How to Edit Voice Overs FASTER with Reaper

hey guys my name is randy i'm a freelance work from home voice actor voice over artist narrator whatever you want to call it um i've been doing youtube videos and youtube narration for a really long time couple of years now and over those years i learned some tips and tricks that helped kind of really make my workflow much quicker so it takes me less time to get these scripts done so i want to share this stuff with you today show you a couple of the tools i use and hopefully you'll learn something new today that you didn't know so first things first there's two things you're gonna need the first thing is a dog clicker just like this one you see here now the reason you need a dog clicker is because it's loud and it's distinct and it sounds like this when you click it into your microphone now why you'll see basically it creates a unique structure in the waveform that you can visually see and that'll help you with editing second thing you're gonna need is what you see on the screen right now that's reaper reaper is a digital audio workstation most people when they're doing stuff like youtube narration or whatever they try to spend as little money as possible so they use audacity audacity is great i used audacity for like a year but when i switched to reaper suddenly it was a lot quicker for me to do all of my narrations so that's why i stuck with it um reaper is free for the first two months you use it and after that it's only sixty dollars and then it's yours forever now sixty dollars might seem kind of steep for people who are doing really cheap youtube narration but in those two months that you are using reaper if you use the tricks i teach you i guarantee you can cut down your work time enough to where you'll be able to earn more money so affording reaper isn't going to be that crazy of an idea and who doesn't like more money in their pocket right so let's talk about what reaper can do that'll make your life easier while you're editing reaper is really good with macros in reaper they're called actions you can see up here at the top there's an actions list so let's go ahead and show the actions list i'm going to show you a couple of the specialized actions that i created that make editing easier for me okay so first things first reaper has something called ripple editing basically whenever you remove a chunk of audio it'll automatically just slam the two pieces together so anything that's in anything that's later in the time it'll all move forward the same amount of time so we use ripple editing for almost everything so the first and most obvious one that i created is called remove and join so what this does is this will turn ripple on right so ripple can be turned on and off it will split the items at a time selection so you highlight the time selection that you want to get rid of and this will split the item at those ends of your selection then the next thing is time selection remove contents of time selection moving later items so it'll get rid of whatever you've highlighted that you've split and then it'll slam them together using ripple and then it'll go to the end of the time selection so that way your cursor is at the end of where you put it so this is good for if you made a mistake and you want to remove a part of your sentence like the beginning of the sentence that you messed up and just moved to the part of the sentence where you did it correctly and i'll show you that another tool that i use is the silence what i call a silence tool so it's essentially the same thing except it doesn't move the item so it's turn it turns on ripple it's unselect all items just to make sure you don't actually delete anything that you uh had selected by mistake and then it removes selected area of item so again you just highlight something that you want to get rid of and you hit e and it goes away but it leaves a silence gap right and then it turns ripple back on last thing that i've created is number seconds of silence sometimes when you are doing youtube narration for certain clients they want you to leave periods of silence in between sections of a script um sometimes it's five seconds sometimes it's one second and the reason they ask you to do that is because it's easier for the editor to see in the waveform where the sections begin and end usually they just end up cutting out that silence but it helps them know where it is so it's easier to edit so i created this as a tool to kind of make that easier so what this does is it turns on ripple and it moves cursor to the start of your time selection so whatever you select it'll move your cursor at the beginning of it for some reason this has to be in there twice for it to actually work i'm not really sure why but you put it in there twice and then it'll split the items at the time selection just like with the remove and join it'll remove the contents of the time selection moving the later items backs right it slams them together like ripple it'll go to the end of that time selection so wherever it was it's now that's where the cursor is and then it'll do insert silence number of seconds and you choose the number of seconds so what'll happen is i'll hit the hotkey for this which as you can see here is five and i use that for five seconds because that's typically how much time i put in between my sections and it'll bring up a window how much silence do you want to insert and then i'll say five and hit enter and then boom it'll just put in five seconds of silence before this i used to have to like remove the section and then slowly drag the audio over using like just point and click to try to get it to about five seconds this is always five seconds it's always exactly precise and it's so much easier this way and then the last thing is the in button which just sets a marker in your audio waveform somewhere on the time frame and you'll see how that works later okay so those are the tools that i use for making editing quicker you got your dog clicker you got your macros in reaper so what i'm going to do for you right now is i'm going to actually record a voiceover script live and then i'm going to show you the process of me going through and editing it and getting it ready for whoever ends up doing the audio production okay so we're going to go ahead and slide this over now here's my script on the left and here's reaper on the right so i can always look at my waveform while i'm recording just in case something goes wrong you always want to be able to see your waveform i've had plenty of instances where i just had it minimized and i realized i forgot to hit record ah okay so this is it's good to just have your screen split okay so i'm gonna go ahead and read through it and if you hear me make a mistake you're gonna hear that sound and that means i've made a mistake okay and you'll see other ways that i use the clicker as i record here and then i'll explain them all okay here we go hysteresis for noise gates whether you use reaper's regate or dynamic split or any other noise gate in pro tools or adobe audition hysteresis is an often overlooked but powerful tool for voice over unfortunately audacity's noise gate does not have this function sorry audacity users hysteresis can be used to replace the hold function on your noise gate setting a hold can leave time for quieter ends of words below the value you set in the great below the gal below the value you set in the gate threshold to stay in the recording this is great for words that end in soft consonants like m for example them it is also great for hard consonants that you might not say loud enough like k or t especially if you're low on breath at the end of a long sentence however this also means that the beginning of breaths can start to make their way in before the gate closes causing your breath to cut out suddenly creating what is called a gate slam here's how hysteresis can fix this first of all what is hysteresis simply said hysteresis allows you to set a different value for when your gate closes than when it opens for example if you have your gate set to negative 40 decibels that's the loudness your voice needs to be to open the gate and if the sound drops below that loudness the gate will close and not let any sound through however if you set your hysteresis to negative six decibels your gate will open at your gate will open at negative 40 decibels but close at negative 46 decibels why is this good well those ins well those words that end in m or soft k's will still go through since they will likely still be above negative 46 decibels this allows you to set your whole this allows you to set your hold to zero since your gate is staying open long enough to catch those ends of words however since breaths always have silence right before them switching from exhaling to inhaling cannot be instant so there will always be a small window of silence before you can breathe in this will make sure that the gate is closed before you breathe in but not before finishing your word how to start using hysteresis with all things related to audio processing different voices and different recording setups mean different values are needed in your fx chain experiment with hysteresis settings experiment with the hysteresis settings in your noise gate i recommend starting at about negative six decibels and go from there turn it up and down and listen for the right values for your recording remember the most remember your most powerful tool in making sure your audio sounds good are your ears thanks for watching i hope you learned something new today okay and so there i have recorded my voiceover so what i'm gonna do now is i am going to edit it now you can see these big spikes in the waveform that's the clicker right that's the sound this lets me know certain things about the audio so at the very beginning of a script and usually at the end i'll do a double click like this one you see here this is good if you're doing multiple scripts in like one setting you can look at it you can see the double clicks indicate the beginning and ends of certain scripts here you can see where a mistake was made and then here where it's a lot i call it a long click like that that means the end of a section so i know that that's where that silence is going to go however many seconds the audio editor want or the video editor wants okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come back here um we don't need all this stuff here at the beginning so i'm going to go ahead and hit r boom it's gone just like that easy right now what i'm going to recommend is this is something that you can do in reaper that you cannot do in audacity which is start listening to your audio and then scroll forward and start editing out the mistakes you're going to know based on the wave form what your mistakes are based on how they look like this is obviously oops this is obviously the same as this is the same as this right so we know that this is a mistake so if we listen to it it'll be this beginning of the same sentence in theory below the value you set in below the gal it's below the value okay so we know that's the same so we've highlighted this mistake we hit r and then suddenly ends of words below the value it's so seamless right you wouldn't even know that i messed up the sentence there so we're going to do that while we listen back now as you're listening back really pay attention to what you're saying because you might have mispronounced a word you might have um missed an entire sentence in which case the it won't really make any sense as you're listening back to it it's like somebody telling you a story and the sentence is missing it's weird right so let's go ahead and start listening and we're going to move forward and we're going to edit out mistakes now what i'm going to also do at this point is i'm going to turn on my effects okay the reason i do this is because i want to hear what the final audio is going to sound like in audacity you have to wait until the end to turn on your effects reaper uses non-destructive editing which means that no matter what you do to this audio file it's always still exactly the way you recorded it it never actually destroys anything it only adds layers to it okay so for a good example of this is here's that mistake i made but the thing is is like all this stuff is still here right i'm just choosing to hide it i'm not actually deleting anything i'm just saying hey don't include that in the final render okay so i'm going to turn on the um the effects chain that i have and i'm gonna listen back and i'm just gonna edit stuff out as i hear it okay hysteresis for noise gates whether you use reaper's regate or dynamic split or any other noise gate in pro tools or adobe audition hysteresis is an often overlooked but powerful tool for voice over unfortunately audacity's noise gate does not have this function sorry audacity users hysteresis can be used to replace the hold function on your noise gate setting a hold can leave time for quieter ends of words below the value you set in the gate threshold to stay in the recording this is great for words that end in soft consonants like m for example them it is also great for hard consonants that you might not say loud enough like k or t especially if you're low on breath at the end of a long sentence however this also means that the beginning of breaths can start to make their way in before the gate closes causing your breath to cut out suddenly creating what is called a gate slam here's how hysteresis can fix this okay so i'm going to pause here what i've done is i've finished all the editing i've edited out all my mistakes i've put in the silences as i needed them you need to listen to the whole audio file okay because you never know where you've made a mistake so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna go ahead and read along here in the script while i listen to it okay so again i'm going to turn on the effects i'm going to listen to it and then when we're done we'll talk a little bit more about it first of all what is hysteresis simply said hysteresis allows you to set a different value for when your gate closes than when it opens for example if you have your gate set to negative 40 decibels that's the loudness your voice needs to be to open the gate and if the sound drops below that loudness the gate will close and not let any sound through however if you set your hysteresis to negative 6 decibels your gate will open at negative 40 decibels but close at negative 46 decibels why is this good well those words that end in m or soft k's will still go through since they will likely still be above negative 46 decibels this allows you to set your hold to zero since your gate is staying open long enough to catch those ends of words however since breaths always have silence right before them switching from exhaling to inhaling cannot be instant so there will always be a small window of silence before you can breathe in this will make sure that the gate is closed before you breathe in but not before finishing your word how to start using hysteresis with all things related to audio processing different voices and different recording setups mean different values are needed in your fx chain experiment with the hysteresis settings in your noise gate i recommend starting at about negative six decibels and go from there turn it up and down and listen for the right values for your recording remember your most powerful tool in making sure your audio sounds good are your ears thanks for watching i hope you learned something new today excuse me okay so that sounds pretty good um you're gonna notice that sometimes i messed up words like i said recording instead of recordings or maybe i made contractions or whatever this is going to be up to whoever's hiring you to do the channel some people are going to be like no you need to read it exactly word for word and if you make a mistake you have to re-record it and some people are going to be like whatever as long as you don't say the wrong word changing the meaning of the sentence right a lot of those little filler words usually aren't very important so here we have our audio file right now we want to go ahead and render it now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and turn on the effects before i render it so that way i'm not rendering the raw audio i'm rendering the audio with the effects on and again this is my chain here i have a gate i have an eq curve and i have a compressor i'm not going to go into these if you want to learn more about these you can find videos on them or i can explain it later feel free to leave a comment below or you can message me on discord and i can explain this stuff so i'm going to go ahead and turn on the effects and i'm going to render the file okay actually before i turn the effects back on because it messes up my recording i want to talk about how to render the file so the most important thing is meeting the specifications of wherever you're rendering the file for but if they don't have any specifications what i usually recommend is a sample rate of 44.1 kilohertz mono and a wave at 16 bit depth you might find people that ask for 24-bit or 32-bit depth that's fine but if they don't recommend anything just do 16. honestly to the point where you're getting above that you're kind of hitting things that aren't going to be important for youtube videos anyway that's going to be more important for like high form narration for commercials or music production for now wave 16-bit 44.1 kilohertz mono is fine so i'm gonna turn on the effects and render it okay so we have rendered the file now and it's going to be sitting in our audio folder so save your work now what people will tell you is you need to normalize your audio right it needs to be a certain volume to sound good you can normalize your audio from here the reason i don't do this is because when my effects are on it's set to certain levels right anything above 37 decibels is my gate if i normalize that audio make it really loud suddenly all these values are going to be off and it's going to mess with the audio so instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to open a new page from a new template okay okay so this is a template called finalize with lufs this is where i'm going to finalize my audio so i'm going to go ahead and insert my file and again it doesn't look very loud does it right these are kind of small waveforms so what we're going to do is we're going to normalize this with something called luffs luff's stands for loudness unit full scale essentially it's become the new standard for how we measure loudness it used to be a long time ago we used something called rms root mean squared and that was fine that was just based on like the science of how audiology works and stuff lufts is based on not the science of waveforms and stuff but it's based on how humans perceive loudness so it's considered kind of a better way when you're making something that's meant to be consumed by humans so for example if you go to somewhere like audible they still do rms for their loudness but if you go to somewhere like youtube or spotify they use lufs youtube i think normalizes to negative 19 lofts i think it's the same value for spotify it might be negative 16 i don't know i'll put that information right here on the screen and we're going to do the same so what we're going to do is we're going to take this and we're going to go to our extensions now you should download the sws extension it's free you can get it online it's super easy to install on reaper and then we're going to use the loudness function which is based on lufs so we're going to analyze and it's going to tell us how it's not very loud at all right 32.4 so we're going to normalize to negative 23 which is what i prefer i prefer negative 23 because i think it sounds better yes it's just gonna get turned up when it gets uploaded to youtube but i'd rather the audio file i send sound as good as possible to my audio editor or my casting director whoever and then wherever they upload it whatever that program is can change the volume i don't care okay now this is normalized to negative 23 lofts now we're gonna see the spike here this spike looks really loud right however that word however now what we're gonna do is we're gonna use an effect we're gonna use another compressor and we're going to use a limiter here on our master bus so basically the compressor once again will just make sure anything that's over a certain volume can kind of get smushed down and the limiter makes sure that nothing gets above this threshold it's like a really hardcore compressor the limiter is just there for emergencies but if we listen to this however however it never gets above as we can see here negative 3.1 and it still sounds okay so i'm not too worried about it you can hear what it sounds like like this since your gate is staying open long enough to catch those ends of words however since breath's always it sounds okay i'm not too worried about it and that's why we have this setup we have another compressor in our final eyes with luft's page as well as a limiter on our master bus so to me i think this is going to sound just fine so once again we're going to render it into a finalized audio file again we're going to use all the same settings right render the file and as you can see the waveforms never got above about negative three decibels so it's always within that standard okay and that's it so once you have that file rendered you send it off to whoever your editor is or your manager is or whatever and it's ready to go as you can see this is a lot quicker than doing it with audacity and that means that especially what this means is that you can record a bunch of stuff at once and rather than having to go through and apply all the effects to everything everything's just already ready to go and you can just take one large audio file split it up into the different scripts put it all into the thing normalize all the audio at once and render them all to their separate folders where they need to go definitely makes things easier especially if you're doing a lot of scripts okay so again my name is randy if you have questions for me feel free to put them down in the comments below or you can send me a message on discord and i'll try to get back to you all right well that's it so you know get out there and make some money doing youtube voiceover

Channel: Randy VirdenVO

Views: 2,649

Keywords: Reaper, Voice Over, Audio Engineering

Id: Dccb9yg4gWE

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021