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Hack 60 Voiceovers for That Professional Touch

A picture is worth a thousand words. But
sometimes, you need 1,020 words to communicate
what's going on. That's when
it's time to step up to the mic and create a
voiceover track.

A voiceover is
simply an additional audio track for your digital slideshow or movie,
in which the narrator speaks directly to the audience. If
you've ever watched a nature show on public
television, you know what a voiceover is.

5.15.1 Creating the Voiceover

Voiceovers can add a professional touch to your presentations and,
believe it or not, they're not that difficult to
create. The first step is to find a way to record your monologue. One
route is to use digital recording software for your computer. All you
do is talk into your computer's microphone, and the
software records your voice and saves it to the hard drive as an
audio file.

You don't have to spend much money for this
software. For Windows, take a look at Easy Recorder (http://www.sell-shareware.com/easyrecorder/).
I like QuickVoice
(http://www.quick-voice.com/quickvoice/) for
Mac OS X users. Each application sells for US$20. Save the files in
either QuickTime or MP3 format, which will enable you to assemble the
presentation in QuickTime Pro [Hack #59] .

You can also use a standalone voice recorder, which I like a little
better, actually. I have the best luck creating accurate voiceovers
that synchronize with the presentation when I can play the slideshow
or movie on the computer (with the audio turned off) and
simultaneously talk into the microphone of the digital voice recorder
to describe what's going on. Then, I simply upload
the digital audio file to the computer, add it to the presentation,
and everything is in sync.

If you have a powerful enough computer, you can use this same
technique by having the presentation play in one window with the
voice recorder software turned on in another. Or you can use two
computers.

I've had good luck using an Apple iPod (not the mini
version) with a
Belkin iPod Voice Recorder.
I just talk into the iPod while in the field or while watching the
presentation on the computer, and then add the digital audio file to
the pictures.

5.15.2 Adding the Voiceover to the Presentation

Once you've captured your monologue, adding it is
easy. If you've read the other hacks on building
slideshows [Hack #54],
editing movies [Hack #56],
and adding music tracks [Hack #59],
you know that I'm using QuickTime
Pro for these projects. QuickTime also makes quick work of adding
voiceovers.

Open your slideshow or movie and drag the insertion pointer on the
scrubber bar to the point in the presentation where you want the
voiceover to begin. For this example, I want to describe a series of
shots inside Grand Central Station in New York City. I drag the
insertion point to the first slide in that series. I then open my
voiceover track and move the two bottom triangles on the scrubber bar
to select the portion that talks about Grand Central Station, as
shown in Figure 5-23.

Figure 5-23. Adding voiceover to a digital slideshow

Then, I simply go to the Edit drop-down menu and choose Copy to put
the voiceover track on the clipboard. I then click on the slideshow
to bring it forward, go to Edit, and choose Add. QuickTime will add
the additional audio track, beginning at the location of the
insertion point.

If you already have a music track added to your slideshow, you might
want to adjust the relative volumes between the music and the
voiceover. Generally speaking, you want to lower the volume of the
music and increase the presence of the voiceover. This is easily
handled in QuickTime Pro.

Select Get Movie Properties from the Movie drop-down menu. In the
top-left menu, select Soundtrack 1 or Soundtrack 2. In the top-right
menu, choose Volume, as shown back in Figure 5-22.
You can now increase or decrease volume, bass, and treble by simply
dragging on the colored areas. Most likely, Soundtrack 1 will be your
background music, because you added it first.

Lower the volume on the music and increase it for the voiceover, if
necessary, until you get the balance you want. Then, use the Save As
command to save your new presentation as a self-contained
movie, which adds all of your various audio
and video tracks to one self-contained QuickTime file that can be
played on any Windows or Mac computer.

Your presentation might not turn out like an edition of Animal
Kingdom, but I guarantee you that your audience will be
impressed.