Peter, have you tried rendering out first and seeing/hearing if the sound improves. The "fuzz" maybe, I'm not saying it is, but it may be part of the Previewing .. if that's what you've done. Just a short render .. If it is still the same OR you'd done this already then ignore this bloke!

Grazie

Peter,
certainly try both of the above suggestions. However there's another way to speed up speech, remove the silence between the words. You can do this with SF.
I've not done this but I'm pretty certain it goes something like this.
First you get SF to mark as regions all the parts longer than a certain length, then you delete them.
Prior to that you can also 'debreath' the speech, basically it's what it says, but as far as I know you have to do it manually. Make certain you have Snap to Zero Crossing On, find the bit where they breath in and highlight it and hit Del.
SF is a great tool for audio microsurgery like this.
Bob.

Bob, that's right. I forgot about removing the gaps between words. This is possible inside Vegas too, provided you zoom in far enough. You just need to watch out for changes in the background sound, because rarely is it actual silence. If there is a noticeable jump in the background at the cut point it is usually quite easy to fix by extending the edges slightly and crossfading.

Richard

Bob? . . "However there's another way to speed up speech . " ?

Pete says:" . . where the speaker often read his lines too quickly .. " I gathered Pete wants to slow it down? Or have I read this incorrectly?

However SF is very good at "nitpicking" and removing unnecessary verbiage . . . ;-)

Regards,

Grazie

Thanks guys - a couple of things I should have included:

Yes, Grazie, I have rendered to new track -still sounds fuzzy.

And yes, I want to slow it down. Nothing to do with gaps between words - the pace at which the words were spoken was unnecessarily fast - I would guess from nervousness, but it comes across as too rushed.

Tomorrow I'll try jaegersing's suggestion and see if Sound Fortge does a better job than Vegas of slowing things down..

Generally speaking, I do my own voice overs, and I have become a bit of an expert at using Vegas to edit - it's really fast, thanks to "S" and post-edit ripple, to cut out duplicated "takes" * or unwanted gaps, then Track audio FX, followed by Render as, to produced finished sections of script.

* "takes" here is not Vegas "Takes" - just whenever I trip over a word or phrase and say it again!

Oooops,
me idiot, should READ post first.
I'm not certain if SF has any better tools for this than Vegas, when you install SF all its plugs become available to Vegas as well.
I'm not 100% certain of this but I seem to recall there being better tools out there. The issue isn't the speedup, it's the pitch shift back that's the tricky bit I think.
There's quite a bit in Jay Roses book on altering how speech sounds, including getting rid of undue stress in a voice but it sounded to me like very tedious work.
SF is in general better for the really fine work on audio, it has a few features that Vegas doesn't like snap to zero etc. The interface is a bit different too and it takes a bit of getting used to but I find it much quicker than Vegas for working on very small bits at a time. The only problem is after an hour at it and feeling very satisfied I zoom out and realise I've work through maybe 10 seconds of an hours worth of audio.

Bob.

Yes, thanks Bob - I've got Jay Rose's book - I'll try Sound Forge first tomorrow, in case it does rescaling differently to Vegas, then have a read!

Peter, when you Preview the NEW track ., you have got it SOloed? Sure you have. - Grazie

Yes, Grazie, the rendered track is a product of the slowed down source track, soloed, but it still sounds fuzzy. As I said, I'm hoping that SF may be better than V5 ..... tomorrow

If it were easy to get the speaker to re-perform, I would, but it's not .....

Have you tried the “time stretch” audio fx in Vegas using one of the speech modes?

JL

Dpending of the voice, there will be a "sweet-spot" somewhere near 1K. You could lift that a little (4 or 5 dB). That should give the speech more presence, which might help give the slowing down more accuracy. Anything you dare remove from the low end should help, too.
Tor

Thanks for all the suggestions guys - Time Stretch certainly produces much better results than Ctrl - Drag.

I now have a saved preset which does just what I need. As you say, Tor, a little EQ tweaking also helps.

One unsolved mystery. Time stretch in Sound Forge lengthens the event, as expected. When applied as Track FX in Vegas, however, it seems to slow the speech down ok, but stays the same length - ?? I must be missing something ...

edit: Aha! - it plays it back at the new rate, and produces a longer event when rendered - you have to allow a "bit on the end" of the selected region otherwise the last bit gets cut off.