Audio For Video, The Voice Over And How To Get There

Ask anyone who has been doing video on a professional level for any amount of time and they will tell you great audio is key to producing a good video, and in many videos such as documentaries or training, the spoken work is a primary driver to success, as the narrative is what supports the video and carries the “message” of the video to the viewer.

Now to the average person, the narrative, which is commonly referred to as a voice-over seems simple enough, grab a microphone, some copy to be read and start speaking.

However, in the real world it doesn’t work that way as a number of conditions must be met before that will be possible, the primary one being the narrator’s voice must be recorded as cleanly and sterile as possible and to do this requires a lot more than a microphone, a voice and a DAR.

Primary to that task is having an area to work within which is acoustically dead, that is to say free of echoes and extraneous noise.

Then secondary to such a task is having a microphone that is capable of handling the task, a standard of the industry is the Electro-Voice RE-20 or the new to town RE-320, these are large diaphragm dynamic microphones with the ability to faithfully capture both the frequency range and full dynamic range of any narrator.

To accomplish the primary, it is typically done by building a studio with isolative sound dampened walls and having those walls covered in sound absorbing materials, this is however expensive and one could quickly drop $25k to build a bedroom sized studio.

An alternative to that is purchasing what is know as a sound booth, these for those old enough to remember what a phone booth looks like, is an oversized heavily dampened phone booth, but buying one will still set you back around $3.5k.

To some, $3.5k is water under the bridge, but for most of us that is a serious ding in the wallet, so how can this problem be solved on a tight budget?

My solution up to now has been to build sound panels consisting of Owens Corning 703 FRK two by four insulation panels surrounded by light weight pine wood frames, covered with upholstery fabric, then once built those panels would be hung on the walls of the room to deaden it.

The only problem with this approach is it’s a permanent solution and while the panels are not offensive looking, installing them precludes the use of other wall hangings such as photographs, awards, knick-knacks and other wall do-dads and if the proposed room is a shared room, like say a home office or den, that idea might not fly well with the other party.

What follows is a solution for such a problem, which I developed after a friend of mine who is a broadcast professional asked me to assist her husband who is also a broadcaster in constructing a home studio where he could do VO’s without having to travel an hour or more from their home to a local radio station where he had access to a studio (for a fee).

It sounded simple enough and in addition knowing my friend doesn’t take being turned down very well, I agreed and quickly stepped into a pit of quicksand.

After actually seeing the proposed room to be modified, I quickly noticed each and every wall of the room was covered with photographs, awards and whole bunch of memorabilia, a majority of which it hers.

Now I had only two paths to follow, I could explain to her “we are going to need to take all this stuff down and box it up” which would probably result in me being stuffed into a box and left out with the trash, or come up with “plan B.”

Not desiring to be found in a box on the side of the road, I came up with a scheme to hang the sound panels from the ceiling, this brought multiple advantages to the table, the setup could be placed when needed and then not taken down and stored in a closet when not needed and it allowed me to build a rather tight hexagonal booth.

What we did was to install upon the ceiling in a hexagonal pattern 12 small unobtrusive hooks secured with plastic anchors known as Togglers, I selected Togglers because they have a pull-out rating that is about 50 times the weight of the panel they would support and while that may seem like a bit of overkill, I considered the factor that these panels may be put up and taken down many times and I wanted a support system that would not fail in the future.

Once we had the hooks placed we then installed loops of 1/16 inch aircraft cable also known as wire rope, the loops ran through two eyehooks on the top of the sound panels and where adjusted and crimped into place to allow the panels to hang 16 inches below the ceiling.

The height was designed to allow him to do stand-up VO’s or sitting on a stool VO’s, it would also allow her (being about a foot shorter than her husband) to do the same, which while not in the original plan, was icing on the cake, as she could now cut spots at home, on her schedule, versus at work, whence a studio became available..

In the end, we took a hard room with an average SPL of 47-49 dB and dropped it within the booth to totally dead at 37.6 dB, her husband stepped into the booth and the reaction was wow and after a little tweaking of his audio chain produced a smile on his face you couldn’t wipe off with a belt sander.

http://www.owenscornin​g.com/comminsul/docume​nts/Fiberglas700Series​.pdf

http://www.toggler.com​/pdf/hollow.pdf

More detailed photos of the attachement points?

alintx wrote in post #15546193
More detailed photos of the attachement points?

They consist of two eyelets on the panel, two hooks on the ceiling and a loop of aircraft wire, I will see if I can get access and grap a couple of shots tomorrow.

Wayne

Simple, effective, and cheap.
If you keep coming up with solutions like that, you'll never make it in politics.

Interesting Wayne and a nice post. A great bit of construction and solution to a problem that addresses both concerns of the room the booth needed to be in and for the booth itself.

A proper sound recording room isn't all that pretty and deffinantly has no hard surfaces to reflect the sound around. You did a very decent job for not a lot of scratch.

I've done a lot of voice over recording work in my years of doing audio. Sometimes in a true sound studio, sometimes not. I've been asked to create "sound booths" in some very odd locations and with very few resources. One of the best and easiest on location solutions is a pair of C stands and arms, a couple furn pads and a fairly soft, small and padded room like a bedroom with carpet. Form a wedge around the person speaking into the mic to stop as much reflective sound as possible and to deaden the imediate area. It's not a perfect solution, but then again, I usually have about 10 minutes to set something up.

Last summer I did just that set up for the show open for the US Pro Challenge bicycle race held here in Colorado. The voice over talent: none other than Phil Liggett. That was the second time in two years that I have been paid to travel across the state to do a voice over session with Phil. A truely wonderful gentleman and excellent VO talent. Just don't ask him to Americanize his Queens English. The show open went perfectly as we recorded it from his hotel room in Durago, CO. Again, not a replacement for a proper sound booth, but in a pinch, the sound blankets/furn pads hung over a C stand arm works pretty well.