Voiceover Not Loud Enough

[Adze]

I've decided to start recording myself playing computer games and uploading them to youtube, but when I play back the recording along with my commentary I can barely hear myself. It's not too bad when there are quiet scenes, but I struggle to hear myself when the in-game volume increases. I specialise in retro games, so there are rarely any Volume sliders present to help me out.

I use Audacity to record myself and Bandicam as a video recording tool. My problem is that one of the programs (I'm not sure which) records the audio and video together, so I can't soften the game volume without doing the same to my voice.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? I don't have any video editing programs aside from Windows Movie Maker, and I don't have Internet on my laptop so I can't download anything else. Is there anything within Audacity or WMM I can do to fix this? I'm new to video editing so I can't see any obvious answers.

I'd be grateful for any answers, thanks!

 

[Steenamaroo]

Hmm. I'm not especially familiar with your programs but I know what you need to do.

Set audacity up to record from your microphone, but mute that track so you can't hear your voice.
Now proceed to set up your video capture software, which should now only capture game audio.

Now, If you can rip the audio from the video and import it into audacity along side your isolated voice recording, you'll have independent control of the two tracks.
You can set the levels and use any processing you want before bouncing the two tracks out to one stereo wav.

Optional.
Furthermore, I'd look for a compressor that allows side chain operation.
You put the compressor on the game audio track, but you look for 'key input' or 'side chain input' and rig things up so the V/O track is connected there via a send.
Now you'll have to jiggle about with send levels and thresholds but, ultimately, you'll get that radio sound where the backing dips each time the host speaks.
Basically the voice track plays as normal but it also triggers a compressor which acts on your game audio track.

I have no idea if audacity is capable of this : If it's not I suggest downloading reaper on a friend's computer and copying it to yours.​

Once done, you'd import the video into your movie maker and replace the original audio with your new combined audio track, and then render the heap.

You might also want to look into compression in general. Most V/O or broadcasts voices are going to be compressed, usually a lot!

Hope that helps.

 

[Adze]

I didn't think of ripping the audio from the video, it seems sort of obvious now, haha. I'll give that a try although my video editing skills are limited to changing the pitch in songs and messing with the equaliser for entertainment, but I'll see what I can do. If I can't find a solution I'll find somewhere to download reaper.

Thanks

 

[Steenamaroo]

Cool.
I don't know about Audacity, but some suites will automatically rip audio from video.
If I dump a video into Protools it'll rip the audio from it.


There is another way - You could record your voice into audacity as normal and route system output to a virtual bus through jack/soundflower.
That way you could record IT straight into audacity as well.
It's a bit involved though. Probably not the preferred method.

Let us know if any of the above works.

 

[Adze]

I worked it out I muted my voice and separated it from the video (thanks for that) and just used a slider in WMM to adjust the volume of the game's audio levels and it sounds perfect! Thanks for the help

 

[Steenamaroo]

Nice one. Glad to hear you got sorted.
Thanks for reporting back. It might help someone else with similar issues.