Last week, we introduced you to the idea of an Online Voice Casting service. This week we would like to talk to you about what sets a professional recording studio apart.
Our friend Barry, as you’ll remember, was really dissatisfied with how the training audio he ordered online turned out. It was basically unusable.
What makes an audio professional?
When it comes to specialty recording – a company and voice talent with specialized equipment and know-how is often the best choice.
In a professional studio, trained sound engineers have the equipment, knowledge, and facilities to eliminate outside noise and ensure a consistent delivery and quality through each recording. This becomes especially important for audio projects that might take a great deal of time to produce, like Barry’s training video, where it cannot be recorded in a single session but the sound absolutely needs to be seamless through the entire manuscript. A legitimate studio is equipped to handle this in a way that an online casting site is not.
This also brings about the point of what makes a truly professional voice talent. On an online voice casting site – much of the talent fall into the category of “people who were told they have a great voice” and have decided to see if they can make some money off of it. A professional voice talent is a voice actor who can bring both short and longer scripts to life. This is of vital importance when it comes to creating an engaging audio recording that will hold the audience's attention for longer than a few seconds. These voice actors may or may not also work out of a home studio, but it is one that has been built to support a long career and their affiliation with a professional studio means that when they deliver the raw audio to the studio – it is still able to be worked with and perfected for the customer. Perhaps even more importantly is the relationships these actors build with the studios they work with that means they are still available to provide edits and updates down the road.
Working with a professional studio is a team effort. The voiceover artist couldn’t do his or her job properly without the guidance of the audio engineer and director. The director helps the talent understand their role in the context of the script and the engineer ensures the recording is sounding great so that the voice talent can focus on reading the script to their best ability without worrying about other distractions. They all rely on each other to produce a solid finished product that everyone can be proud of. This would be incredibly difficult to achieve as a one-man show.
Barry ended up hiring a local professional studio to re-record his project. They took the time to explain their process and find the right voice for his project. He had control over how the final product would sound because he was more involved in the process and was even able to attend the recording session. He also felt comforted knowing that they had a long-standing relationship with the voiceover artist in case he ever needed to update part of the video. Once he received the finished product, it was like night and day when compared to the first recording from the voice casting website.
Stay tuned for the final installment of our series next week.
Music was sent down a telephone line for the first time in 1876, the year the phone was invented.
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