VO Pro Tip: Visual Trick for Faster Editing

Published 1 day ago • 1 min read

Faster Editing Visual Tricks

Hey Reader,

If you do long-form reads—e.g., audiobooks, eLearning, or corporate narration—editing out mistakes can eat up way more time than the actual recording session. (even on commercial reads!)

Stopping your flow to hit undo or split a region every time you stumble breaks your momentum in the booth. Or alternatively, if you are recording everything before sitting down to edit, it can be overwhelming staring at a massively long waveform that includes the good takes and mistakes all baked together.

An easy way to fix this is using "visual markers" directly on your track while you record.

When you flub a line or make a mouth noise, don't stop the recording. Take a brief pause, give a sharp clap with your hands or snap your fingers near the mic, and then re-read the line from the beginning of the sentence.

Here's why that helps:

That sharp transient creates a huge, vertical spike on your DAW's waveform display. When you open the track to edit, you don't have to listen back to the whole file at 1x speed. You can just look at the overall track, spot the visual spikes, zoom right into those sections, chop out the mistake, and move on.

You can even come up with your own system where 2 claps means something different than 3, etc...

And when you go back to do a re-take, make sure to start the new take at a point that will provide for a clean easy edit, likely the start of the sentence, or after punctuation, as opposed to right in the middle of a thought or line.

It lets you stay in the flow of your performance while saving you a massive chunk of time in post.

-Michael

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Thanks so much!

Curious about my own personal VO Work?

www.MichaelLangsnerVO.com

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