VO Workflow: Structures and Creativity – Tuesday Tech Tip

Systems support our workflow. However, as creative individuals, we tend to want to reinvent things. That can get us into trouble now and again. 

It’s that right brain/left brain battle we face in the studio when we are both the voiceover talent and the audio editor. The creative impulse of our brain may inspire performance, but can get in the way during the production process in our VO studio.

A few longer eLearning projects last week made this abundantly clear. 

I had been doing other types of projects recently, and that made me a bit rusty when dealing with two recent 55-minute-plus jobs. In the editing phase, I paid a little less attention to my standard approach and suffered for it. 

Both projects had similar technical challenges and overall length. However by the time I finished everything, the first had taken nearly 40 minutes longer to complete. The recording and editing passes had been pretty similar for both. But on the first project, I made a tiny change to my workflow in the QC step.

It is important to test and compare workflows. I’m always trying to remain aware of slight improvements during procedures – whether a minor repositioning of mouse or keyboard, or something as major as how I proceed through an audio file. Certainly, it doesn’t make sense to cling to an inefficient process because I’ve “always done it that way…” But the impression of speed in the moment doesn’t always translate into overall improvements.

The thing was: it felt more efficient at the time. In the QC pass, I normally drop a marker to flag anything which sounds wrong (clicks, distracting breaths, background noise, etc.). Then I return and address those issues on a separate pass. On the first project I had a cluster of issues right at the beginning and stopped and fixed each as soon as I heard it. It felt like I was doing something! So I continued doing that for the whole file.

However, you can’t argue with the stats. It took me about 40 minutes longer. The numbers don’t lie.The micro-distraction of shifting from text to audio, addressing the mechanics of the fix and then switching back to listen and edit once again turned out to be a significant inefficiency when repeated over the longer script.

I probably began that deviation on some shorter projects, when the small delays didn’t end up being noticeable. In fact, when I began QC on the second long project, I had the realization, “hey… I normally do that this way” and returned to my drop-marker/separate-fix method – with measurable improvement.

Though we love to reinvent stuff, structure remains important. 

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