Which file format to supply your voiceover files in? Tip #4
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! Today - number 4 - File formats.
There is a best practice in which file format to use for which purpose, and in this video I share my screen to show you how it is done. The final episode in this series is up tomorrow...
Transcript:
Hi, everyone, it's Toby Ricketts here coming to you from inside my computer today. Now this is number four of a series of five mini episodes of VOLIFE, about the top five mistakes that voice actors make when submitting their final audio. So if you haven't seen the other four, then do go back and watch those as well today. Number four is file formats. The way you submit your audio to an engineer is relatively important with file formats. Okay, there's then it's pretty simple. There's really only sort of two flavors. When you're doing auditions. The quality isn't that important. Sometimes it is. But I mean, often you just want to send that out and it gives people an idea of your voice and then they hire you if they know if they really like it. So you're fine to go with mp3 for that. So let's just record a little bit of audio. Hello, this is my audition submission. TobyRicketts voiceover there it is. So now we go Save As we bring up this save dialog which has appeared on my other screen. I'll bring In here, you want to save that in your demos folder. I always advocate having a demo folder here, which is there 2020 demos. And mp3 is the file format you want to select. Okay, now this just call it something random. We'll just call that like a demo here. Now, it gives you options here the formatting. This often confuses people. 128 kilobits per second when you're in mono is perfectly acceptable. It's it's pretty much CD quality, but there are a few sort of flaws. So 128 kilobits when you're in mono is a really is a really good place to be a little bit. Listen, that's okay, I wouldn't go lower than 80 and there's no point going 100 and higher than 192 kilobits are when you're in mono, and I say that because when you've got stereo, of course, you're compressing two channels, so half the bitrate on each of them. If that makes any sense. When you are sending your final audio (i'll cancel out of that), I'm not going to save it. Let's say this is your final Audio recording, take one, you are going to clean up your takes. As we found out in the last episode, make sure you silence those breaths, all those mouth clicks, maybe put some beeps in. If you want to like this, take one. And then when it comes to saving your final file Ctrl Shift and s on most programs to save it, you can save it in the appropriate now I always put jobs under, under client name in a jobs folder because it's really easy to find them later on. And then you can put this, you can like we said in the other episode about naming files, it's really important to put your name, the client name, the project, how many takes you've done, and whether it was a session or a while takes and then raw or processed and then the date - sounds confusing, but go back and watch the following one if you haven't already. Then you can put the file name in there which I'm not going to do and then select WAV uncompressed is what you want to do you want to say this is a WAV file, there aren't really any, any format settings with this. I wouldn't touch those ones because it's literally just recording every little bit of information. Unlike mp3, which is compressing it, it's lossy compression if you're interested in audio compression, so not audio compression data compression, then do a search online about lossy compression versus lossless compression. So WAV is uncompressed, it's the best quality, this is what engineers are going to want from you. Because then they can go to work and do all the stuff they want and there won't be any loss of quality with subsequent generations. The other options, you have other sample rate, I'll do a series on this in the future about different sample rates. I usually stick with 44,100 hertz at 16 bits just because that CD quality, it's it's applicable to most things - 48 kilohertz is when you start to get into film and television and they'll ask for it if they want it specifically. But I would stick with 44.1. So that's the basic rule of thumb if it's a demo then mp3. If it is final audio, send that as a WAV And that concludes today's lesson. So hope you guys are enjoying the series. There's one more, which is coming out tomorrow and we're going to talk about it's going to be a surprise. So yeah, I'll catch you guys tomorrow. And do go to my blog if you want some more information at TobyRickettsvoiceover.com/blog or follow the volife channel, here on Toby Ricketts on YouTube. Thanks, guys.
