Weekly VO Workflow: What Are We Saving?
When setting up a home voiceover studio, it’s easy to focus on the challenges of acoustic isolation and treatment, the cool gear that one might obtain or aspire to own, or the refinement of our workflow to gain efficiency and maintain focus. There’s another part of the puzzle that can be easy to overlook. Taking time to think through how to archive your work can be a gift to your future self.
The other week, a client reached out to see if there was any possible way that I might have the original audio from a project that took place a couple years ago. They had been updating their site assets. Somewhere in that process managed to slice off and discard the audio I had provided.
Like UPS power backup setups, long term archival storage is one of those things that most of us don’t worry about until those files are needed. It certainly can be simpler to ignore the issue, figuring that most of the audio we deliver is ephemeral or that it’s not our responsibility to maintain a copy after we’ve been paid.
While those may be valid points, a bit of forethought and effort on our part can put us in position to save the day for our clients. That is the sort of thing they remember.
I reckon I got in the habit out of self defense, way back in the days of Zip drives and physical storage media. It was a lesson I learned the hard way – losing significant work and spending days recreating it from scratch.
Now there are a number of fairly robust resources at our disposal. It’s likely that you are already paying for some manner of underutilized storage – iCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox all have pretty ample virtual real estate. Even the lowest paid level of Dropbox has 2 Terabytes (2,000 Gigabytes!) of storage, which is a lot of digital acreage to locate client files. (Note – depending upon the nature of the project, your client may want the files encrypted or stored with a certain level of protection).
Maintaining an archive for your client is a bit different than simply backing up data. Backups regularly written to Time Machine, Carbonite, or BackBlaze. Those may have a copy of the data, but it can be difficult to easily find specific files quickly.
The archiving of a project has to be part of the workflow. After the recording is finished and audio delivered – whether the project is a 30 second commercial spot or an eight hour audiobook – you aren’t really “done” until the master file (or files) gets placed where they are easy to locate. For me, that is a client folder that contains project folders inside of an archive folder.
It’s also beneficial to save your work into a format that is not application dependent. Creating a WAV or FLAC copy would be more appropriate than relying upon an Audacity “AUP3” format, or the large “Session” or “Song” files that multitrack music recording apps utilize. Those types of recording environments work with a huge array of small audio files until a coherent version is “bounced” or created. Exporting a contiguous file which has all the edits intact remains my preference when using that type of software. Otherwise, you have to hope all the original snippets remain intact and available within the master recording track.
If you are using a waveform editor such as Twisted Wave, Ocenaudio, or Adobe Audition (in waveform mode), then you are always working with a single master file. Simply saving a WAV or FLAC creates a usable master copy that can be opened in any common recording application.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with telling a client that you can’t help them, being able to solve their problem moves us into the position of a helpful partner, rather than just someone they hired for a job. I’m happy to earmark part of my storage to keeping that intact.
Have you tested your studio’s audio quality to make sure it meets professional standards? For a free review of your vocal recordings, please use the upload tool on my Audio Review page.
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As someone who once worked IT, I would say to always have multiple regular data backups – cloud (as you mentioned, encrypted per client) and a local drive.
It can be a pain to regularly manually locally archive, and there’s a good chance you’ll skip now and then, but you’ll be very glad if something happens to that automatic cloud backup (not to mention companies sometimes shutter without warning).
Drive space is really cheap these days, but keep in mind that solid state won’t hold data as long as a traditional hard drive (about 5 years or so). A traditional hard drive should be good for about 10 years, but if you need longer, then the best solution is to be sure to copy your old archives to a newer system; one of the beauties of digital is that you don’t get replication fading as per analog recordings, and since storage capacities tend to increase over time, you probably don’t have to worry about your new drives not having the space for the old ones.
If you need to compress, make sure to use a standard type of lossless compression (If you see a professional graphic designer/artist shaking their head, there’s always a chance they are dealing with low-quality .jpg files….)