Editing/producing Voiceover

Goldwave

Lets get the VO cuts prepped for editing. Are you using a stereo recorder with a stereo mic? Are you using one channel of a recorder for a mono mic? We will cover that here as we want the VO to be mono, in the center of the stereo field.

Open the VO recording into Goldwave and perform a 100 HZ High pass on the entire file. Go to edit, filter, Low/High pass, type 100 into the Cutoff frequency Initial cutoff (Hz) field and tab to the group of radio buttons and down arrow to High pass. Hit enter. This will take a few seconds to complete. You may or may not hear the results of this on headphones. This will remove hum and plosives out of the recording. Introduce a sub woofer and you will tell the difference. After a hi-pass you will be able to achieve more volume normalization out of the recording. It also will be better prepped to introduce compression and limiting without as much color.

Now lets make sure just one channel of the audio is in the file. Go over to the effects menu and down to Stereo sub menu, hit enter. IF need be down arrow to Channel Mixer and hit enter. In the presets choose, Mono left and hit enter to apply the effect. This will make sure your audio is in the center of the stereo spectrum, and only using one channel of a recorder will have less noise. When this completes, we want to maximize or, normalize the volume of the entire file. Again go to the effects menu, and down to the volume submenu, and down to maximize. In the presets choose full volume and press enter. This will verify that the volume of the file is as loud as it can be without peeking or clipping. After this finishes processing, press control+s to save the file. Alt+f4 out of Goldwave.

Below is an audio example of the condenser, Blue Microphones, Bluebird Mic with a 100 HZ High Pass.

Below is an example of a dynamic Shure SM-58 Microphone with a 100 HZ High Pass.

If you have the Sonic software lets now increase the rate of the voiceover. You may also accomplish this in Reaper, but you can hear it, when you use sonic it sounds like normal speech without the artifacts. I normally use around 1.12 speed in the batch file of Sonic, Copy the file over into the sonic folder and name the file in.wav. The file that will be created will be called Out.wav. After you have this new file you will need to open it in Goldwave and again, maximize the volume, and again save the file.

Below is an example of the Blue Microphones BlueBird Mic, 100 HZ Highpass, EQ, Comp, Limit, and Sonic.