Want to do voice-over for animation/cartoons at home. Possible?

[TalentLess]

Hey people,

I'm a new member. I have prepared some scripts and would love to bring them to life. I am working on a project involving a series of videos where I will have to do the voice acting for the animated characters on screen. I want to sound decent, that's all. I have a Samson C01 usb microphone and a decent laptop. I am a bit familiar with Audacity and so thought about using it. I'd like to have some questions answered by people who have the experience with voice recording. Here are some of the questions:

1. Should I do this line by line or the entire episode in one file?

One way I can think about doing this is by recording one line, adding effects, exporting that as a file. I'll keep doing that until all the lines are ready. Then I can start a new project where I can simply assemble all the lines one after another and export the whole thing as one file. After that, I will put background music to the recorded file on a separate project. The other method is to do all the lines under one project as separate tracks and save the file as my project. Then I can may be create a back up and work on it until all the effects are put in place and the timings are set properly. After that I can export it to a file which I can work on to add background music to the overall thing. Pros/Cons?

2. What should be my mic levels for Audacity?

I realized that the windows settings and audacity mic settings can be changed. Is there any zone (like 75% volume) where I should set things up to be? I want the audio to sound good and not distorted.

3. Can someone please help me with the order of the effects?

These are the effects I think I'm sure that I'll use:
- Noise removal
- Amplify
- Change pitch
- Normalize
- Reverb

What I want to do is to record the lines and then remove the lines from them and alter pitch and maximize the volume so that the listener has the option to go up/down volume. Are there conventional orders of these effects?

 

[gecko zzed]

How you do it is entirely up to you . . . people will have their different ways of organising their workflow. Do whatever you feel most comfortable with.

Were it to be my project, I would work on one aspect at a time, i.e. doing all the voice overs, then all the effects, then the music. I would do this to get consistency throughout the project. However, I don't know how long your episodes are. If the episodes are long, it might be easier to break them into smaller , more manageable chunks.

I don't know what Audacity can do because I don't use it. I would be comfortable tackling this project in Reaper because you can load a video file and record along to the vision.

As for setting microphone level . . . so long as you are getting a reasonable signal that doesn't distort, that will do. After the event you can raise its level and add compression to give stability and cohesion to it.

If you are doing destructive (i.e. permanently changing the source) editing of your recordings, then you would need to think more carefully about the order of effects you add. However, if you use non-destructive editing, then it doesn't matter that much, and you can always go back if it doesn't work out.

 

[DaleVO]

Talent...
Gecko gave you some good advice regarding "one aspect at a time". You may want to consider recording the piece as a whole, so you can stay in character throughout the script. Although it would be good practice for getting back into character for pickups, recording the piece in one take (unless it's a 10K-word soliloquy) will give you a better chance for a consistent vocal track, to later apply the effects as a whole. Thus eliminating any variations to levels, mic position, tone, character, etc.. Once you have one dry vocal track, you can apply effects, without having to remember the effects/parameters/levels/order, for the each of multiple tracks that you suggested. As Gecko said, you will always have the dry master-track, to start over, should you use a destructive effect.

The answer to your #3 question will depend on how you do #2, and your recording environment. I would encourage you to experiment. If you can get a good signal recorded, then you may not need to use much, if at all, the noise removal, amplify, normalize effects.
Dale

 

[Massive Master]

Sort of mentioned already - But if you need noise removal *at all* - figure out why and tackle that first. You certainly won't need normalization.... Most VO I do is spec'd at -18 to -12dBFS *absolute peaks* - which, not surprisingly, is where you should be tracking in the first place.

That said - I'm not saying not to use compression and what not to taste -- But use what you need (as little as possible) to leave a little room for post.

As far as flow - S'just me, but I tend to go through the whole thing in one shot making notes along the way (3 takes, use 2, blah, blah). Even if I'm using several different voices. If different voices need different global processing (such as pitch shift), I just drop those chunks from the 'main' track (usually "1") to subsequent tracks, editing out pretty much all the blank space along the way with short (~100ms) fades on just about everything (hence no noise reduction, expansion, gating, etc.). That said, it's a darn clean signal in the first place. If you don't have that, fix that first.

 

[Bobbsy]

Lots of good advice but a suggestion from somebody who has done a lot of voice over work...

...record in "natural" chunks. If there's a single line, do it alone. However, if there's a segment of a bunch of lines together, do your best to do it in one go because it will sound more natural that way.

Your choice whether to stop between chunks and save each segment separately or just pause then go on, ending up with one big file (including false starts and retakes). It can work either way.