voiceover artist and a sound engineer with over 25 years experience, I now have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t when supplying voiceover tracks for any kind of recorded media. I’m doing a short video mini-series on the top 5 things that will improve the experience for both voice artist and audio / video producer! Continuing my video mini-series series this week - How VO artists can improve their final audio.
Today we look at #2 - Cleaning your messy takes! Think of your poor sound engineer listening to your sneezes, mouth clicks and mistakes! Tidy them up and keep them happy!
Here’s the transcript:
Hi there, Toby Ricketts here again, voiceover artist coming to you from my studio. This is the second in a series of five this week where I'm talking about how to submit your voiceover audio, so that you and the client have the best experience. And today we're talking about messy takes, unedited takes. Basically, you need to submit your audio as perfect tracks. There should be no no retakes in there. And this is an alternate version. There should be no nothing where you fluff it. And then you go back to the beginning of the sentence, none of that you need to go and need to clean up these takes, so that the video editor can just slot in whichever takes best and they don't have to do any editing because why should they spend their time fixing your mistakes. It's amazing how many people submit voiceover audio, which is which has got mistakes and say I shouldn't be doing this. You know, I'm paying you to do the voiceover so give me complete takes. And also as an aside - It's worth slating your takes, which means you know saying what the project is this is take one ABC perhaps. So that if it's a really long voice file, people don't get like lost in it because when it's just a waveform information I'll show you. So we take a very long session like this is a live session I did for visa recently, I as you can see, there's lots of takes in there and say which ones which you can put markers in like I've done here just to give yourself some space. But what helps is to do this. I just took one take here, and you're here. But this is how I labeled the takes in the audio. This is take six aligned to ABC. So so a farmer in Minnesota can buy hands net admittance from Moscow, at a coffee company in Colombia can reach buyers in Cape Town, B. So go line by line and we do it ABC takes, it gets very confusing. If I didn't have any reference in there, I'd have to listen to each one. And I wouldn't know which one was which. Because often at the time, we've got a voiceover form here, which I'm writing down, I'm circling which of the good takes, and then producer will be doing the same thing. So you're editing before you even get into the Edit, if you know what I mean. And if you don't have any like markers in there, like saying ABC, then it gets very challenging. The other thing you can do is, you know, just have this like it was a cough in here, I was a bit of a lip smacking noise, it's just nice to mute those out. It's just a nice thing to do. And sometimes also between takes, I put a little beeping, I've got a hotkey on the keyboard here, but it's T, you go T, and it goes. And it puts a little beep in there. And what that signifies that someone is, this is the beginning of the take a line to ABC. So a farmer in Minnesota, see what I mean? So it just kind of like gives like a marker reference. And I didn't say at the beginning of that one, which I probably should have done. Anyway, so send through audio that is complete. It's got no mistakes in it, it's in the right order. And it's labeled because it's so much easier for the audio engineer to then go in and if you make it easy for the audio engineer, you'll probably get more work through them. So hopefully that was useful. Toby Ricketts signing off and stay tuned for episodes, three, four and five. There are three more things that you can do better when submitting your final voice files. And if you want to watch the old ones, then go to TobyRickettsvoiceover.com slash blog or follow me on all of this amazing social media. Thanks guys chat again soon
