Heya everyone,
The sun is shining I am panicking, it is time for me to ask for clips for my annual Amecon panel. What I am most in need of are clips with just SFX and BGM for the live dubbing segments, this year I am planning it as more of a workshop/ fun and games session so the emphasis will be on practical stuff so I need looooots of clips. Clips with just BGM and SFX can be of any genre.

If you have completed clips with voices in you want me to show off I’ll take those as well, though with no guarantee I’ll be able to use them. For completed clips comedy and parody material goes down the best. i.e comedic clips from anime or more serious anime which has a parody dub. For example Naruto and DBZ abridged

In summary:
- I need clips with just BGM and SFX no voices any genre of anime or anime con appropriate stuff ( j-drama, japanese games etc)
- Completed anime dub clips with voices any type but with a preference for comedy/parody.

Please contact me at aralechan@gmail.com
Deadline for this is August 1st
If you are coming to Amecon I hope you can make it.
Thanks all
For the curious here’s the panel description:
Anime dub live
Interactive fan voice acting workshop. Ever thought about voice acting as a hobby or even as a career? Join us for fun and games as you grab some friends form your own “ dubbing studio” , and then watch it become a global success or epic failure. Then do battle in the live parody dub.
You could just watch, but where’s the fun in that?

You do have to wonder what the point of proceeding with a dub this bad is. Surely any marketability you pick up dubbing it drops with the quality. The worse part for me? Apparently this game features Yuri and Nikolai from Shadow Hearts, one of my favourite ( and pretty decently dubbed) RPGs of the last few years.

The dialogue flows nicely, which is no mean feet considering the stylised an energised nature of most anime. The girls in the dub ( Nikki, Rikka and Kathryn)   have distinctive voice despite all performing in the same voice range.

Brandon’s voice really stands out, he has a distinctive way of pronouncing words which he uses to great effect when his character Otani drops his dramatic news. My only criticism is that separated from the anime it comes from it was easy to miss the references,  and I’m sure I would have gotten more out of it I’d known a little more about the characters.

Clip Info:

Lovely Complex episode 2 clip 6
format: DivX AVI
running time: 1:37
file size: 15MB zipped
*CAST*
Nobu: Kathryn
Chiharu: Rikka
Risa: Nikki Jones
Otani: Brandon Baus

My host is moving my account to a new server today so there may be a bit of downtime again today. I apologise for the inconvenience. Forum users will now be aware that bbcode is now in use in the forums. it is apparently very memory intensive so I may have to switch it over so that it acts as a converter changing your posts to html.

Oh! and don’t forget to add your link to the directory.

Thank you!

If you need voice actors, or want critique feel free to post your work up.

Table of contents for Introduction to voice acting online

1. Introduction to voice acting online: What types of projects can I audition for?
2. Introduction to voice acting online: Low budget microphones
3. Introduction to voice acting online: Recording and cleaning up your voice files in Audacity

In the previous article in this series I talked about low end microphones. Now I’m going to talk about recording. For now we’re just go through the basics, so that you can send of auditions and lines for productions at the highest quality you can manage.
As I said if you’re just starting out with a cheap microphone, you’ll likely pick up all sorts of noise. This tutorial is going to walk you through recording and cleaning up your files in two popular pieces of free software. First off Audacity.

Audacity Tutorial
The first is the open source audacity software. Audacity is pretty popular since it’s free and also offers multi-track facilities. It’s noise reduction can be a little basic, but it’s worth learning all the same.
You can get audacity from it’s website. Once you install it, press the record button and check to see if it’s recording.
If not go to Edit> Preferences>
Then click the drop down menu next to recording and make sure your microphone is selected. You can adjust the recording volume using the slider at the top of the screen.

Once everything has set up press record, and record a test sample leave a few seconds at the start and end where you don’t speak.

Take a listen at my audio file fresh from my PC with no editing. The file is downloadable so provided you can edit MP3s you can follow along.( see the LAME details at the button of the post )

Oh dear! If you’re anything like me you can hear my pc fan in the background there‘s also a nasty click where I knock my microphone. I’ve highlighted the click there so you can see it

The click is simple enough it’s on it’s own so I can highlight it by holding down my left mouse button dragging the cursor over the section and then pressing delete.

Now I have to deal with the background noise. I went to the end of the file and highlighted a bunch of noise. Then I went to effect> noise removal and select get noise profile. Once I’d done that I shut the window and deleted the bit of noise at the end. I then selected the whole file.
I then went back into noise reduction and used the stage 2 box, moving the slider about and pressing preview. The further to the right it was the less noise there was, but the more distorted I sounded. I adjusted the slider until I was happy then clicked remove noise.

The noise was then gone! The last thing I did was selected normalise from the effect menu. Normalise smoothes out your file so the volume remains constant. Make sure remove DC offset is selected and I want to set maximum amplitude to -3db.
You can hear my final file here.

I then want to file save as mp3, If you haven’t run Audacity before this requires some set up. You need to download the LAME codec from it’s site. Once you have done so extract the zip file into the same folder you installed Audacity.
Load Audacity and select Edit> Preferences
Then click File formats, and then the find library tab. Select the directory Audacity has installed in.
Audacity also lets you save as ogg and wav files by default.

You don’t of course have record line by line, if you were recording play you might want to record several lines at once to maintain flow, but to make the life of the producer for whom you are recording it‘s best the send the lines off as individual files which means you have to split the file up. All you have to do is highlight the line you want to save, then select “ Save selection as…….” and it will then save your selection as an individual file.

If you don’t like Audacity don’t worry! Next time we’ll do the same with Wavepad!