Tip #5 Room noise - My (messy) studio setup!

Last episode today - 5 - Room noise.

It's important to provide voice tracks that are clean, with no outside noise present and no echo or reverb.

Toby shows his studio setup and some principles on how to achieve the best sound you can. I covered this recently in more detail on VOLIFE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIreiw5jcmI

Transcription here:

It's Toby Ricketts here again back with my series, my mini series on how to provide better audio tracks for your clients as a voiceover artist - starting outside today because today we are talking about the outside and the inside. Number five is room noise. I've called this because there are two types of room noise there's the noise outside - listen to the trees it's decidedly winter here in New Zealand. We've got all the trees up there with the leaves blowing in the wind. And that causes noise. Rain is a problem sometimes can always is a problem and just general city noise other people in your house can be a problem. Luckily I've got my little studio here in the woods. So there's not too much car noise. There's not too much other people noise going on, but there is the noise of nature. So when we step inside here, cut most of that out which is what we want. This is called soundproofing, it's keeping the outside noise from coming inside. The other problem noise is called room treatment. And when you're in a room, especially modern houses with the stuff on the wall like drywall, jib plywood, it's pretty reflective. So you go in here, this like ringing, it's kind of it's just, it's a little bit live. So we need to install some room treatment, which is this stuff here, Autex. This is called Autex, quietspace panels. And it's polyester layers of polyester sheeting, and it just soaks up sound. So if I go into the scene, and I go back, it's really nice and, and quiet because this just soaks up all that sound. So as an audio engineer, if I get tracks that have car noise, rain on the roof, wind or lightness, then it's not very useful. So as a voiceover artist, it's your job to cut all that out of the recording stage. Now that doesn't mean you have to go out By $10,000 studio bricks or whisper room unnecessarily, although if you do want to do this as a full time gig then like that might make sense. But what you can do when you're starting out is find a place which cuts out a lot of the outside noise, which is soundproof and this is often somewhere in the core of the house this is under the stairs. It can be a walk in wardrobe. These places are insulated from the sounds of the outside so they're very good. Walk-in wardrobes are perfect because they've also got lots of clothes in racks which soaks up the sound soaks up all that lightness so you effectively have a studio mic environment and yeah, if you can get some power and microphone into them. Also on the soundproofing front, it's worth I'm gonna flip the camera. I have some backup panels here, which is also the autex quiet space. And basically if it starts raining heavily because this has quite a thin roof and got some panels up on the roof there that just this cut it out a little bit, but I kind of I sometimes have to build kind of a A little, little pillow fort. And I basically have to get these panels and pile them on top of each other like this. I just had to do this with one hand in the camera, but basically like this and you can build yourself like a little, a little, a little cozy like this and get inside. And then it cuts out a lot of the room noise. I've left the door open. So that's why but that's like an emergency backup. If I've got like a live direct session that's happening. And I need to have audio that is as nice and pure. I will go through the trauma of installing these panels as you can see that a bit unwieldy. And if you're judging me about the messyness of my studio, which it is and I apologize for that. But, these are real, real podcasts. And check out Tim Harford. He's a great writer who talks about the benefits of a messy desk. Apparently it helps you be more creative and productive. So I'm going to delegate to him on this one. And thank you for tuning in to this series this mini series about how to provide better audio tracks to your clients and sound engineers. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please interact leave comments, ask questions, because I love hearing from people who are enjoying these videos. So yeah, if you can give me a bit of feedback, that would be great. You can subscribe to my my video blog on YouTube, my voiceover channel, Toby Ricketts, just youtube.com/Toby Ricketts and subscribe to that. And you can also find me at gravy for the brain Oceania where I do tutoring. We do live script script read throughs and things like that. And check out my voiceover blog as well Toby, the voice over comm slash blog. You go there's all the channels. Cool. I'll catch you guys for the next mini series. Thanks for tuning in.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Which file format to supply your voiceover files in? Tip #4

As a voiceover artist and a sound engineer with over 25 years experience, I now have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t when supplying voiceover tracks for any kind of recorded media.

I’m doing a short video mini-series on the top 5 things that will improve the experience for both voice artist and audio / video producer! Today - number 4 - File formats.

There is a best practice in which file format to use for which purpose, and in this video I share my screen to show you how it is done. The final episode in this series is up tomorrow...

Transcript:

Hi, everyone, it's Toby Ricketts here coming to you from inside my computer today. Now this is number four of a series of five mini episodes of VOLIFE, about the top five mistakes that voice actors make when submitting their final audio. So if you haven't seen the other four, then do go back and watch those as well today. Number four is file formats. The way you submit your audio to an engineer is relatively important with file formats. Okay, there's then it's pretty simple. There's really only sort of two flavors. When you're doing auditions. The quality isn't that important. Sometimes it is. But I mean, often you just want to send that out and it gives people an idea of your voice and then they hire you if they know if they really like it. So you're fine to go with mp3 for that. So let's just record a little bit of audio. Hello, this is my audition submission. TobyRicketts voiceover there it is. So now we go Save As we bring up this save dialog which has appeared on my other screen. I'll bring In here, you want to save that in your demos folder. I always advocate having a demo folder here, which is there 2020 demos. And mp3 is the file format you want to select. Okay, now this just call it something random. We'll just call that like a demo here. Now, it gives you options here the formatting. This often confuses people. 128 kilobits per second when you're in mono is perfectly acceptable. It's it's pretty much CD quality, but there are a few sort of flaws. So 128 kilobits when you're in mono is a really is a really good place to be a little bit. Listen, that's okay, I wouldn't go lower than 80 and there's no point going 100 and higher than 192 kilobits are when you're in mono, and I say that because when you've got stereo, of course, you're compressing two channels, so half the bitrate on each of them. If that makes any sense. When you are sending your final audio (i'll cancel out of that), I'm not going to save it. Let's say this is your final Audio recording, take one, you are going to clean up your takes. As we found out in the last episode, make sure you silence those breaths, all those mouth clicks, maybe put some beeps in. If you want to like this, take one. And then when it comes to saving your final file Ctrl Shift and s on most programs to save it, you can save it in the appropriate now I always put jobs under, under client name in a jobs folder because it's really easy to find them later on. And then you can put this, you can like we said in the other episode about naming files, it's really important to put your name, the client name, the project, how many takes you've done, and whether it was a session or a while takes and then raw or processed and then the date - sounds confusing, but go back and watch the following one if you haven't already. Then you can put the file name in there which I'm not going to do and then select WAV uncompressed is what you want to do you want to say this is a WAV file, there aren't really any, any format settings with this. I wouldn't touch those ones because it's literally just recording every little bit of information. Unlike mp3, which is compressing it, it's lossy compression if you're interested in audio compression, so not audio compression data compression, then do a search online about lossy compression versus lossless compression. So WAV is uncompressed, it's the best quality, this is what engineers are going to want from you. Because then they can go to work and do all the stuff they want and there won't be any loss of quality with subsequent generations. The other options, you have other sample rate, I'll do a series on this in the future about different sample rates. I usually stick with 44,100 hertz at 16 bits just because that CD quality, it's it's applicable to most things - 48 kilohertz is when you start to get into film and television and they'll ask for it if they want it specifically. But I would stick with 44.1. So that's the basic rule of thumb if it's a demo then mp3. If it is final audio, send that as a WAV And that concludes today's lesson. So hope you guys are enjoying the series. There's one more, which is coming out tomorrow and we're going to talk about it's going to be a surprise. So yeah, I'll catch you guys tomorrow. And do go to my blog if you want some more information at TobyRickettsvoiceover.com/blog or follow the volife channel, here on Toby Ricketts on YouTube. Thanks, guys.