Game Over Movie Part 3 In Hindi Free Download
Keena Wiegert
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PART II tackled honing your skills as a voice actor, understanding how important specificity and script analysis are, and breaking your habitual patterns so that you develop more range as a performer.
I'd never done that before. I didn't own a mic. Not only did I not have a treated space, I wouldn't even know how to do it. How do you edit? Would my Logitech headset microphone be enough for the job? WHAT DO I DO???? I'm a voice actor dammit, isn't that enough? And then I fell through the first of many rabbit holes that opened up how vast the whackadoodle world of VO really is!
I am thoroughly grateful to Kevin Carney, Bob Michaels, Alex DeWees, and Tim Tippets for guiding me down the rocky path to having broadcast quality audio, and for helping me master my own workflows and processes. What once (in the beginning) took an hour to figure out and do, can now be accomplished in mere minutes, and thanks to hot keys, sometimes even seconds. You just need the knowledge, and the practice.
We will start with the big overarching theme, and then break it down into its components. When you audition, market to potential clients, and studios, you want to be able to tell them (with confidence) that your studio offers broadcast quality audio. What does that mean exactly?
Also called 'room tone,' it is both the measure and quality of the sound of your space when no one is speaking. When we talk about the dB (decibel) levels of your "silence" (the loudness or quantity) we are referring to your 'Noise Floor,' and when we are talking about the EQ of how it sounds (the quality), we are referring to your 'Room Tone.'
People seem to know about these concepts but not really understand them. I see folks asking how to fix their 'floor noise', 'noise tone', 'room floor', and all kinds of other things. It really hurts my heart to see that, because this is a concept that anyone can understand so let me explain this with practical applications:
When setting up certain processes to clean up the audio (like the DeNoise process) you need the profile of the room tone, so it knows what to clean up and the dB level of the noise floor, so it knows how much to clean.
Most home studios, with effective room treatment and lack of noise-causing elements (like computer fans, refrigerators, HVAC, landscaping, traffic, etc.) will fall somewhere in the -48dB to -52dB range when the audio is raw.
Each studio will sound slightly different (due to the size, shape, microphone, and other components of the space) so there will be different frequencies (the exact tone, or musical note of the sound) that will be adjusted, but generally the DeNoise process will be looking to make a -8dB to a -12dB adjustment to the noise floor to get it to -60dB, the broadcast quality level. It will accomplish that feat by using your unique room tone.
Some folks, in order to get their noise floor down below the -60dB threshold, will simply turn the gain down, which just delays the problem. The noise floor is successfully at -65dB.... but your voice is now -20dB!! Which needs to be coming in closer to -3dB.
So they normalize the file (more on 'normalizing' later) to -3dB in the edit session... and uh oh... now the noise floor is -48dB, which isn't going to be competitive in today's audition marketplace. It also won't pass certain quality checks (like for audiobooks on ACX.)
You will hear different coaches, teachers, audio consultants, and YouTube videos all give different recommendations about what levels to set your recording gain to. Some will have you set your gain very low, and have your voice peaking under -18dB, some will suggest setting it much higher.
The other issue is that for certain interfaces (and I'm looking at you, Focusrite Scarlett Solo!) the amount of self-noise they generate goes drastically up past a certain point that creates more issues than are ever worth solving.
BUT... Set the gain too low, and you're just creating more work for yourself in the edit. You'll basically be normalizing your audio multiple times, and adding unnecessary steps to your processes. There was a time when gain needed to be that low based on the equipment that was being used. In today's world of digital plug-ins, editing, and effects, that simply isn't as much of a problem as it used to be.
It leaves plenty of headroom for randomly overly projected syllables, for the polishing effects to be made in post, and the noise floor is low enough that I can tame it with a highpass filter (which is an effect that we'll discuss when we get to EQ) and Izotopes RX DeNoise.
Think about it just like graphic images or photography, while you can compress a large HQ image down into a thumbnail for an email or website, you cannot take that thumbnail and produce a large HQ image for a poster or billboard.
The other caveat is, the higher the quality, the larger the file size and bandwidth it takes up. If your internet can't handle supporting the signal of 48khz on a Source Connect session, you and the studio will have to take it down to 44.1khz (which is fairly standard.)
It's a matter of both personal preference and client need, but it's important to understand the basics, and all of this is helpful to know when you are selecting an interface, and setting up your DAW. (Digital Audio Workstation; like Adobe Audition, Audacity, Reaper, etc.)
Soundproofing prevents sound from traveling into or out of the space, and is also called 'isolation.' It is expensive, it requires mass, many layers, and to truly be a soundproof space, must be air/ water tight.
Acoustic treatment changes the sound inside the room for clarity and dynamics. While, with enough layers and mass, it can dampen noise, it isn't soundproofing. It stops echo, reflections, and other unwanted room sounds from making it into the signal along with your voice.
Soundproofing requires MASS, so how much does that product WEIGH? This will give some indication of how much it will interrupt unwanted sounds from outside the room, so that you can isolate your voice, inside the space.
Professionally manufactured isolation booths like Studio Bricks, Whisper Rooms, Vocal Booths, etc. weigh about 5 pounds/ square foot. So they weigh anywhere from 50-200 pounds (and cost thousands of dollars).
While weight and density aren't the only factors that impact how much isolation you will get from your purchase, it's a pretty good place to start, so that you know what you are getting, and have a way to compare like to like.
Foam tiles and moving blankets are indeed the least expensive options around, which is why they make it into almost every new VO's first booth, but how many will you have to buy to get them as effective as a sound panel or producer's choice blanket?
These are very important considerations to make when you set your budget and plan your upgrades. And while you may not have the budget for a whisper room for many years of your career, you do need to figure out how to keep your audio competitive, with what you do incorporate into your space.
There is also the option to use a shotgun mic or other hypercardioid mic to help limit noise inside your sessions, though it tends to work better for commercial and narration work more than character work. It's not about the amount of money you spend, it's about spending your money strategically. (#Quality>QuantityAlways)
We've talked quite a bit about effects that control gain which are the "quantity" effects, like normalization, where you tell your DAW how loud you want the peak of your file to be, and it automatically adjusts all of your audio up or down to meet that threshold. It's really no different than grabbing all the audio and cranking the amplitude up or down until the loudest part is where you want it, but using Normalization makes the DAW do the math for you. It isn't selective or targeted; it's a generalized, all-over effect.
Now, let's talk a little bit about the "quality" effects, which involve EQ. These effects are quite specialized and targeted. EQ comprises the qualitative 'musical notes' of sound, which are expressed in hertz. With EQ effects, the gain of each frequency can be adjusted independently.
A lot of noise comes from low-end garbage frequencies that are lower than any of the notes of your voice, and so one strategy that many people use (including myself) is to do what's called a "HIGH PASS FILTER" or a 'low end roll-off'
It takes the frequencies BELOW the threshold you set (i.e. 80hz, 100hz) and "rolls them off" at whatever slope of "gain" you set it to (in this example it's 24dB/ Octave, 48dB/ Octave would look like a steep cliff, and 6dB/ Octave would look like a gentle bunny slope).
There are many ways to test or use a high pass filter to see if it will lower your noise floor: The most common is to record sample audio (including silent spaces of your room tone, along with speech) and to apply the effect in your DAW. The next is to use a built in high pass filter on a microphone or on your interface to run the process live as you record.
I personally prefer to do it in the DAW in post. That way you can "un-do" it if you don't like the outcome, and it also gives you more flexibility in how you set it up than the switch on the back of a microphone, which generally only has up to 3 settings.
What a de-esser does is compress only the frequencies that you set around your sibilance. We don't have time in today's (already tome-like) entry to cover compression in depth, but it's basically a way to give the audio a haircut. For every x amount of decibel that passes the compressor's threshold, it only allows y amount to pass through. There's a heck of a lot more to it than that, but it's a good start.
Whatever effects we use with EQ (or with compression), we want to make our main goal to simply polish the audio with a light touch. Too heavy a hand, and you will quickly start stripping away the beautiful qualities of your voice, and the depth of the performance.
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