Q: Can you record a VO remotely? What’s involved with that?

A: Yes. There are several different setups depending on the needs.  The two most common cases are

A) The director is local at SoundSpace but the talent is somewhere else

B) The film production and crew is elsewhere, but the talent is in Colorado.

In the first case, the director and crew come into the studio where we connect to the studio where the talent is (which can be a professional facility, or increasingly often often their own home studio).  We connect via a service called Source Connect which allows us to record their voice as if they were in the next room.  We setup a real-time voice patch so that everyone can communicate, give direction, and hear playback examples.  This setup is very similar to a local session because the actor would be isolated in the VO booth anyway.  In this case, the booth just happens to be somewhere else.  Other than discussing TV at the. water cooler, the session operate more-or-less as usual.

In the 2nd, reversed setup, the talent comes into the studio and in the simplest setups, they would be recorded here with the director patched into something as simple as Skype or FaceTime.  We aren’t concerned about the audio fidelity of the call-in because the tallent is here in the studio.  Therefore, the director’s call-in can be very simple and casual.  They can literally call in from wherever they are, any way they want.  This works especially well if SoundSpace is also handling the post audio because we will already have the recordings and know what to do with them.

If another studio is handling the post audio, then we can setup a more formal scenario very similar to Version A above where the director is in a professional facility in LA, for example, and we use Source Connect to patch the Colorado Talent to the LA studio where they would conduct the session and manage the recordings.

The bottom line is that many setups are possible and we’ll work with you to maximize quality and minimize complexity.