VAM 088 | Q & A Session 17 – Reducing Sibilance & Practicing ADR and Anime
Welcome to episode 88 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
In this episode, I continue answering questions from my podcast audience! For those who may not be as familiar with the podcast, in past episodes, I’ve given out a phone number where you can call in and leave me a question about voice acting as a voicemail. From time to time, I’ll pick the most relevant questions I receive and answer them here on the podcast.
For this round of Q & A, I answer questions from Yvonne from Oakland, CA and Emily from Tampa, FL.
Yvonne works in the audiobook industry. He’s been having trouble with his recordings being too sibilant.
First, let me define sibilance for those of my listeners who may not be familiar with the term. Sibilance is the sound one makes in the English language when one makes an “s” sound. In the world of voice over, sibilance usually refers to someone whose “s” sounds are too pronounced or hissy.
I give Yvonne some tips on how to reduce the sibilance in his recordings, both in terms what he might need to change in his performance as well as numerous technical solutions to the problem.
Emily is aware that in order to work as a voice actor in anime, a performer needs to know how to match the lip flap of characters on the screen. She’d like to know how to practice matching lip flap on her own.
Matching the lip flap of characters on the screen is a challenging skill to develop.
The practice of dubbing your voice to preexisting video footage is known as Automatic Dialogue Replacement or ADR. Not only is ADR work challenging for an actor, but because the technical requirements to set up an ADR recording session are complicated, it’s challenging for a recording engineer as well.
While running your own ADR setup is possible it requires manipulation of audio and video on a professional level. I share some of the software one can use to run ADR sessions on your own, but learning how to use such software effectively still requires a significant investment of time and energy.
Emily’s time might be better served by taking classes like my Anime Voice Acting Workshops where all the technical challenges are taken care of.
I hope you find the answers useful in your own voice acting endeavors!
If any of my listeners would like to call in with your own thoughts, thank you’s or questions, the number is:
323-696-2655.
Please don’t forget to include your first name and what city in the world you’re calling from. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks for listening!
Download Voice Acting Mastery Episode #88 Here (MP3)
19 Responses to “VAM 088 | Q & A Session 17 – Reducing Sibilance & Practicing ADR and Anime”
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I would love to take those ADR classes, but it’s kinda hard when I live in South Texas. Usually when I watch subtitled anime (which isn’t often, I prefer dub) I’ll read the subtitles out loud and try to match the mouth flaps. Mixed results.
Thank you for your time and wisdom, and thanks to Yvonne and Emily for their questions.
I understand. You do what you can from where you are. That’s all you can do.
Really great episode as always, very helpful. The only suggestion I could make for the ADR question would be if you’re using windows and really desperate to overdub to use Windows Movie Maker. Depending on what version you have you should be able to record audio in wmm, adjust basic levels, and it comes pre-installed on most systems. It’ll just be difficult to really edit is all.
I’ve never run a windows computer so I don’t know anything about Windows Movie Maker. Thanks for the tip though. Have you tried to do ADR in Windows Movie Maker?
I think you’re making home ADR setup sound a bit more complicated than it actually is, or at least more than it needs to be. My recording software of choice is a $60 program called REAPER – essentially, anything pro tools can do short of professional studio installations*, it can do about twelve times cheaper. One of my favorite features is the ability to drag and drop video files into the software, where you can move them around just like audio files while still working in a familiar environment. Makes syncing up your lines a lot easier than if you’re using Audacity and have the video open in a separate program. It also uses VLC to handle the encoding, so it can handle pretty much any video format you throw at it.
REAPER has a semi-unlimited free trial, so I’d highly suggest anyone looking check it out (go to reaper.fm to download).
* The studio limitations have less to do with the program’s feature set and more to do with the fact that as of this writing doesn’t really play nice with the big external mixing consoles.
See, I knew someone would have some ingenious solution! I’m not familiar with the program Reaper. I’ve heard of it in passing, but I had no idea it could handle video and audio at the same time. That’s great to know.
I’d be a little nervous about throwing just any video codec at an ADR system though. Sometimes it’s nice to have a codec that doesn’t require too much b-frame interpolation and also has a steady and not a variable frame rate. The industry standard frame rates in North America and Japan tend to be either 24 fps for film or else 29.98 for TV in either drop frame or non-drop frame. Studios used to use JPEG-A or Photo-JPEG codecs for reference videos to make sure each frame was independent so you could scrub audio and video at the same time. Those files ended up being a lot larger than h.264 reference videos though.
Have you done ADR work in Reaper yourself? What were your results?
It’s worked out pretty well for me so far. I’m still strictly on the amateur circuit and don’t do very many fandubs, and unfortunately the only one I was ever in that gave me more than six words of dialogue seems to have disappeared from the internet, otherwise I’d leave a link here.
Actually, managed to find the file and render out a sample. It’s old, so my performance is kind of awful, but here’s how it turned out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxx8Aal4PuU&feature=youtu.be
Thanks Ben! That does look good, although those beeps are sorta harsh sounding. Were those built in to the program, or did you have to make them yourself? Glad to know Reaper is a viable solution for practicing ADR! I’ll have to explore the program more now. Thanks again!
The beeps were just me using the built in sin synth to throw something together. If I’d wanted to I could have made them nicer sounding and configured the project to automatically play them before recording punched in, but I felt it would have been too much effort for one fandub so I just pasted the midi item a few dozen times, put it before each of my lines, and started the recording a few seconds early.
No worries. As long as they work that’s all that matters. I just was curious if it was a built-in beep sound or something that you could change to a different sound if you wanted to.
Again, timing looks great. Really nice.
A small note to the guy trying to reduce the sibilance in his audio recordings; if he is doing audiobook recordings for ACX they will not allow de-essers and other such filters in the mastered recordings.
That’s great to know! Thanks so much!
One question: How can ACX know if you’re using a de-esser or not? Can they hear it in your recording?
According to their audio training seminar, the filters cause problems in their end of the uploading or production process. They run a program through all submissions that pick up on files that don’t comply to their mastering standards.
Interesting. I wonder how they can detect something so subjective as a de-esser in a recording with an automated program.
I really enjoyed this! Two great questions.
As for ADR, Sony Vegas has an option to record audio while the video is playing, And the sync is great as well! You can get a watered down version for $50 at Best Buy. If you’re not too picky on mic quality, it’s a good start!
You’ll also need to type up a script to go with the lip flaps.
Hope that helps.
~ Kalyn
Thanks Kalyn! I only work on Macs so I’ve never worked with Sony Vegas. Glad to know that’s an option as well. I don’t like to recommend things I’ve not used myself so I appreciate you sharing your experience with the program. Thanks again!
I often am tasked with matching VO to an existing audio for a corporate/industrial video that has a scratch track. One of my tricks is to play the scratch track live in my headphones while recording, (no visual) so that I can match the pacing of the existing audio with my VO. One of the snags with this is that it’s difficult to monitor your own VO simultaneously. So I will follow up with another track, without the scratch in my phones, to give a more polished read that pays more attention to what I’m saying rather than just matching the pace.
Sounds like you’ve worked out an effective method for yourself. Good for you!