Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'd be very surprised if it's as little as 3h work per 1h of recorded output - I'd expect something more like double that. You need to:
1. Do your initial recording.
2. Listen to it, and mark any errors.
3. Get your voice artist back into the studio to re-record the sentences with errors in them.
4. Edit the re-recorded sections into the book at the correct points.
5. Listen to it again to make sure it's OK.
5. Do any digital processing required (noise reduction, digital marking of chapter breaks, etc.)
Given that at least three of those processes are "real time", it's got to take more than a 3:1 ratio.
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The voice artist does the initial listen for obvious mistakes, so that part doesn't necessarily involve waiting on another person to listen. It's about double time for the reading. The way I did it was to record x hours/minutes, listen, re-record. For me that was 3 times that of a finished hour, but I did get better at it. There were times when my husband (who was doing digital processing) would find areas that required re-recording--sometimes for a mispronounced word, sometimes because I swallowed the end of a word, once because I set my water glass too close to the mic and the resulting "earthquake" took too long to settle.)
As I got better at recording, I could actually catch the mistakes as I made them and just read the sentence again. Deleting the old sentence was quick and easy on a first listen. We did one session where my husband listened as I read and he'd stop me to re-read. That was the fastest because he'd hear things I couldn't. He'd stop me, I'd reread and we'd continue. Later, we'd delete the sentence/word that was a problem. Deleting is always the fastest operation!
We tried a lot of different things and I"m sure a pro recording artist has a streamlined process. The engineering time varied. In one case, we wanted to add some enhancement to one of the voices (there's all kinds of things you can do--reverb, changes in pitch, etc) and that meant several readings.
After doing various short stories, we decided that two voices were definitely better than one (at least one male and one female). But then the acting ability varies and keeping separate and distinct female voices for each character (and also for the male parts) was VERY difficult. I'd record one day and forget how I did the Dragon voice. I found myself wanting to record longer sessions to keep the various voices in sync.
I chatted with some pros before we did this. Recording with multiple voices is ideal--but it's also the most expensive. Each artist has to be paid. Then there's a production guy who has to make it all come together. Then it goes for sale and everyone wants a cut. Amazon takes 65 percent of indie work (it's almost opposite that of ebooks when it comes to commissions.) Amazon requires exclusivity to get a 60/40 split--for SEVEN years.
If you want to help artists and authors, buy audio books direct when you can. Full Cast Audio is one of the outfits that was kind enough to chat with me about audio:
https://www.facebook.com/fullcastaudio/?fref=ts
(They have a website too, but I think there's a freebie running right now on the FB page so I linked to there. It's via iTunes and it may have expired.)