Punch and Roll (PNR)

hi there this is stephen gonzalez with steven gonzalez voiceovers how are you doing today there's a technique that whether you're a long-form narrator or that 15-second stinger specialist that can really help with your editing process and so punch and roll that's what's next on reaper voice talent in this video we're going to be tackling punch and roll exactly what it is where it comes from and how it fits inside a voice over project and then we're going to be talking about pre-roll this is what makes punch and roll happen what it is and how to configure it within reaper and we're going to be having some demonstrations along the way and then we're going to be looking at two very specialized reaper topics the first being a record mode known as time selection auto punch this thing is absolutely wonderful it's the golden safety net when it comes to recording within reaper and then finally we're going to be looking at recording audio during pre-roll and it's exactly what it sounds like why would we want to do it and how to set it up along the way there will be some side topics now there are some caveats to go with this video and the first one is that i'm going to invite you to get your notepad out whether electronic or paper i'm going to invite you to go get that cup of coffee or a bag of popcorn or both whatever and then buckle your seat belt because this is going to be a long ride with a bunch of information and i know that some people are new to voiceover and if they're not necessarily new to voiceover they're certainly new to punch and roll i don't think that you can get everything that's in this video in one setting so i'm requesting that if you have some fogginess about certain topics that you watch the video again and then if there's still further fogginess then in the description below there's a timestamp list with topics and you just click on the specific time stamp for that topic it'll jump you right to that topic and then if you still have further fogginess about anything then we can set up a one-on-one and i'll be happy to do that for you the second caveat i guess you would call it by popular demand um i don't know how many pms i've received about this and um one or two public requests so here is my editing table and you'll see some things on the periphery here don't worry about those right now including this little guy right there the three things that we're interested in are these three right here all right so what is it that you're going to actually see well you're going to see this so you're going to have reaper as the main window and a pip in the lower right hand corner now with a whole of that out of the way and without further ado let's get started now what exactly is punch and roll in the first place well imagine yourself in a studio and you're recording an audio book and i mean we're human right so we make mistakes even the most professional the most experienced voice actor makes mistakes from time to time very rarely but they do and so what will happen on our mistake is that the engineer will stop the recording process back the playback cursor to a point before your mistake and then do what's called a roll and that term comes from the old days whenever music and audio were stored on magnetic tape and they would come in these reels and the reels would sit on spindles on the recorder and so what would happen is when you hear roll tape the engineer would literally turn on the machine and those reels would start rotating on those spindles and the tape would go through the recording mechanism so for us the engineer would start rolling the project and at a point that seems to be completely random to us completely unknowable the engineer will punch the record button and then the recording process will continue so really it should be called roll and punch instead of punch and roll but punch and roll took a hold and that's what we have so that's it how do we configure this thing well we start with the pre-roll and the pre-rolls definition is simply the distance between the roll and the punch points that's it that's what the pre-roll is and so how do we set this up well we go into reaper and for those of you who have gone through the fundamental sequence you've already done the first part which is setting up the bpm and time signature for those of you who have not i really encourage you to pause this video go to the fundamental sequence video called global project settings whether for mac or for windows look at that participate in its tweaking of some certain parameters and then come back if if you don't want to do that then i'm going to go through what the necessary parameters will be and so we're going to be going very very quickly here we go so we're going to go to file and project settings and we're going to go to the project settings tab and project bpm you should have 120 change that to a 60 and time signature you should have four slash four or four over four or as musicians would say it four four time and change that first four to a one now we've said one measure is equal to one beat that's what this one is all about and then because project bpm is 60 60 beats per minute is what bpm stands for that means that there is one beat happening every second what we've done is taken a measure to equal a beat to equal a second so a measure is equal to a second and that's the goal equating a measure to a second remember reaper's meant primarily as a music production software package but we have to make it think the way we do in seconds and this is the way to do it for punch and roll now if you want to keep 120 well that means that there's a beat happening every half second right or in another way of saying it and maybe the more important way to say it for our purposes there are two beats happening every second that beats per second is our number that needs to go to the top here so at 120 that's two beats per second so we need to change that top number to a two if we do something like 420 which is seven beats per second well then we need to change the top number to a seven i give you these and others in the description below because of actions and scripts that are granular according to the tempo in other words the faster the tempo the more effective those actions and scripts are going to be and for right now for our purposes we need to keep it at 60 and 1 over 4. now that we've set that up but before we go with punch and roll let's see what it's like to do a mistake and then punch in our correction so we're going to develop a track we're going to record arm it and i'm going to stretch it out until the zero appears in the vu meter which is right about there and i'm going to change the input to the microphone through which i'm speaking with you now and i'm going to label this as p r oh sorry record without punch and roll now i've set this up believe it or not i've set this up as a one action thing so from now on whenever i develop a track you're gonna see it go from a you you know kind of a blank track to this in like no time and in a future video i might show you how that's done the thing that you want to take a look at the two well three things you want to take a look at the first is the cursor location and the transport you'll note that in this demonstration it's only going to increment it's only going to count up from zero and then you want to look also at the reaper status it's going to toggle between stopped and either playing or recording and then finally you want to look at the vu meter here you want your peaks to go between negative 12 and negative six and it's okay if it hops above negative six every once in a while every once in a while if you're not reaching 12 on a regular basis then really you need to crank the gain on your interface and if you're going above negative six all the time then you really need to crank it down and so let's begin with the mistake in three two one sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give retreat okay i meant to say we can give battle and so i made that mistake and i want the cursor around right about here at the end of the last known good so that i can record the pickup but i can't get my cursor there simply by clicking because of these vertical dotted lines collectively known as the grid for music it's a wonderful thing for vo it's a nuisance so you really want to take that grid out and the way that we do this is by going to the icon toolbar and clicking on this button and now we can go ahead and click wherever we want that edit cursor to go and we want it to go right roughly about right there and now i need to go over cursor modes with you in anticipation of something called trimming the first mode that you see with the mouse cursor is what i call the time mode in other words if it's in this kind of appearance i can drag out a time selection so if i'm in an empty area in the arrange area or if i'm in the ruler i can simply drag out a time selection you see now the next mode is called the pointer mode and in this case we can select and or move things so for example i can select this media item or i can move it you see and if i click here i can move the edit cursor the next mode is what's called fade mode and it happens right before we get to the edge of the media item and it looks like that now what this allows me to do is drag a fade into the media item now it in this case it's out but if i were on the left side it would be fade in and also i can pull up its context menu and change the shape of the fade you see very cool and then finally at the edge of the media item we have what's called the trim mode and you see there is the double arrow left right thing with a square bracket that's open to the middle of the media item in question if i were on the left side the square bracket would be opening to the right again to the middle of the media item in this case we're on the right side so it opens to the left now if i want to reduce the visible presence of a media item that's called trimming and it looks like this now watch what happens right before i get to the edit cursor bam that's what's called snapping perfectly aligning itself with something else and there's a reason why i keep the grid off but snapping on is because snapping affects more than just a grid it affects media items cursors markers regions all kinds of cool stuff and so normally again you would have the grid off but the snap on if you want to increase the visible presence of a media item it's called untrimming and you simply drag away from the middle of the media item now eventually you're going to get to a point where it snaps like that and then if you further untrim you'll see two cusps here on the top and the bottom this is telling us that this is the end of the media item but if that's the end of the media item what gives with all this audio here well if you notice this audio segment and this audio segment are identical and that is because what is happening is that the media item is repeating itself in reaper parlance that's called looping and i can think of a wonderful wonderful thing about reaper for looping and that is room tone record say five minutes of room tone pull out the best 30 seconds save it off as a wav file and then you record and edit your project whether it's an audio book or e-learning slide deck or or commercial stack whatever it happens to be and then you would develop a second track call it room tone let's say import that 30 second wave and then untrim it for as long as the project is way more efficient than sitting there and saying copy and then paste paste paste paste wonderful way to do things and then finally before we get to actually recording the pickup there is an action that says hey wherever the cursor is wherever the edit cursor is that's where i want the trim to happen and you can go to the actions list and you can say trim right edge and you'll see item edit trim right edge of item under mouse to edit cursor and you'll note that i've given it a shortcut in your actions list it probably will not have a shortcut and to add a shortcut you simply go over here after selecting it and you would say add and then you would do alt t or option t if you're on a mac and then from that point you're ready to rock and roll with that keyboard shortcut now let's parse this out trim right edge of item okay so we're talking about this right edge right here item under mouse so for example i don't have to necessarily have this media item selected i can simply have my mouse over it in cursor or in pointer mode and then it says to edit cursor so basically what it says is move this edge to wherever the cursor is so if the cursor is here then i should be able to run this and it'll move this edge to that cursor now you'll note again shortcut is alt t in this case i have assigned alt t to my controller and it's this upper right hand corner button right here so what does it look like let's just give a demonstration here if i hover over the media item and the cursor is right there bam it just trimmed over to this side it didn't delete any audio if i untrim you can see that indeed the audio is still there this is what's known as non-destructive editing in things like audacity or whatever this would definitely get rid of whatever audio is there but in reaper's case it's not now we want the trim to actually be here because this is the mistake and so we'll trim to there we'll re-record arm this thing and we're gonna do the pickup now now i'd better have the right cadence the right timing you know the right emotion all this good stuff to match what came before it because once i hit record it's gonna be i'm gonna be on stage so here we go and remember the phrase is we can give battle so here we go in three two one we can give battle okay let's see what that sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle okay i wasn't quite comfortable with that pause there it seems just a little too long so i'm going to trim just a little bit and then i'm going to push this together and see what that sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle there we go that's what i'm talking about now notice something else about these media items now two media items this one has a time marker of 1733 which means 5 33 pm this one has a time marker of 1741 so this is later than this one and it also means more importantly that these two media items represent two different wav files remember this reaper will not will not directly touch a wav file unless it's creating it in one of four ways recording which is what we did gluing which says basically i want to take these two and make them one wav file and what will happen is reaper will actually generate another wave file and generate another media item to represent that particular wav file and not touch these two wav files here so that's gluing the other two ways are stimming and freezing and when we get to coursework i'll show you what those are so that's without punch and roll now let's talk about setting up punch and roll we go to options and we go to metronome and pre-roll settings now remember we have equated one measure to being one second so now instead of pre-roll measures it's pre-roll seconds now we can be comfortable with two if you want we can do five if you need it and that's fine we're going to take our cue from a well-known well-loved voice artist whose license plate says three beeps and that's reference to his cues whenever he's in a project so what he will hear is beep beep beep and then he starts recording what this effectively will do is from the edit cursor wherever we put the cursor it'll back off three seconds and then count down and i'll show you what i mean in just a second now to actually engage punch and roll we have to check this check box right here pre-roll before recording i usually keep pre-roll before recording on all the time and i normally have it about three seconds maybe five seconds sometimes depending on the moon phase and wind direction pre-roll before playback for those of you who have seen this if you're a musician this may be something you want to do if you're strictly doing this for voice projects really you don't need it and i'm going to keep it off okay notice that there is no ok button there is no apply button there's no cancel button that is because this modal window anything you touch in here it's automatic and it's in it's immediate so we'd better know what we needed to do before we got into here let's x out of here and now let's develop another track and i have what's called a custom action which does that so the track is ready we just have to relabel it a little bit here so this is record with pre-roll and i'm going to use the jog wheel to get the cursor to the origin or zero time now watch the cursor location and watch the reaper status there are going to be some drastic changes in three two one pre-roll sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give retreat okay did you notice what happened in the cursor location it counted down and this is a question that i feel all the time when it comes to punch and roll well if i'm at 0 or if i'm within the pre-roll length what does reaper do well it simply counts down and especially if it's at zero and we set it up for three seconds it's going to count down three two one blast off so to speak but did you notice also that the reaper status changed it said recording but it was suffixed with pre-roll as the pre-roll was happening and then once it got to the punch point the pre-roll suffix dropped off now let's rearm this let's trim and now let's record the pickup in three two one sun tzu said if it's equally balanced we can give battle okay did you notice that i was able to speak with myself for those first two phrases and then i was able to get the third phrase let's see what that sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle there we go that's what i'm talking about so that's punch and roll in its essence now let's talk about some other things the sort of specialized things that reaper can do in order to talk about the next major topic we have to go on a side topic known as takes and in order to do takes i have to um show you what takes are first so what exactly is a take well a take can be something like where you have a tag for example and the client wants three wild takes and it usually is a tag so you say like tag tag tag you know give them three different options for them to select and let them select which one they want and another definition i guess what you would call of takes is correction whether it's because of a pickup on our side or it's a re-scripting or changing of words from the client side and so that's a take and let me demonstrate what a take looks like in reaper in three two one pre-roll sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give retreat okay this time i'm not going to trim i'm just going to go for it so here we go in three two one pre-roll sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle okay notice what happened here we have these horizontal lanes and that's what these are called lanes and inside each lane there is a take so if you look at the label here you'll see take two of two whereas if you click on the original one it says take one of two so let's see what this sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give retreat okay that's the mistake let's choose the correction or the pickup and see what that sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle there we go that is a take now there are some people who are uncomfortable with multiple lanes inside the track there is a way to show either the selected take or the most recent recorded take and it has to do with options and show all taken lanes win room now you can hit control l if you're on windows or command l if you're on a mac but watch what happens whenever i run this toggle you'll see now it's only that's take that i selected now if i want to select the other take i must run the the toggle and then select the other take and then run the toggle again now this is a global toggle so you can't have just one track doing it it's going to affect all the tracks so let's figure out okay we're going to do that one and take that out and now let's talk about a record mode known as time selection auto punch this thing i've been waiting to show you all this for since the beginning of the um video here record has three modes to it and you can choose which one you want right now it's in normal mode but if we pull up the context menu of the record button you'll see that the three options are there auto punch selected items i've seen that mostly in music and i've seen it a little bit just a little bit inside voice projects not much the vast majority i've seen time selection auto punch and you'll see that the uh the record buttons icon has changed that gives us a signal that hey tsap is engaged let's see what this looks like so this is recording with tsap time selection auto punch let's see what this looks like in three two one pre-roll sun tzu said if equally forced we can give battle okay notice i said if equally forced not equally balanced so this is where the mistake is happening what i can do is drag a time selection from the end of the last known good audio to the beginning of what's called the resume audio in other words where the audio is is correct what time selection auto punch says is that while we're outside of time selections which there's only one really so the time selection you're in playback mode but once you get into the time selection you're in record mode practically what that means is in this case it's going to be in playback mode from the beginning until it gets to the beginning of the time selection and it's going to go into record mode while in the time selection it's going to be recording until the end of the time selection and then it's going to go back into playback mode until the end so let's see what that looks like re arming this thing in three two one pre-roll sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle okay let's see what that sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle okay so that's what i'm talking about you protect everything except for what you want to correct the punch in everything else is just not going to be wiped out and the thing is again if this were a destructive daw whatever's here would have been gone but again if i untrim this you'll see that the original audio is still there it is still there now that brings us to recording audio during pre-roll if we look at p r at the beginning here we unmute this thing and we drag this out a little bit and we come here remember the cusps say that this is the end of the media item so recording actually started right here right before i started speaking so in other words the pre-roll had finished and then the record mode was engaged what our adp says is that the recording point actually isn't going to be at the punch point it's going to be at the roll point and let me show you what that means let me develop another track and this time we're going to do with our adp now i had to turn our adp off whenever i started with this because it's on by default so realistically you should have already recorded audio during your pre-roll but to turn it on and off you can go to options and then under preferences and then under audio under recording it's right here record audio during pre-roll now let's see what this looks like in three two one pre-roll sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give retreat okay now i'm going to trim this back and start again so in three two one sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle okay let's see what that sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle okay that's cool but if we drag this out and we untrim it you'll see that indeed i've recorded another take of the entire thing now let's listen to the second phrase to see if we like the first one or the second one better if equally balanced if equally balanced if equally balanced if equally balanced let's say we like the second one better well then all we have to do is trim this first one and then trim the second one to the same point right before the second phrase and then we squeeze these together and now let's see what this sounds like sun tzu said if equally balanced we can give battle and that's what i'm talking about recording audio during playback if you found this video educational or fun or both do me a favor and smash that like button subscribe to this channel and hit that notification bell setting it to all so that you don't miss anything whenever i drop a video or go live and especially if you have a comment or question please drop them in the comment section below it not only helps you and our fellow voice talent but it also helps the algorithm and makes this video just that much more present in youtube also if you found this of worth share this video out i don't know of any punch and roll in this in-depth matter so this is stephen gonzalez with stephen gonzalez voiceovers wishing you all all the best and you have a wonderful and wonderful day

Channel: REAPER for Voice Talent

Views: 1,025

Keywords: punch and roll, Reaper for Voice Talent, Punch in, reaper daw, reaper tutorial, how to, digital audio workstation, download daw, best daw software, cockos reaper, Steven Gonzales Voiceovers, SGVO, RFVT, reaper daw tutorial, reaper daw tutorial video, reaper daw beginner tutorial, reaper 6 daw tutorial, pnr, time selection auto punch, record audio during preroll, preroll, recording takes, gain staging, ShuttleProv2, ShuttleXpress

Id: 01JZKxxouyU

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020