brutalmoose

Just how much recorded audio do I actually use?

Added 2014-07-04 19:33:55 +0000 UTC

Cutting audio is one of the most tedious steps of creating a video. Once the script is done and I've recorded my voice over, it's time to whittle down the audio down to the bits that I'm actually going to use. I took some screenshots while doing this, and combined them into one image to figure out just how much audio I tend to use. In the above image, the top track is the large, unedited VO audio file. For this video I recorded for about thirty minutes. The second track shows the audio after I've done my initial cuts, which is when I remove all of my mistakes, jokes that I decide I don't like, and duplicate takes that I've recorded. The third track is the final step of my VO edits. The audio has been trimmed down to remove silence at the beginning/ending of tracks, and I take out most of the sections where I take a breath mid-sentence. Not everyone does this, but I tend to like my audio to be super quick, so if a joke doesn't land, we're quickly onto the next part of the video. The final audio edit stands at just under 9 minutes, which means I used somewhere around 30% of the audio I actually recorded. I haven't done this for any of my other videos, but I'd assume that's a pretty standard amount of audio usage for me. People that are better at reading lines will use more of their recorded audio, since they have less mistakes to remove. Man, if I could actually just read through a script once without errors, it would speed up this process so much. That is... pretty much never going to happen, though. Anyway, production on my latest Original is moving along at a really good pace! Hope to have something for you guys to watch pretty soon.