Blue Microphone Releases Joe and Snowpack, Paramount HD DVD Luncheon with Optimus Prime, The Rise of Niche Game Import Bidding War, Bob Green in The Biz, Adam Fox in Tech Talk, and time to tell your story in the VOX Box.
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Adam Fox, Blue Microphone, Bob Green, Optimus Prime, Video game Bidding War
Transcript of Vox Talk #46
Male: Episode 46. You’re listening To VOX Talk, the voiceover industry’s number one podcast brought to you by Voices.com. It’s about voice acting, growing your business, and sharing your knowledge. VOX Talk is a show that you can be a part of. Getting involved is both fun and rewarding. It’s time for this week’s episode of VOX Talk with your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Hi, I’m Stephanie and welcome to VOX Talk! This week, you’ll hear from correspondents Bob Green and Adam Fox. Let’s get this episode started with some news.
Male: The Loop, informing you of news and current voiceover events.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: In tech news, Mix Magazine reports that Blue Microphones introduced Joe, a large diaphragm cardioid condenser microphone and Snowpack, a USB product bundle at the 123rd AES Convention in New York City.
Joe is targeted at project studios and designed to capture a variety of sound sources, such as vocals, acoustic instruments, drums and more. The Snowpack bundle comprises of the Snowball USB microphone with a pair of USB headphones and Mackie Tracktion 3 software for a portable USB-powered studio for music and podcasting on the Mac or PC.
Blue Microphones states that the Snowpack will be available November 1, 2007 and expects to ship Joe on January 1, 2008.
Want to see it for yourself? Go to mixonline.com or visit Blue Microphones’ website, bluemic.com.
Onto our next story, Paramount unveiled their signature HD-DVD at a presentation recently, featuring the Transformers, their HD-DVD title of the year. Those present also lunched with Optimus Prime himself, Peter Cullen. All those in attendance were given an Optimus Prime movie toy helmet along with the HD-DVD set for the Transformers movie, and an official movie poster.
To read the complete article and also the interview with Peter Cullen, go to 411mania.com or visit the VOX Talk show notes for the direct link.
Been to the gaming aisle at the local department store lately? The $50 video games you see at the store have quite a different story to tell, travel and cost wise. Here’s a neat fact for you: Did you know that it can cost a million dollars to localize and record voiceovers for video games that have a 50,000 piece production run? That’s the truth when it comes to importing video games and having to make the content accessible to a different market and to their native speakers.
To read more about niche game import bidding wars and find the direct link, visit the show notes for Episode 46 of VOX Talk.
Male: The Biz, helping you grow your voiceover business.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Today in The Biz, Bob Green shares his thoughts on something I’m sure you can all relate to.
Bob Green: Whether you’re new to voiceover or if you remember doing a tag for a palm oil or cigarette and they’re smooth, we all audition. Hopefully, taking into account the copy and the intended audience along with the direction given by the client if any.
Now, learning to move on after not getting the job, having been right on the money or a reach, hey, there’s some element of subjectivity here. Auditioning a hundred times and getting nothing isn’t necessarily a reflection on your vocal prowess. But every so often something comes along that turns up the volume of frustration to a million decibles. I didn’t hear back? How is that possible?
A few months ago, an audition for a gang whole company meeting was posted. They talked about motivation and reaching limits above and beyond, above and beyond. Wow! I had something for this baby. Oh, yes. I don’t generally believe in sending an audition fully produced for many reasons including bad presidents but hey, this was different.
If they want to raise the flag at this meeting, I had the music. I took a few paragraphs of the copy and produced the following:
Each of us knows what it is to be limited and each of us dreams of moving beyond those limits. And in building our own individual characters, the effort we make to press those limits leads us to new standards, new heights.
There comes a moment in every one’s life, there comes a moment in time when you come to a river you just have to cross or a mountain you just have have to climb.
Bob Green: We stretched ourselves and move beyond our previous perceptions, our current level of excellence. And in each of those new heights, we seek further possibilities we never understood before.
This is the moment and now is the time to reach out where no man has gone. Time to break through the barriers, blaze a new trail, time to reach out above and beyond.
Bob Green: As we stand before those limits, we make a promise to ourselves to go beyond them, beyond our present sense of excellence no matter how daunting. And so we grow in character. We learn greater value. In excellence, we define ourselves not only as individuals but as an organization.
We are leaders who provide value and excellence to patients. We dare to go beyond who we are today to become even more tomorrow.
Reach for the future, let go of today when you reach out above and beyond.
Bob Green: Throughout our history as leader in the pharmaceutical industry, we’ve committed ourselves to the crippled bottom line, to social responsibility, to environmental soundness, and to economic viability.
We can only do this if each of us knows his or her own limits and is willing to move beyond them.
[Music]
Take to the time in your own special way when you reach out above and beyond.
Bob Green: What is the promise you make?
[Music]
Above and beyond …
Bob Green: To what horizon is your limit set?
[Music]
… above and beyond.
Bob Green: How can you go beyond that limit?
Never heard a thing. Now whether they thought I sounded like Peewee Herman or they had a Ukranian accent in mind, one would think something might have come back to me.
No matter how experienced factors an and your alleged cerebrum says move on, one’s heart is occasionally broken.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Bob, it is incredible to think that you didn’t hear back on that one! How many of you winced at the end of that piece? I know I did. Thanks for sharing Bob and I hope you receive a thank you sometime soon!
Male: Tech Talk, walking you thorugh the technological landscape.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Now, I’d like to present Adam Fox.
Male: You’re listening to another DefiantDigital podcast for
Voices.com. Here’s your host, Adam Fox.
Adam Fox: Well, howdy folks and welcome to another edition of the podcast. I hope all of you out there are staying warm and dry, which brings us to today’s topic and I’ll just jump right in. Today’s topic is Power Outages.
Power outages, the digital studio’s worst nightmare. You know, you’re cooking along, getting your spots done, just working hard and going from spot to spot. You got all your stuff organized. You’re saving and you’re backing up and that’s great. Then you’re in the middle of a spot then the power goes out.
Well, this is not an uncommon occurrence. In my neck of the woods, I live up in the Pacific Northwest and I live in a country so I live a few miles outside of town and it definitely has happened from time to time where I’ll be recording something and the power will go off in the entire house. And oh boy, what a bummer, I tell you.
Especially when you’re in the middle of something and you’ve maybe hit it a couple of times and you’re thinking okay, well gosh, you know this is going to be the take and you’re in the middle of that take and bang! All of a sudden the power goes out. And you’re thinking, oh man!
Well luckily, we all out there have our battery backup systems, right? Well, let’s talk about that for a second.
Battery backup systems are really great way to preserve the integrity of your information both data and especially in our business, voiceover audio files, current mixes, you know because when you’re – during the production process, if you’re putting these things together and doing editing of voice tracks and things like that, it preserves all that stuff so that we can get to the next save, which is what we’re all about. Just trying to get to the next save.
If the information is safe, you can always recover that however, if the power goes off and you don’t have some sort of a backup system that will allow you at least you know, five, ten minutes to back your files up and shut down, you can pretty much lose just that time involved and having to boot back up and getting back into the system and that can be a really inconvenience.
A lot of programs however, even if you don’t have the information safe the Sony Professional Series that, that I love to tout. They actually will – it will write a temporary file if the program closes down for some reason either power outage or some sort of a program crash or an operating system crash, anything like that, it’ll actually – it’s creating that temporary file the entire time and it’s caching that entire file and writing it to a cache file on a disc.
So, the next time you start up the program, the first thing it ask you is, “Hey, here is this temporary file that the program wasn’t shut down right and audio and do you want me to go ahead and open this temporary file and you can recover it and save it as something else?”
Which I’ll tell you, I will admit has saved me a couple of times when I’ve just been you know, in the heat of it and I haven’t gotten into that next save and it’s a very handy feature.
However, having a battery backup will definitely cure those problems. And as far as battery backups, where do you go?
Well, there’s so, so many of them out there. You can pick up any computer magazine, you can look on any of the web searches, Amazon.com, eBay, any of those places and you can very readily, all you have to do is type in a search for battery backup and you’ll find just a whole platter of companies that will offer you variety of different services, a variety of different start and shut down times, backup times, some of them you know – depending on how much of an investment you want to make.
If you’re a small studio and you just want to make enough of an investment to say, “Okay, I just want to be able that when the power goes (inaudible 00:10:55), I want to be able to you know, save the files I’m working on and then be able to power my machine down. I just need five, ten minutes you know.
It’s very inexpensive to be able to get into something like that and it’s a very worthwhile investment. I suggest it highly. To do something like that, it will definitely save you a lot of producing gray hair.
The brand of power backups that I use is the APC and I use one that gives me about 20 minutes. I don’t need really a whole lot more than that. I don’t plan on you know – once you’re in a battery backup environment, you certainly don’t want to,”rely” on that to run your studio while you’re finishing your spots.
If you really have something in an emergency, that’s why I have one that runs me about 20 minutes. If I really have something in emergency and I need to finish it up, I can. However, the whole point to that is just to make sure that your data is safe and that you can recover it properly on the other end.
So, I have an APC. I think it cost me, I don’t know a hundred bucks and I bought it a few years ago and it still gives me 20 minutes. I can plug everything into it. It’s got six outlets on it so I can pretty much run my entire studio. It all goes into the battery backup and through the power conditioners and all that stuff before it goes into a wall.
So the main components of everything just completely get backed up. A lot of my off board rock here and stuff like that, the machines and things like that don’t actually run onto the battery backup because you know, hey, what do I care if they power down? I’m not really using them a hundred percent of the time.
But all the computer stuff, the mixing board, all that stuff that provides power to the condenser, all that stuff gets battery backed up and it’s a worthwhile investment and I highly recommend them and they’ll definitely save you a lot of time and effort in the winner months that we’re entering into here and it’s just a good thing to chat about and just wanted to bring it up today.
Nice, short one today. Just wanted to kind of finish off our discussion from last week with that last part. I know we brushed on it a little bit about battery backups and just wanted to make sure that I covered it a little more especially since when I got up this morning, the wind was blowing pretty hard and I was watching the trees sway and I thought, “What am I going to do today? Oh, battery backups, that’s a good topic.”
So if you like you know, please continue to send that podmail and you know, any audio clips are certainly welcome. You can send me audio clips directly to the DefiantDigital website at Adam @ DefiantDigital.com.
You can also hit me on the website here at AdamFox.Voices.com or again at the website at DefiantDigital.com.
Come on over, set a spell, take your shoes off. It’s a good time ahead by all. Well, thanks a lot folks for letting me chat along today and I hope you all have a wonderful week a great weekend coming up. Stay warm, back lots of firewood, enjoy time with family and friends, and we’ll talk to you next week. Until then, bye for now.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Do you have anything to add? Send Adam your feedback and podmail at Adam @ DefiantDigital.com. He really loves to receive your e-mails, folks so please keep them coming.
Male: VOX Box, sharing your audio feedback.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: In the VOX Box, I’d like to extend an invitation to share some of your news! If anything notable has happened to you of late, for instance, you won an award, or featured in an article, or landed a wonderful gig, please send me an email. I’d love to hear about your success so that we can also share it with others.
If you’d like to send in your news as an MP3, I’ll air it here on an upcoming episode of VOX Talk. If you’d rather write me an email with your glad tidings, that’s perfectly fine. Just send it to Stephanie.Voices.com.
If you haven’t subscribed already, go to podcasts.voices.com/VOXtalk or of course you can find us in the Apple iTunes Podcast Directory by searching for VOX Talk. Thanks for listening and staying subscribed. See you all next week.
Links from today’s show:
Mix Magazine reports on new Blue Microphone – Joe and Snowpack
Paramount HD-DVD / Peter Cullen Luncheon
Bob Green
Adam Fox
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