VOX Talk #27 – David Boreanaz NHL VO, Movie Trailers, TFormers.com Interviews Peter Cullen, Elie Hirschman, Adam Fox, Jesse Springer, S. Michael Leier
David Boreanaz Lands NHL Playoff “Quest For The Cup” VO, What’s Holding Female Voice Talent Back in Movie Trailer Voice Overs?, TFormers.com Interview with Peter Cullen “Optimus Prime”, Elie Hirschman’s Ways To Keep in Practice, Adam Fox answers Jesse Springer’s PodMail and S. Michael Leier’s Humorous Demo.
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Tags
David Boreanaz, NHL, Stanley Cup, Playoffs, Buffalo Sabres, Bones, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Movie Trailers, Peter Cullen, Optimus Prime, Transformers, TFormers.com, Anime Matsuri 2007, Elie Hirschman, Adam Fox, Jesse Springer, S. Michael Leier.
Transcription of Vox Talk 27
Matt Williams: Episode 27
You’re listening to VOX Talk, the voiceover industries number one podcast. Brought to you by Voices.com. It’s about voice acting, growing your business and sharing your knowledge. VOX Talk is a show that you can be a part of, getting involved is both fun and rewarding. It’s time for this week’s episode of VOX Talk with your host Stephanie Ciccarelli.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Hi, as Matt Williams just said, I’m Stephanie Ciccarelli, your host. Welcome to VOX Talk.
Matt Williams: The Loop, informing you of news and current voiceover events.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: In voice over news, actor David Boreanaz, star of the FOX TV drama Bones, landed a series of commercial voice over spots for the NHL’s “Quest For The Cup” promotional run, detailing the stories of the teams who have made it thus far in the 2007 Stanley Cup NHL playoffs.
To learn more about David Boreanaz’s voiceovers and to find a link to his NHL blog, go to the show links for Episode 27 at blogs.voices.com/voxtalk.
Other news, we know that the movie trailer voiceover business is a man’s world, but why? Just what or who is leaving female voice over talent out in the cold? Perhaps it’s because we just simply isn’t ready for a feminine spin, or more likely, there politics at play. Whatever your opinion on the matter, have your say on the VOX Daily blog at blogs.voices.com/voxdaily.

In closing, I spotted a cool interview conducted at Anime Matsuri 2007 with Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime in the highly anticipated blockbuster movie “Transformers”. Peter Cullen was the voice of Optimus Prime on Transformers cartoon series back in the 80’s and has reprised his role nearly 20 years after the fact by popular demand.
If you’re a Transformers fan, you can get a dose of Peter by visiting TFormers.com or visiting the VOX Talk blog show links.
Matt Williams: The Biz, helping you grow your voiceover business.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Today in The Biz, Elie Hirschman of ElieHirschman.com reminds us of the importance of keeping in formed and in practice.
Elie Hirschman: Hi, this is Elie Hirschman. As we begin to take off in your voiceover career there of course basic things that you need to keep up, you need to keep up your marketing efforts. You need to keep contacting and sending out your demos, that goes without saying anybody who’s been in the business will tell you that you need to do that. But there are also other forms of maintenance that someone in voiceover needs to keep up and that’s keeping informed and keeping in practice.
Bye keeping informed, I mean that the voiceover talent needs to know what other voiceover talent are up too. What kind of jobs that available out there and basically stay on the cutting edge but continuing to rid up on their career. Checking out various voiceover blogs and podcast is of course a get way to keep informed but there are also various Yahoo and Google groups out there dedicated to voiceover and voice acting which will allow you to network with other voiceover talents and pick their brains and see what work for them and what didn’t. Beside Yahoo and Google groups, there are forums such as the voiceover bulletin board VO-BB.com and the Indie flavor forms at IndieFlavor.com. You’ll hear this a million times that your voices is your instrument and of course keeping in practice make sure as always in the finest shape and that you’re comfortable behind the mic and ready to perform at anytime.
If you don’t have a radio station that you can volunteer and do it overnight shift at. Another idea might be to join an online audio group, there are many different groups out there, Darker Projects, Dream Realm, Broken Sea, Dream Seed, there’s even the Voice Acting Alliance, the amateur voiceover board. All these groups will post audition notices and let you participate in their audio dramas which is a great way of increasing your range and proving acting skills and just generally staying comfortable behind the mic.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Thank you Elie. It never hurts to get back to basics.
Matt Williams: Tech Talk, walking you through the technological landscape.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: This week, Adam Fox of DefiantDigital.com answers some
PodMail from Jesse Springer in Anaheim.
Bob Oakman: You’re listening to another Defiant Digital Podcast for Voices.com.
Here’s you host, Adam Fox.
Adam Fox: Hi, folk and welcome to another audition of the podcast. I’m going to start of by doing some podmail today, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve been with you and I’ve been getting a lot of podmail since then and it’s seems that the focus this last couple weeks has been on some technical issues regarding the streaming of recording or to have your gear setup. So, I’m just going to go ahead and cover on of this letter today and that should give us a new insight on how to setup our digital recording gear for session. So, here we go.
The letter I’m going to covered today is from Jesse Springer. His a voice talent out of Anaheim and you should check out him at Jessecharlespringer.com, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. So, Jesse writes in his letter.
“Hey, Adam, I’m a 19 year old voiceover artist in Anaheim. I like to Tech Talk section on VOX Talk and I was wondering if you could help me with a technical question. I just bough a PreSonus Firebox, Firewire free and I’ve been having some skipping issues. I use Adobe Audition CS2 for WAV form capturing and editing and usually more then once per minute when I’m capturing, I have section that when I listen back during playback skip several frames. I can rarely get through a few sentences without having to patch back in and record the lines. I also encountered similar issues when I’m playing back the audio, it will stop, jump, skip etcetera. I’m wondering if this is some sort of issue with my latency settings or if it might be something in audition?”
Well, let me tell you, I’ve actually been able to help Jesse solve this problem and I tell you what we did. Let’s start with a basic definition of what latency is. Latency is basically the log time that it takes from the input signal that you’re putting into the computer, that time that computer has to process it and the time that it’s actually spitting it out. So, it’s basically the log time that it takes from your input signal to your output signal and it has to run through the computer, it has to be process. The computer has to understand it, convert it in to digital numbers and then be able to spit that back out in something that’s it have been translated into an audio signal back out for you to be able to monitor.
So, there’s a whole lot going in there just from the time you’re putting your voiceover in until the time you’re hearing it in real time and latency is that delay that can occur. Now, a lot of things can affect latency, a processor speed, hard drive speed, how you have your hard drive set up or you have your scratch disk setup for recording and where your program is utilizing the resources of your machine both in RAM and in hard drive usage. There’s a lot of things that can go into that, so let’s just, let’s go down how we broke down Jesse’s problem and solve it.
What we started with was I asked him what kind of history he had with this kinds of problems, if he had this problem before he bought that piece of gear or did just start popping up when he bought this new piece of gear and starting using it. I also asked him how long his been using the software. Is the software also something that he just now incorporated with the new piece of gear because sometimes that double your problem, you’re adding a piece of hardware and software, now you have two new things to setup and troubleshoot rather than if you’ve been using the same piece of software you put a new piece to hardware into the chain and now all of the sudden you start having problems, at least you know where to look first, right?
So, what we basically found with Jesse we went through all his configurations, his RAM, how much memory usage he was using with his software and all that another kind of thing and what we discovered was that we was using his USB hard drives to actually record and capture too. Well, the USB hard drive were actually external hard drive and so therefore you’re actually adding a step, you’re actually having to go outside of the internal chain of hard drives and go out to an outside external source and the time that log time that it takes to go out to there records, scratch disk that and then shoot it back in to be able to process, there’s an audio signal was causing his latency issue.
So, what we did was we suggested that Jesse go ahead and his scratch disk, his internal drive, his operating drive and now even you have a machine that has two drive the C and the D drive, generally I will use the C drive from scratch disk and I just make sure that because it’s also the windows drive that I’m using and that actually runs a system, I just make sure to defrag it once a week and give it a good thorough defragmentation so that it kept at optimal operating efficiency.
Well, I know that solve Jesse’s problem and if you out there have some similar problems with latency or if you have some other issues of hardware or setting up and how to properly setup the hardware and software to work with each other, you can always go ahead and drop me an e-mail at the Voices.com website at adomfox.voices.com or you can certainly drop me a line at defiantdigital.com. I can be reach there as well.
Well, thank you very much for listening today and it’s been a couple weeks. It’s good to get back and give you guys a podcast and thank you so much for all your letters, they’ve definitely given a source of conversation and I like to continue that to dialog in the future and hopefully we’ll just go ahead and have some excited topics for you again next week, so until then. Bye for now.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Thank you Jesse for sending in your PodMail. I’m glad that Adam was able to help you out. This is what it’s all about, folks. So, keep sending that podmail in.
Matt Williams: VOX Box, cheering your audio feedback.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: If you remember last week, I sent a call out for humorous demos. I received one from S. Michael Leier entitled “The Overworked Producer.” Let’s take a listen:
Male: Please state your name.
Michael Leier: S. Michael Leier.
Male: Okay, yes go ahead and read from the script.
Michael Leier: Everybody may love Friday but soon everybody will be talking about Thursday.
Male: Okay, cut. Can you be a little less happy?
Michael Leier: She had a dream but little did she know her world was about to shattered. Next time on a very special –
Male: No, no. How about angry? Can you do angry?
Michael Leier: Label an outcast. Now, on a mission to save his name, filter their world upside down.
Male: All right, that was a little scary.
Michael Leier: Okay, you want scary? It came to our world from beyond the grave. One man has the power to stop it but will he be too late.
Male: I know, I think we’re going to go a different direction maybe a woman.
Michael Leier: I can eat all the pizza and donuts I want and still loss 20 pounds. You can too, just –
Male: Just enough. Thank you.
Michael Leier: How about a dog? Kibbles ‘n Bits, Kibbles ‘n Bits Oh, want to give me some Kibbles ‘n Bits.
Male: Next.
S. Michael Leier: How about a drunk? Does everyone know when the bus to Albuquerque gets here?
Male: Security?
Michael Leier: I can do a cow. Moo, moo.
Male: Okay pal, let’s go.
Michael Leier: Wait, wait how about a drunk cow? Moo-hek-moo. Wait, wait, wait.
Male: Fine. Okay, next.
Michael Leier: How you all doing? My purpose is I talk really goodly.
Male: I hate my job. Next.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Thanks for sending that in Mike! If you enjoyed Mike’s demo, let him know. You can visit him at his website, smichaelleier.voices.com. Thanks for listening. Next wee we’ll here from David Boyll and Colin Campbell, so stay subscribed. If you haven’t subscribed to VOX Talk already, you can do so through the iTunes Podcast Directory or subscribe to the RSS feed by email on the VOX Talk blog at blogs.voices.com/voxtalk. Take care and see you next Thursday!
Links from today’s show:
Movie Trailer VOs – Where are the Ladies?
Peter Cullen Optimus Prime Interview
Elie Hirschman
Adam Fox
S. Michael Leier
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