I was intrigued by the process of how a professional voiceover guy manages to submit 40-60 voiceover auditions per day, so I watched his video. Turns out a lot of those leads are sent to him by pay-to-play websites, which isn’t something that’s financially feasible for me right now. So that part of it is out. But what about the editing of this audition tracks? That’s what tends to take me the most time.
Turns out it starts with his saving time by doing every audition with only one or two takes — mere minutes each — and on one long recording. My method thus far is making a new file and recording the audition with sometimes several takes, which I’ll edit together later. Stop, step out of my “booth”, save that file on the computer I don’t have the means to have with me in the booth, open a new file, save the track under the new file name, step back into the booth, and record that next one. That’s a fair bit of time eaten up, so doing everything top to bottom in one long track makes sense to save that time in and of itself.
Problem, being, the first time I tried that approach a few days ago, I screwed up in editing and lost a couple of the audition material samples entirely.
I still don’t know what happened, but think it was something along the lines of taking the existing track and saving it to a new document and editing that down and then cutting off the remaining part of the track (read: all the other auditions) and opening a new document for that next part, etc., somehow… maybe overwriting one of the files? Or something? So at some point when I tried to paste the remaining segment of track with the uncut audition material on it, it pasted in blank. And then because I’d already saved and closed the previous file with only the small segment on it, I couldn’t retrieve the original, full audition track. (Although in retrospect, it may have autosaved it and I could perhaps have gone back to that save and retrieve it?)
In all fairness, it was the reverse of the way this guy did his edits, which is editing from the top of the track down: Edit the first segment, copy and paste that segment into its own file, render and submit it. Then returns to the remaining track in the original file.
I was re-saving the original track again and again into new files as it got whittled down, which probably opened me up to way more room for error (with way more needed content of auditions) than his approach. The submitting the file as you go also ensures you’re getting the audition out ASAP, rather than what I’ve been doing which is editing them all and sending them all out when they’re all done.
Whatever the case, this error of mine has made getting back into the booth to record again a bit daunting, for not wanting even more work to go wrong or go missing. But the bigger part of me knows that’s silly and the best way to do it is just to do it. Get back in the saddle and ride again, or whatever your preferred metaphor is. I won’t get better at it until I do it more. So suffice to say I’ll be going back into the booth once I’m free again shortly, and just try to be more conscientious and practical (/safe) with the editing process.
Live and learn.