Changing Speed Of A Voice-Over To Fit A Time Slot

[Lloyd]

I don't know where else to post this.
Please excuse.
I'm new at this.
I live in the US midwest, just west of St. Louis, MO. I have an iMac Intel running OSX 10.5.6.
I have started doing voice-overs on the web, and I am using an excellent sound recording program that is not Apple, but it is made for Mac.
I need an answer to the following problem.
When I do, as an example, a 30 second audio spot, it may take me 35 seconds or more.
(Clients always want to put in more words than there is time to speak.)
If it’s a good take, and I want to keep it, I have to “squeeze” it to exactly 30 seconds.
After I properly use my sound program’s “change pitch and speed” command to do the “squeeze”, changing only the speed and leaving the pitch unchanged, it sounds fine except there’s a echo.
I asked the author of the sound program how to solve the problem, and the author said,
“The echo that you hear is inherent to the way Apple's time-stretching algorithm works.”

Does anyone know of a way to improve on Apple’s time-streching algorithm, or of a sound program that does not cause an echo in an iMac when speed is changed?
Thank you,
Lloyd

[BKK-OZ]

http://www.ronimusic.com/
(Amazing Slowdowner)

Waves Soundshifter

Vocalign Project

[Heritage]

Do you own Final Cut Studio?
If so, you can do this in Soundtrack Pro.

[Lloyd]

Thanks for the suggestions about Waves Soundshifter and Final Cut Pro.
They are both way too expensive for me right now.
I saw SoundShifter on the web for $800.00 and $600.00
My understanding is that Soundtrack pro used to be available by itself for about $200.00 or $300.00,
but now you can only get it as part of the $1300.00 package with Final Cut Pro.
I have sent an email to WavePad to ask the same question.
It's freeware, and the Master version is about 50 bucks.
That's about my price range at the moment, unless I take my car seats out and search in the spot where my wife dropped her purse last week.

[Superballoon]

Why are you deliberately not mentioning what program you are already using?

Makes it tricky to suggest solutions/options you might not have thought about...

Anyway in general I'd say if you need to shorten 35 seconds of speech to 30 to fit in a radio spot, clarity and intelligibility is of very high importantce, and IMHO would manually edit it down by removing selected "whitespaces" and shortening the tails, rather than using a generic and/or optimized timeshift process, which typically introduces some artefacts.

This might be an option that saves you the hunt for a better timestretch, and it gives you better control of individual words/syllables.

[Lloyd]

Hi Superballoon,
Thanks for the info.
It's Amadeus Pro, and it's great except for time-stretching in my iMac.
The author has been very good at answering my questions and helping me learn.
It does allow me to remove spaces manually, and I can get by with that, but patching loose ends is not my expertise, and I'd rather have something more sophisticated than me.
I searched for IMHO and got International Mental Health Organization, which may be a lucky find for me, but what do you mean by IMHO?
Have to go now.
Won't be able to get on the web till late today or tomorrow.
Thanks,
Lloyd

[BKK-OZ]

$80 for Amazing Slowdowner

[spitfire31]

I searched for IMHO and got International Mental Health Organization, which may be a lucky find for me, but what do you mean by IMHO?

That's 'netinese' for In My Humble Opinion. Which can often be read as as 'In My Not So Humble Opinion'...

HTH.

Sorry, Hope That Helps

Joey

[Cools]

The simplest solution here is to stick to the time limits. Part of my job is doing TV commercials and clients always want to squeeze as much as possible into the voice over. If they go over the time limit, I tell them and we work at it until it fits. It's better to fix something during the session rather than waste time on it in post.

[Slovenec]

The simplest solution here is to stick to the time limits. Part of my job is doing TV commercials and clients always want to squeeze as much as possible into the voice over. If they go over the time limit, I tell them and we work at it until it fits. It's better to fix something during the session rather than waste time on it in post.

I totally agree! Not only that but do as suggested in another post and cut out any unnecessary spaces. I do this all the time when editing interviews for my radio work and 90% of the time it works!

The other thing with time stretching is that if you speed it up too much, the actualy diction of the words can start to sound strange as people wouldn't speak that way normally (if you get my drift).