Virtual Voiceover Recording

Apr 01, 2020

Hi everyone,

I wanted to reach out to see if anyone here had some advice on recording voiceovers virtually. Due to the coronavirus, my company has all been deployed to telework. Our normal practice for recording voiceovers is using a yeti mic and a soundbooth in the office, recording through Audacity. Someone from my team would be in the room to manage Audacity, and also to stop the employee providing the voiceover when they have made an error and need to re-record.

I am wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how we can get good-quality recordings from home, when the employee providing the voiceover doesn't have access (or the knowledge to use) any of the equipment or software? We have tossed around ideas such as the employee recording into her phone, then sending us the file, but that does not give us the option to stop and correct any errors. It is not an option for me to provide the voiceover myself — it has to be the SME. Can you think of any other ways?

Thanks in advance.

5 Replies

Amy Cathlina

4 years ago04/01/20 at 9:32 pm (UTC)

Can they download audacity and can you order them a microphone headset? they should be able to save rough files that you can edit.

Allison LaMotte
Staff

4 years ago04/02/20 at 7:01 am (UTC)

Hi Julia,

Can you ask the SMEs to listen to their audio when they're done recording and make sure it matches the script? That way, if need be, they can rerecord? Another option would be to have them send you the audio files, check them, and ask them to rerecord any sections with errors later on, though I know that's probably not ideal.

Richard Mulcahy

4 years ago04/02/20 at 2:12 pm (UTC)

We have the same setup and now we are using peoples phones to record the audio. We still do the editing as most SME don't have that skill and we prefer to edit the final audios for sound quality volume consistently. If they make a mistake, then we have them re-record the sentence in error (not the whole script.

We have also used computer voices by Natural Readers. Very good for small scripts and cost effective.

https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/