Friendster’s Professional Voice Overs

You’re ready to do a professional recording after you’ve found a talent and have made a script. Doing a recording might seem daunting however there are some computer softwares that will provide you the tools you need to craft the whole project on your own even without the help of a videographer or a production team.

There is a significant amount of preparation required to ensure that the environment in which you record the voice over will help you create a quality piece. Here are some essential tips when preparing the room for your voiceover recording:

1. Check all your equipment. Booking the voiceover talent for the project and then wasting several hours testing equipment will cost you. Jay Rose, the author of the book “Producing Great Sound for Digital Video” suggests that you make sure you get the right kind of equipment and test it well before production day. Even testing it a few hours before production time can reduce unforeseen delays.

2. Test a room for echoes. You can find out if a room creates an echo effect by doing some test records in it. Close all doors, windows and check all your equipments to eliminate or at least minimize echoes.

3. Make use of a background music. A Narration should feel and sound like as if the narrator is having an intimate conversation with the audience. There should not be any ‘white noise’ to produce this effect. If you find that you’re recording a lot of ‘white noise’ and can do nothing about it, I suggest you use a background music to somehow mask those noises.

4. Find the best position in the room for the recording. There are no rules about where to position the microphone, so feel free to move the mic setup into different areas of the room to get the right sound. You don’t want to record when the sounds seem hollow or filtered in any way. Move around to find the best fit.

5. Ignore outside noises and minute sounds. In reality, anything can affect the quality of your voiceover recordings, from lightning fixtures to everyday outside traffic. The truth is most mics are not that sensitive to pick-up these noises. If these noises go through your recording, purchase a high-pass filter for your microphone for finer voiceovers.

6. Quiet vents, air conditioners and computer fans. If you’re working in a very small space, you may have left computers or an A/C on during the recording. Sounds from these machines can cause some turbulence for your recording, so it’s a good idea to turn them off for as long as possible during each recording segment.

As a final advice, oversee your production using a pair of headphones. Go to a different room and make use of playback functions to hear mistakes as soon as possible. This will save you a lot of time as it allows you to address audio quality issues on the recording day itself.

Author Terry Daniel is a Professional Voice Over Actor from Minneapolis, Minnesota and Has Provided the Voice Talent for Dozens of Companies and Agencies Since 1991.