Record Narration Slide by Slide or for Entire Module?

Feb 20, 2015

I'm recording the narration for my e-learning course.  Is it best to do many separate recordings slide-by-slide?  Or do I read through and record the entire e-learning module?  What is a best practice?  The course is short.  Only about 18 slides, and they are not text-heavy.  I can use all the help I can get with this.

Thanks,

Joan

5 Replies
Brett Rockwood

I guess it's really a personal preference. It might come out sounding smoother and connected if you do it in one take — and you're able to get through it without screwing up. But you're still going to need to chop it up into multiple audio files, one for each slide. I generally do them one slide at a time but that's just me. When I do it slide by slide I always read out the slide number first so I can keep track easily of what goes where. Just remember to trim those bits off before you're done.

 

Joan Loshek

Brett, if you're out there, I hope you can help.  I took your suggestion and recorded slide by slide.  I also identified each audio clip with the sound button.  I clicked save after each audio clip.  But now I'm not sure what to do.  How do I listen to the audio with the slides and delete the slide number I recorded?  Is there a tutorial you can recommend?

Thanks, Joan!

Brett Rockwood

Joan, I'm not sure what you mean when you say you identified each audio clip with a sound button. If you are just simply trying to add audio to a slide there isn't any need for a button.

What I generally do is put all of my sound files in a folder and name each sound file "slide 1" "slide 2" etc. Then I go to each slide in the course and from the Insert menu click Audio/From File and select the corresponding file, e.g., on slide 1 insert the audio file "slide 1," etc. Once you have inserted a sound file it will show up on the time and you can easily identify it as it looks like a sound wave.

If you haven't edited out the slide identifications that you recorded at the start of each clip you can do it directly in SL. Just double-click the audio object in the timeline and it will open in a new editing window. Here you can select the stuff you want to cut, e.g., "slide 2, take 3," and save it back to the timeline. Once you've done that for each slide you should be good to go. (You might need to adjust the length of the timeline for the slides where you have trimmed the audio as you may have dead time at the end because SL may not have adjusted the timing of the slide to match the new (shorter) length of the audio.

Hope that makes sense.

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