Voice Actors Can Take Virtual Tours of Home Studios

Voice actors who want to know what voice-over equipment their colleagues are using can now peek into those studios, in a new series of articles and photos on VoiceOverXtra.com.

Located in the web site’s Home Studio section, these virtual Home Studio Tours reveal the equipment, studio layouts, soundproofing and other factors that are crucial to providing clients with quality voice-overs.

The articles also provide insight into the studio owners’ reasons for buying certain equipment.

For instance, the current online tour explores the West Palm Beach, Florida studio of voice talent Ed Victor. He was recently hired to do all voice-overs for the Florida Lottery – a job that takes him to a Miami studio for recording.

In his first visit to that studio, “The booth was dead silent, and the microphone was the same one the big movie guys use in Los Angeles,” Victor says. “I couldn’t help myself, and broke into my best ‘Don LaFontaine’ (the premier voice of movie trailers).

“The door was open and the ad agency in the next room overheard my impromptu – and called me for an audition right there on the spot!” Victor says. “So I had to get that microphone for my own home studio, and bought one the next day.”

Stories abound from the growing slate of other voice actors whose studios are profiled in the series, including (in alphabetical order) Colin Campbell, Cookie Colletti, Mitch Collins, Luis Garcia, Joan Hovey Hall, Diane Merritt and Alan Varner.

The Home Studio section also features advice on constructing home studios, equipment to use, a voice-over bookstore, and an expansive Home Studio Super Store for quality equipment purchases.

Source: OpenPR.com

ISDN and Source-Connect Explained for Voice Actors

As explained in a new article penned by voice artist Jennifer Vaughn at VoiceOverXtra.com, ISDN - or Integrated Services Digital Network - and Source-Connect are tools that allow two-way, high fidelity, real time communication and recording from a home studio to high-end studios, stations and networks elsewhere, all over the world.

“With an ISDN connection, it’s like being right in the client’s studio,” explains Jennifer Vaughn, author of the article, “What Are ISDN and Source-Connect? Do I Need Them?”

In this process, the voice actor records and transmits in real time, while receiving direction from the external studio. However, these high-tech tools involve rather costly equipment and monthly subscription charges (ISDN) or software (Source-Connect).

To read the full article, click here.

Source: OpenPR.com

WordPress; The New Podcast Publishing Platform

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg has announced that WordPress.com, a free blog hosting service, has updated the amount of space it allocates to each user to 3 gigabytes, ideal for podcasting.

“Much of the work we do at Automattic is behind the scenes, infrastructure you’ll (hopefully) never notice or see, but we’re always thinking about how the improvements we make to the foundation of the site will allow us to build more interesting things on top of it.

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.”

Since much of the challenge of podcasting rests with finding economical online storage, LibSyn was by default, the service of choice.

Now, WordPress has changed the game.

With its simple administrative interface for creating new episodes, powerful built-in search engine optimization and plethora of plug-ins, WordPress is poised to become the defacto standard podcast publishing tool.

If you’ve been thinking about starting your own podcast, download this free guide called “The Small Business Podcasting Kit“, then sign-up at Wordpress.

Hoteliers Find Voice Overs Help Rent Suites

When is the last time you saw a hotel promoting itself online using little more than static imagery and some strategically placed ad copy?

Hoteliers would be wise to observe the trend in the real estate market and employ more technology and visitor friendly aids that will results in more bookings for their establishments.

Dee Thomas of Pegasus Solutions suggests that hoteliers should provide customers with a web gallery with multiple-language voice-overs that will present the shopper with a complete perspective of the property and its facilities.

Voice over could be used as a tool to flesh out the offerings and also as a mechanism that effectively communicates in the language(s) of prospective customers, whatever those languages may be.

The web has opened up business on a global scale, thus necessitating communication with customers in their native language.

Websites attracting people from around the world should be aware that only 30% of visitors are English speaking. The other 70% speak different languages. If the text used on a website is only in English, then 70% of prospective customers are unable to easily consume the content which directly affects the potential of conducting business with those individuals.

Source: BreakingTravelNews.com

Image: istockphoto.com/Frances Twitty

The Future of Voice Acting Now

Aspiring voice actors aren’t just working day jobs in radio, television or at telemarketing firms… they’re in the high school broadcasting communications classes and take part in co-operative learning opportunities to gain practical, hands-on experience working in the field that will shape their future careers.

Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices.com had the great pleasure of sitting in on one such class taught by a seasoned broadcaster, Brent Bissell, teacher at Clarke Road Secondary School in London, Ontario Canada, watching the high school’s daily broadcast and spending time with the students to take their voice acting questions as well as chat with them about their goals following graduation, a reality that is right around the corner.

“I’d never been so ‘behind the scenes’ before and it was intriguing to see how the green screens worked when graphics were added to give the appearance of a professional network studio during the televised broadcast. I also got to watch the students, who were all responsible for different things, operate the teleprompter, cameras, and even be news anchors behind the desk.”

Technology being used in the classroom included an assortment of editing tools such as Adobe Audition for audio, a Shure microphone modeled in the 50s style, a dynamic microphone for the radio announcer, linear and non-linear editing capabilities, and a Shure 819 boundary microphone used to pick up the voices of the news anchors during the Clarke Road televised daily broadcast which was flat upon the table and picked up the presenters voices effortlessly.

Source: VOX Daily

Yahoo’s New Browser-Based MP3 Player

Yahoo recently announced a new free browser-based MP3 player that you can embed in your any web page.

To use the Yahoo MP3 player, you’ll need to:

• Add links to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
• Add a line of code to insert Yahoo’s Javascript library.
• Refresh your page and see the player buttons appear on your web page

You may be thinking this is a great idea, however one must be cautious when working with their precious audio productions. This sentiment was felt by the +30 people who left comments at TechCrunch.

Why You Should Think Twice Before Adding the Yahoo MP3 Player

Podcasting News gives three valid reasons why webmasters, podcasters and voice talent should avoid the Yahoo MP3 Player:

• First of all, Yahoo’s player duplicates the functionality of a lot of existing Flash-based MP3 players. If you’ve got MP3s to share, there are free plugins for the popular blogging platforms that embed players into your pages.

• You don’t want to outsource control of your site’s look or functionality to a third party. If you put a middle man between your content and your audience, they can change the features, introduce advertising and even hijack your content at any time. It’s happened before.

• You especially don’t want to rely on Yahoo for this. Remember how Yahoo unceremoniously killed their podcast portal last year? They could drop support for this MP3 player at any time, which would break every page that you used their player on.

Given Yahoo’s history of trying out new ideas and be willing to pull the plug with little notice to their users, I’d recommend staying away from the Yahoo MP3 player, particularly if your business depends on having a reliable, ad-free MP3 player.

Is Audacity for Mac OS X Development Dead?

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

You can use Audacity to Record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, change the speed or pitch of a recording, and more.

Audacity has been used by many podcasters as an entry-level podcasting tool, appears to be dead on the Mac platform.

Podcasting News is reporting that richardash1981 at the Audacity Team Forum said “There is currently no one with a Mac actively contributing to the development of Audacity, hence at the moment no Mac releases. 1.3.4 for OS X will appear when someone volunteers to compile it and sort the remaining bugs out.”

If you’re a Mac OS X developer, now is the time to act. Join the Audacity Team Forum to bring this release to the public.

You can download Audacity free and learn the basics of recording, editing and mixing with Audacity by reading their helpful tutorials.

10 Technological Innovations Introduced at CES

As we gear up for CES 2008, a quick look to the past reveals that the annual technology conference has been, and still is to a large degree, the venue of choice for introducing new hardware, software and inspiring change.

• Videocassette recorder (VCR) 1970
• Pong home console by Atari, 1975
• Camcorder 1981Compact disc player 1981
• Commodore 64 personal computer 1982
• Mini disc 1993
• Digital versatile disc (DVD) 1996
• High-definition television (HDTV) 1998
• XBOX game console by Microsoft, 2001
• Plasma television 2001
• Internet television (IPTV) 2005

CES 2008 runs from January 7-10 in Las Vegas.

Source: Consumer Electronics Assn.

MADCAT to Perform Automatic Translation for Troops

Foreign language translation in the battlefield is a job the military wants to see automated.

BBN Technologies has been awarded a $5.6 million contract to develop automated translation systems for the U.S. military.

The funding comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the Multilingual Automatic Document Analysis and Translation program.

MADCAT - Multilingual Automatic Document Classification Analysis and Translation - has a single goal, to quickly convert everything from a handwritten note, urban graffiti and computer files in foreign languages to English using a PDA or a laptop so that military personnel may respond to threats in foreign nations.

“This is one of the most exciting but challenging research areas,” Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies, stated, “but the potential benefit is clearly huge.”

BBN says it plans to pull it off by integrating “optical character recognition with state-of-the-art translation and distillation techniques,” while developing “novel methods for processing handwritten text,” according to its press release.

Is automatic voice translation the next frontier?

Add your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Photo Credit: DARPA

Warner Bros. Goes Blu-Ray

In response to consumer demand, Warner Bros. Entertainment will release its high-definition DVD titles exclusively in the Blu-ray disc format beginning later this year, it was announced today by Barry Meyer, Chairman & CEO, Warner Bros. and Kevin Tsujihara, President, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group.

“Warner Bros.’ move to exclusively release in the Blu-ray disc format is a strategic decision focused on the long term and the most direct way to give consumers what they want,” said Meyer. “The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger. We believe that exclusively distributing in Blu-ray will further the potential for mass market success and ultimately benefit retailers, producers, and most importantly, consumers.”

Warner Home Video will continue to release its titles in standard DVD format and Blu-ray. After a short window following their standard DVD and Blu-ray releases, all new titles will continue to be released in HD DVD until the end of May 2008.

“Warner Bros. has produced in both high-definition formats in an effort to provide consumer choice, foster mainstream adoption and drive down hardware prices,” said Jeff Bewkes, President and Chief Executive Officer, Time Warner Inc., the parent company of Warner Bros. Entertainment. “Today’s decision by Warner Bros. to distribute in a single format comes at the right time and is the best decision both for consumers and Time Warner.”

“A two-format landscape has led to consumer confusion and indifference toward high definition, which has kept the technology from reaching mass adoption and becoming the important revenue stream that it can be for the industry,” said Tsujihara. “Consumers have clearly chosen Blu-ray, and we believe that recognizing this preference is the right step in making this great home entertainment experience accessible to the widest possible audience. Warner Bros. has worked very closely with the Toshiba Corporation in promoting high definition media and we have enormous respect for their efforts. We look forward to working with them on other projects in the future.”

Warner Bros. is the largest movie company in the world, releasing more movies per year than any other company. Blu-Ray now is exclusive to 75% of movie studios.

For more updates, visit Techmeme.

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