Voice Overs

J

Jokerswild

Well-known member
I just had one of my still photography clients tell me they had a training film done and the company used a voice over talent in California. They said they did the reading of the words over the telephone, to the East Coast. My client was skeptical of the quality but they were amazed that if came out fantastic. They were listening live to the talent, even correcting him as he was speaking. Is there some special equipment used for this? I never would have thought the quality would be as good as it was.

Evidently the video company has been in business since 1974 and they really know what they are doing, even suggesting that for the French language voice over part, they should film the sequences a little longer because in French, it takes longer to describe things..I would have never thought of that. Sort of depressed me as I am just getting in to this...Oh well, gotta start somewhere I guess.
 
I've done a number of voice overs this way... the feed you here down the phone is a split line... the voice over is recorded clean and a channel is set down the phone line for monitoring... after the session they generally send a aiff, wave or mp3 version of the take...

Cheers

Les

www.les.herstik.com
 
All of the VO's I've hired out I've done as Les is describing. I think what your client is talking about though Jkerswild is an ISDN link between two studio. Quite common in live radio interviews where the guest might be in another location. It's definitely not your normal phone line. I've heard of this method being used to record in a remote studio as well. Perhaps a VO artist has a home studio and ISDN he can link to a remote studio anywhere with ISDN and they can do their own mix right there and just record away like the talent was in the studio as far as I understand.
 
Thanks Zaza for the reassurance - I had only heard that it was done this way and wasnt totally sure. Is this still a common place occurrence or are most just sending a wave of the recording over via email or ftp? Seems a heck of alot cheaper for smaller guys like me that would like to avoid costs of going to a studio with an ISDN line and paying them to basically record and do a minimal mix I could do myself.
 
Yes... it would be cheaper for smaller guys just to get the files, but when you're dealing with a larger client and the voive talent is on the other side of the country or world, ISDN is the way to go. It's just like they are in the other room...and MUCH cheaper then flying them in for the session. If you'd like to know more, check this out: http://www.telos-systems.com/?/zephyr/default.htm

I owned & operated a recording studio for over 20 years....ISDN was a must have. I was in NY and without fail, clients wanted to use voices from LA!

Go figure...
 
Higher-end VO talent use ISDN all the time - often from their own private studio. It's very, very, common.
 
I have learned a lot from this thread....and here is what I learned:

THERE IS A LOT I DON'T KNOW!!!!!!! hahahaha, thanks folks. This is very interesting. Thanks for the input.
 
We do this several times a week and it's awesome. We use Procomm.
http://www.procommss.com/
Many of our clients don't want local talent so they log into procomm, listen to voices catigorized by age, sex, type of voice etc. Then we schedule a session with the talent and it's like the talent is in our recording booth being directed locally.

We even did one with the head of the UN, Copi Anon? a few months back.
It's really amozing. For one recent session we used a 10 year old who had his studio in his bedroom! :)

Don't feel bad about not knowing EVERYTHING. I've been in broadcast for 30 years and about the time I start getting a handle on "everything", everything changes. :)
Gotta learn something new every day to stay on top of it.
 
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