As a voice-over actor in a post-pandemic world, the ability to host live direct sessions from home has never been so crucial. With earlier providers like ISDN costing up to $1000 per month, remote recording services that connect voice talent to directors and engineers were expensive and inaccessible to the average voice over actor for decades – until Source Connect hit the scene. If you haven’t heard about Source Connect, it’s a digital connection app for remote audio recording and monitoring, voice-over, and ADR. It’s rapidly becoming the cost-effective industry standard for sound studios and voice-over actors alike. Today’s go-to for any voice artist with a remote studio and the new meta for content producers.
Source Connect isn’t just quickly replacing ISDN – it’s the simple and efficient solution that’s become a must for anyone in voice over work. It allows voice actors to connect with international teams across multiple time zones all at once and eliminates borders from the equation. Source Connect makes recording from home more streamlined than ever before.
Source Connect for Home Studios
As a reasonably prolific voice over artist myself, I use Source Connect at least once a week in my home studio – and it’s paid for itself hundreds of times over. A lifetime Standard license only costs about a twelfth of what ISDN might cost you for an entire year and adds tremendous value to your voice artist toolkit. It’s powerful and intuitively designed, and it doesn’t simply facilitate all of my varied international collaborations. Still, it allows me to connect with multiple clients across several time zones at once as if we were working together in person.
A perfect example of how it benefits me over vast distances might be the monthly casino ad for which I provide voice over work. It helped me bridge the time zone and geography gap between my creative director Larry and sound engineer Steve for the last two consecutive years. As a voice artist working in East Coast time, I often work with Midwest, Mountain, and Pacific time zones or EU regions simultaneously. The beautiful thing about Source Connect is that it doesn’t just allow us to reach each other over large distances but lets us sync our work up seamlessly to produce content as if we were in the same room together.
A Typical Session
Our Source Connect sessions always begin with Steve inviting me to connect with him from my home studio. We work through a few different reads until Larry is ready to join us from his Source Connect studio for his final stamp of approval on the content. We’ve been knocking monthly radios and tv ads out for close to two years now, and both of these guys rarely have to ask for adjustments or re-reads.
Source Connect is Incredibly Versatile
Source Connect is so versatile that it doesn’t just bridge location gaps but also makes live direct sessions more precise. Whether it’s to sync up videos that were initially in different languages, or more technical ones that need to be double and triple checked, the platform makes my job as a voice over artist that much easier.
Several E-learning companies I work with also like to use Source Connect for our live direct sessions if some of their content involves specialized vocabulary and pronunciations for things like medical texts. I’ve been performing professional medical narrations for several years and always have an affinity for them. New techniques or procedures are continuously developing. No matter how complex or unique the medical jargon is, it’s crucial to have accurate and knowledgeable narrations that meet industry standards without delay for notes and feedback. Source Connect makes that possible wherever my clients and creative teams are.
It even lets you sync up to an entire international team all at once. From my location in Montreal, it let me connect to a director in Milan, a copywriter in Paris, a sound engineer in Vienna, and a project coordinator in Buenos Aires, all at the same time to the clients in New York and Miami.
Source Connect Simulates a Studio Setting – No Matter Where You Are
Source Connect essentially simulates an in-studio setting, no matter where you happen to be. If you have a studio in Arizona, you can be in the same room as me here in Montreal and a creative director’s studio in California. As long as you have a Source Connect studio license, you can connect with entire international teams over several locations, just like an in-person studio session.
I have a regular client in Milan who produces many videos for the fashion industry and uses Source Connect for ADR. They are usually filmed in Italian, so my job as a voice actor is to narrate them in English for foreign markets. The tricky part is maintaining the timings as the original content to avoid recuts. From there, it’s ready to be broadcast to the American and International markets.
Source Connect Joins Artists
I’ve also done a bit of ADR for the Canadian and American English versions of international commercials used to market products initially produced in the UK. This type of work requires a tight sync, and Source Connect makes it possible for us to coordinate the audio I record with the videos they send me. It isn’t just useful for long-distance collaborations – it’s perfect for projects where your clients are already in the room.
It offers your sound engineer control over who hears what and when and allows you to disconnect from a session if you need to work on other projects. It also makes it easy for them to invite you back into an ongoing session, making pickups and adjustments ridiculously simple.