What's the proper setting for voice overs?

Report · Nov 24, 2023

Greetings,

I have been working on recording voiceovers and was wondering if anyone knew what is good setting to use in audition to have a professional sounding recording? I have watched different YouTube videos on how to do this and yet nothing seems to work.

Report · Nov 24, 2023

The reason that nothing seems to work is very simple - all voices, and voice-overs, are different! People have different voices, they use different mics and they record in different acoustics. There is absolutely no one setting that will improve everything. Most of getting a good result is about everything except the settings in your computer - so it's about a treated space, the proper mic set up properly and getting your voice into a good shape. What you are aiming for, in fact, is to need to do the absolute minimum in the way of post-recording treatment to get the result you want. And it takes most people a while to get to this stage - there's no quick fix, I'm afraid.

Report · Nov 24, 2023

Ok. Forgive me for my ignorance, but are you saying this applies to noise reduction(the features inside audition) as well? I understand that people have different voices, but I'm referring to delivering a quality and or professional sounding voice over product to clients.

Report · Nov 24, 2023

Absolutely it does! A good recording doesn't need it, and anyway there is nothing about NR that makes any voice sound more 'professional' (whatever that is - could you define it, please?) I'm saying this because all NR does is alter the background noise levels - doesn't do anything to the voice at all - if you get it right...

Thing is, if you take NR as a typical thing you might want to do, then the settings you use will vary considerably, depending entirely on what background you are trying to get rid of. There's a whole giant can of worms over this, in fact - some people seem to think that getting rid of everything - including natural breath noises - is the way to go, but those of us who've been doing it for a while know that listening to a voice like that for any length of time is quite disturbing.

There really is no 'one size fits all', I'm afraid. And even if there was, then everybody would sound the same - and I don't think that would help either!

Report · Nov 25, 2023

https://youtu.be/n4FHoi1cs_s?si=-kxSTIux1Z5mjGdv

I just sent a link to a video about noise reduction in Adobe Audition. And my apologies but your comment still dosen't make much sense to me. It sounds like you're telling me to do a straight voice over with mistakes and all and just send it to my clients? I've never heard such advice like this before I'm afraid.

Report · Nov 25, 2023

I'm not telling you anything of the sort. I'm certainly not telling you to send out unedited material. And I'm afraid that Mike Russell's method of using process NR is extremely sub-optimal and not what we'd recommend at all. If you want a much better idea of what to do, look at this thread.

But ideally you shouldn't need to have to repair what you record - all you should need to do is edit the takes the way you want them to be. But, the process of recording the material needs to be optimised before you start editing. If you don't get the recorded sound from your mic sounding good in your room or booth, then you will waste a lot of time having to tidy it up. This is how it works in a purpose-built VO studio - they optimise at the record stage primarily for two reasons: the less you need to process the recorded result, the better it sounds - and the less you have to do to the sound, the less time it takes. And when you have people breathing down your neck for a result, that can be significant - especially if you want any repeat business. Editing - fine; everything will be less than optimal.