Voice over tips?

Hi Everyone,
I am currently trying my hand at creating voice overs. I have a reasonable mic/preamp setup plugged into one of the higher end Sony Vaio laptops so I already get a descent raw audio file. However, that's exactly what it is: raw. I would be really grateful if any of you could give me some tips on making the audio (spoken male voice only) sound more professional. Perhaps not quite as deep and resonant as the film trailors but something towards that direction. At the moment I am experimenting with the compander and then I normalize the file. This has given fairly good results.
Your help will be much appreciated.
Many thanks

Nothing beats an acoustically dead or well treated room for that closeness. I don't have it, but the Reflexion filter from Selectronics is pretty good. It's a half barrel of heavy duty damping material mounted around the mike.
When I use a dynamic mike, I point it not directly at the mouth but to the tip of my chin or even from the side. This way I avoid plosives like heavy B's and P's. It also rounds off treble gently, emphasizing the bass in your voice slightly. This kind of 'natural EQ'ing' is preferable to digital filtering afterwards IMO.
Inside Audition I always remove any noise that might creep in, like fan noises etc. I also roll off all bass below circa 70 hZ. You must listen to your recording to find the correct frequency; it shouldn't affect the sound at all. The reason I do this is to remove rumble and deep resonances that will not be audible on most computer speakers anyway. My recordings ends up in the MP3 format, and low frequencies tend to 'steal' a lot of energy from the compression algorithm. When there aren't any really low frequencies, you free up resources so that your VO is treated better. This is especially evident with hard MP3 compression.
If I'm not the last hand on the file I will deliver my files without any dynamic or EQ treatments except perhaps normalizing to -3 db. If I make the final file I actually use some hard limiting too. Max is at -3 dB, because I've found that laptop speakers especially can break up at anything above that. I push up the volume a bit to get more presence and intelligibility on poor speakers. It depends on your target audience.
Nevertheless, you need one of those rare 'million-dollar-voice' guys in to get that particualar voice. Technology can't do it alone. The attitude of the talent/speaker will make a huge difference. Don't sit hunchback'ed and talk, pretend you are a teacher (in a quiet class!) and you want to say something important to all, without shouting. Singers in the studio are often told to sing with a smile - however artificial - because it improves their voice. Similar tricks for VO. Things like that...

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[email protected]

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Hi again and thanks so much for replying.
The 'mic jack' on the old mic is both wide and large, measuring about an inch and a quarter from the base (where it comes out of the black encasing) to the edge of the tip (sort of cone shaped). As I can't plug this in directly to any port in the back of the Mac, I thought it might be possible to to buy some sort of adapter so that I could plug in the jack at one end, with a USB connector at the other end to go straight into the Mac. But I see from your comment that you are suggesting a smaller jack itself (i.e., large size jack to small size jack and then plug in to the small round port, instead of jack to USB port)?
At the Mac shop I bought a USB adapter to connect up a second monitor (screen). I've just dug out the package and it's called a mini display port to VGA adapter. But back to the mic issue, I don't want to use the old mic really, I'm just trying to eliminate whether or not my usual mic, or its USB cable, is at fault and causing the clicking.
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I do have a headset that I used to use for Skype. It has a pink and a green jack. I could plug one into the "headphones symbol' port and try recording again with Garageband. At least the jack is the right size. Again, this is just for the purpose of eliminating whether my good mic on a stand with the anti-popping sheild is at fault.
While my Mac does have both inbuilt speakers (I don't need external ones) and an inbuilt microphone, the latter is not of a high enough quality for voice overs, hence buying an external mic etc. But whatever is causing the clicking or ticking is obviously affecting the quality of my recordings. As you can imagine, it is very time-consuming to edit out the ticking spikes and if the noise appears during speech, you can't edit it out at all.
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Hi Slacker:
Welcome to discussions!
It almost sounds like you extracted the main audio (so that it shows up on the second line in the timeline) and then you tried to record over that with the mic.
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Hi Rajendra,
your questions is marked as solved, but I haven't seen your question answered, so I might be wasting time. Anyway.
I bumped into the same problem not long ago. I'm using a Multibridge, but the problem and solution are the same. Here's the reply I got from Kristian Lam over at Blackmagic:
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"The DeckLink cards either record or playback but doesn't do both simultaneously. In order to use the VO Tool in FCP, you have to:
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I'm not sure the AES/EBU xlr inputs will work with a mic plugged directly. This is actually intended to be a digital format - see the wiki here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES/EBU
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If you are planning to use the VO tool, you may be recording scratch VO until the script is finalized... in this case, or even if this is intended to be the final audio, you can also hook up an adapter to use the Mac's built-in audio input as a source, in whic case the A/D conversion happens on the Mac's audio card.
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I have a FCP system set up which includes an AJA Kona LHe card. Audio inputs are via the AJA. This includes audio from a video deck as well as other audio inputs, such as a studio condenser mic connected for voice overs. I monitor the output from FCP through the AJA card via a Samson C-Control (monitor matrix). Here's my big problem. When I'm recording voice over, whilst there is definitely an audio feed being routed to the headphones (I am able to hear the audio cue countdown), I am unable to monitor the sound from the microphone through the headphones (or speakers for that matter). The microphone is working fine... when it comes to playing back the voice over through the headphones (or speakers), I can hear the track absolutely fine. I cannot understand why this should be. Has anyone experienced the same problem... and do you know how to solve it? HELP!.... Thank you.

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Voice over tips?

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