Voice-over
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Bob Dylan to mumble GPS directions?
When it comes to enunciation, Bob Dylan falls somewhere between Scooby Doo and Miss Teen USA South Carolina. But people love their celebrities (and irony) so even Dylan could have a bright future in GPS navigation voiceover work. Mr. Zimmerman admitted to "talking to a couple of car companies about the possibility of being the voice of their GPS system," during his late-night BBC radio show. Naturally, it will happen with all the press he's received. And when it does you'll be on you own with no direction home, dig?
The Daily Quest: Dave Arneson rolls a 20
D&D co-creator Dave Arneson passed away earlier this week. While you might not have played D&D, know that he and the late Gary Gygax were the pioneers of this genre of games. I would not be surprised to hear from Blizzard on this in the upcoming days. On a personal note, I ran into him around the age of 10 while in a St. Paul, Minnesota comic book store (Schinders, for those of you wondering). I was looking at Magic cards mainly, but he was browsing around and came over and talked with me when he saw I had turned my attention to one of the D&D 2e books. The clerk later told me as I was checking out who he was. Mystic Chicanery gives a good step-by-step guide on how to make voice overs for WoW movies. Teeth And Claws has a nice discussion looking at a feral raiding spec for patch 3.1. Derevka of Tales of a Priest has a very good rundown of the Acutioneer add-on. We've covered it a few times as well. Our own Matticus has thoughts... about Val'Anyr and "stuff." Click here to submit a link to TDQ
GDC09: Just how many words were in Fable 2?
The answer? A lot....Oh, you were hoping for something a bit more concrete? Well, as we just learned in a GDC session, the talky action-RPG included some 370,000 words, totaling 38 hours of speech. No, really, you can read it for yourself just above. And that, friends, is why Fable 2 was our 2008 Game of the Year: All those words.
Voice-over recording with voXover
voXover is a new, high end voice-over automation and batch recording application for OS X intended for multimedia, video game, telephone voice-response, and related production uses. Designed for maximum efficiency for projects that require large amounts of individual voice recording, voXover allows the user to write and import scripts and rapidly automate recording. An advanced and streamlined utility designed in Cocoa from the ground up, this software takes advantage of CoreAudio, Quartz, and several other advanced OS X features. Developed by Audiofile Engineering, this is a serious audio recording utility for multimedia professionals, priced at $375. A full list of features can be found on the official website.
Simple voice-over narration with Ishmael
Ishmael is a basic application for easily creating voice-over narration for still photos and images, and then exporting your final product as a QuickTime video. So if you need to whip up a quick presentation, or want to make up a little story about a recent trip this is the app for you.Ishmael supports images from iPhoto albums or PDF files as its source, which can then be dubbed over and encoded as an actual QuickTime file. You can then take that video output and include it in an iMovie or Final Cut Pro project, or even export it back to iPhoto. Ishmael supports most Core Audio-compatible input devices, and includes multiple video encoding formats, and it even features Apple Remote support. Note, however, that it requires iPhoto 6.0, QuickTime 7.0, and OS X 10.4. Give the free demo a go and it will cost you $30 for the full package. Unfortunately, I'm running 10.3.9 (shock!), so I can't give this guy a test spin, but there are video samples linked on the official Ishamel website.