How I Use the VO Tool

The Voice Over Tool is accessed with the shortcut OPT 0 (that’s a zero):

Now the VO Tool is a pretty nifty thing to be sure (I love the levels meter, input options and queueing features), but, given the fact that I could not seriously record clean a VO track in my editing bay with my computer running, it’s never really been a viable VO recording tool for me. I guess you could have a setup where you had a nearby VO booth with the XLR cable running back to your editing rig, but at that point, isn’t is just as easy to import a recorded VO file? In addition, these days, when my clients use VO, they usually hire people who send their work in from remote locations or record it when they are in the production stages and I certainly don’t perform the VO work myself (I’ll leave that to the pros, thank you very much).

So what good is this tool? Well, there are two things I’ve used it for pretty effectively. Firstly, I do use it frequently to record “scratch” VO tracks to help me with the pacing of the edit. In cases where my client has provided a VO script, but has not yet furnished the VO (they might want to see a picture cut as a reality check for fine-tuning the VO script), I will actually read thorugh the script myself and use my own unacceptable read as a rough or scratch track to use for rough cutting. I can quickly turn it on and just start speaking through whatever audio input I have at hand (I use the mic in my vintage iSight camera or the built-in mic on a laptop, if I’m using one) and voila, I have a useful track.

The other way I have used it (albeit only two times) was to provide a sort of “editor’s narrative” to go along with a rough cut. In these cases, I was asked to assemble a very complicated set of graphics and effects that were integrated with the footage I was cutting. As I laid things out, I wanted to run my ideas by the producer before spending hours of time creating the graphic assets on spec. These were both remote assignments where I was not in the same city as the producer and it was really the equivalent of talking through the timeline with the producer sitting next to me. I realize there are some tools for live streaming for this sort of thing, but I’ve never really done that and this was one way to get a cut to the producer with my commentary and it worked well.