Producing Audio/Voiceover for Web Presentation (Flash)

Former user wrote on 2/15/2005, 11:06 AM

All,

I have recently been hired by a new client to produce several multimedia demo/tutorials for viewing on the web.

After learning some very valuable lessons on the first demo (file size too large, gapping audio, freezing video etc) due to my penchant for producing the highest quality on screen product possible (but lousy for web viewing) - I am going to go with Macromedia Flash for this next one.

Can anyone share any solid bandwidth saving tips with respect to the produced audio elements that I will be injecting into this demo. My bits include lots of voiceover, Intro and extro music, graphical elements, custom slides etc etc.

The big mistake in the first project was too wide a sound field (Stereo) and too much overhead with the audio elements (mono voiceworks but 44.1KHZ 16bit sample rates.)The presentation sounded and looked incredible but needed a fairly powerful box to playback correctly. At the premiere screening at their company meeting - the presidents laptop choked on this file making for a very ugly presentation.

What we want this time is clean, clear and concise without huge file overhead. So I am on a mission to define some best practices for producing clean audio without the heavy baggage.

I have read some great articles on chopping the low and high end of my voiceover, reducing the sample rate to 22.0 KHZ (instead of 44.1) etc etc. Is it better to always start with the highest quality material (like 44.1KHZ 16 Bit wav files) and encode/convert down to 22.0 before inclusion into the project? Or should I just record at 22.0KHZ to begin with.

Any tips or tricks would certainly be appreciated.

Cheers,

Cuzin B

Comments

cosmo wrote on 2/15/2005, 11:38 AM

Flash is most assuredly the tool of choice for this type of project. As for what you can do to streamline your audio etc - it's just varying degrees of quality. Flash publishes/renders so fast, you can change settings and keep render/tweaking until you hit the number you want, or file size that is.

Remember also that Flash will pre-load your entire piece before playback starts - if you want it to. So you can have two versions/renders - one high quality and one low quality. The difference in the two will be the load times and the audio quality once it starts to play. If you're running the presentation from a laptop like you mention - take the full res flash file. I've never had a problem running large Flash presentations from PCs before, even crappy sales staff issue Dells.

Sample content: to see a preloading Flash movie with high quality audio and video(or semi-high) go to my site limitedwave.com and watch the little Flash blurbs that cycle through on that page. To see the kind of file I run easily from laptops, download this exe and rename it to .exe to before viewing. This one is from 2001, but is very representative of current works...if you watch it til the end.

There are many in-betweens with quality on Flash presentations. You can also select a Publishing option in Flash to Generate a Size Report - do this to see EXACTLY what parts of the Flash file are taking up the most file size.

The_Voice wrote on 2/16/2005, 1:50 PM

I would record at a minimum of 44,100 kHz, 16 bit, then convert down to a samller size. An old radio adage is to record at a higher quality level than your final product. As a Voice Over person I find that re-sampling is the easist way to go to preserve some semblence of quality.

Good Luck.