Recording Techniques

U

Utopia

This is a question mainly aimed at Alcove Audio, but if you have any input please feel free to chime in.


How would you go about recording a multi-cast audiobook/cartoon.

Let's say you have 5 character actors, all doing at least 10 characters, and a Narrator.

What types of mics would you use? Preamps? Sample-rate/bit depth?

Would you go for perspective? I.E. Narrator close-miked while the characters are miced with either a shotgun, lapel or pencil-condenser?

How would you position them in the room? How "dead" would you make the Narrator?


Your thoughts?
 
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We discussed some of this in the VO thread. I like multiple mics (close in, mid [12"] distance and far [18"]) if I have that option and DEAD, DEAD, DEAD, CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN! Considering all of the wonderful toys available to us these days it is easy to "degrade", fold, spindle and mutilate any sound want in almost any way we can imagine; we have convolution 'verbs, EQ, distortion, delay, you name it and we are geniuses!

Just choose the mic that suits the voice, put up the others if you have them and roll.
 
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Cool - thanks for replying.

Do you have a trick to keep the actor on the mic like placing a popper stopper on his nose and say "stay in that spot and don't move away from there"?

Also, when editing, what's your main tool to get rid of mouth clicks? Pencil tool?
 
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My main "tool" is to keep them hydrated while doing the sessions (room temp water- cold water constricts the vocal chords), and some diluted lemon juice will get rid of phlegm.

I just slice them out - or even do a volume automation - to eliminate clicks, etc.

A little trick; when there is a larger unwanted artifact I will cut it out and the use time stretch from both sides and a cross-fade to fill the hole.
 
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Oh.

I gave up on trying to find the magic elixer that handles mouth noise on the talent. I finally concluded to myself that it's the person's diet and if the person eats too much sugar or carbs that I can't fix that with 2 swigs of water and they are just either mouthy or not and the better talents out there are clean as a whistle and the TV actors who come in to do voice over are the noisiest. I once spent 5 days editing a 5 minute piece of voice over done by an actor - no joke.

I mainly use the pencil tool to pencil out clicks and snaps.

Otherwise I copy a minute worth of ambience I record with no-one in the booth and paste special "paste to fill selection" and then do an auto crossfade of about 10 milliseconds.

I also cut a cycle out that has the offending noise and do a tiny crossfade.

One thing I found that handles pops very well is Adobe Audition's spectrum view of the frequencies - it's so easy to "paint" out the pop when you can see the little ball of energy.

I can't believe people charge like 150$ an hour for this stuff.. AND I can't believe people get paid like 300$ an hour to teach Pro Tools...

But, the Pro Tools teachers told me that they get paid for their patience, not the "teaching" they do.
 
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