Skills involving multiple take narration sessions

Riker

I'm currently working on a video that features narrative part. 5 minutes of talking. The narrator is all over the place with his schedule and he insists on recording on his own (I guess he's shy and wants to do it alone at his home).

I gave him my Zoom and lav, and he recorded the thing in one day...so I mixed all the clips and sent him the mp3 - and now he wants some segments changed, few seconds/couple of words here and there. But he doesn't want to record it all from the start.

Is it possible to equalize this somehow, to make it sound as uniform as possible?

stip

and now he wants some segments changed, few seconds/couple of words here and there.

Make him AT LEAST record whole sentences, and only in combination with listening to the original recording to get loudness and tone to fit it. Everything less than whole sentences will give you real headaches!

Riker

Already received one file...

I got the entire sentence in the recording, but it's very silent...which makes it a bit noisy when I amplify it. The tone of the voice is somewhat different, and most of all - I can't replicate my audio tweaking settings, because I used Sound Booth and just saved the file as wav and mp3, thinking the job was finished.

Suffering succotash.

stip

Does he get money for the job? Did you have an agreement on how many correction circles are included? There should be at least one. It's always a pain in the ass to insert re-recorded single parts as most often it's not possible to get the same tone and sound to fit in the rest. It ends up being the easiest to re-record the whole thing. For the narrator it should only be a few minutes more work as he has to prep recording anyway being it 30 seconds or 5 minutes. ESPECIALLY if it was the narrator who wanted the changes!

DouglasHorn

It's one thing for a VO artist with a lot of experience and a home studio to do their narration on their own. (It's actually quite common for me to work with someone this way or more often with me listening and directing by phone.) But it the narrator isn't skilled in this, then it's not usually a great idea to let them do it without supervision and assistance. If this is the situation you're stuck in, though, I'd say ask the talent to record any new sections as much like the original as possible so that you can insert them with similar noise and levels. Teach them how the VU meter works and about the evils of low levels and peaking. Hopefully some education will help him pull it off.

thepalalias

I'm assuming you mean "it's very quiet" not "it's very silent"? Because there's not much you can do if it's actually silent. :)

Anyway, all the things mentioned here are helpful. You might want to consider using something more advanced than SoundBooth if you plan on doing a lot of this - saving and re-loading templates can really help a lot. My vote would be for Cockos Reaper.

If you use something like that, between the waveform display and a visual analyzer (such as a free FFT tool like Voxengo Span) you can see where you are in regards to both volume/amplitude and frequency content and try to EQ and volume automate to get closer. Or you can use a matching EQ to help with the EQ.

For denoising, Izotope RX and Adobe Audition both have strong algorithms.

But honestly, there are a LOT of variations during a recording session that will be difficult (if not impossible) for you to match in post. Your best bet is to help him get things right on site.

Riker

Im working with Audition, so far the add-on sound files blended in nicely, can't complain. But I hate it when the client want's a hasty change, and it's not even about the money. That will be my work so if he thinks it's "good enough" and refuses to take more time for the takes or refuses the second takes, I will be the guy behind the product, regardless if he's happy with it.

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