VO Studio Workflow Efficiency: Less Wasted Motion – Tuesday VO Studio Tech Tip

Over the past few years, I’ve become more focused on workflow. I’m just old enough to remember phrases like “labor saving device” and “paperless office” being touted in relation to computers, and how they were going to change things dramatically in our immediate future.

If you have to render out a finished chunk of audio, a faster computer processes it more quickly. With the new Apple Silicon machines, and their ridiculously fast chip architecture, this single export step takes much less time.

Saving a few seconds here and there during the physical editing steps would seem not to be terribly important , especially with a powerful new machine running your studio.

Saving 1 second from a 5 second task would seem to be less useful than decreasing a 5 minute rendering process by half. After all, 1 second is certainly less than 2 and a half minutes, just to keep the math simple…

But, those small 5 second “inconsequential” steps add up quickly. How we insert an edit, or replace an error, in our recording becomes important because we will do them multiple times over the course of any given project. That single, small gain of efficiency within an oft-repeated task can pay outsized benefits.

It’s why I like using a Batch Processor once a studio is dialed in and consistently sounding good. Otherwise, as fast as any new computer might be, there will come a point when you’ll be repeatedly waiting for that “fast” process to render before you are able to proceed to the next step. That means it’s a manual task which needs to be managed. That’s a bottleneck that delays the workflow, especially if you are producing reasonably consistent raw recordings.

This type of approach won’t work if recording results differ wildly from day to day. That’s why when I work to refine home recording setups, we’ll focus on gaining that consistency. That lets us use the power of our software to automate repeated processes.

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