Don't forget to breathe!
When podficcers first start recording, we all tend to face the same question: "Should I cut out my breathing?" With so many new podficcers joining us (welcome to the party, guys!), it seems like a good time to revisit this question. The basic answer: don't cut out all of your breathes; keep clear pauses in your narrative and dialog.
Breathing is a normal, natural phenomenon. When we speak to people during everyday conversations, we hear their breaths and they hear ours. Although your breathing may seem loud and distracting to you, I can assure you that most listeners will expect to hear it-and may even react strangely if they cannot (possibly without even knowing why). If you listen closely to any professional audiobook, I can almost guarantee that you'll hear the narrator breathing in the pauses. As one podficcer put it for me, "Please leave [your breaths in]! If I don't hear you breathe, I forget to." Some people do feel sympathetic breathlessness if they don't hear you breathing. I'm not saying that you can't silence any breaths that you find especially distracting or which you believe disrupt your flow, but there is no need to painstakingly remove them all.
While recording, you may notice that you tend to take breaths when you meet punctuation marks, paragraph breaks, and scene breaks. You naturally pause at these spots. These pauses for breath give the listener time to process your words, comprehend, and visualize the scene. If you trim your pauses too much, you run the risk of becoming incomprehensible to your listener. You may seem to be speaking very quickly.
Here are some suggested standards for pauses in your recording:
After I do my preliminary edits (that is, after I edit out all my flubs) in Audacity, I usually go to the toolbar, and select Analyze > Silence Finder and search for a minimum duration of silence [seconds] of 1.3. This will leave a label at all the spots in the recording with a silence of 1.3+ seconds, so I can go to each, listen, and determine if I need to trim them down a bit. If you record a 30-minute podfic when you're finished, run the Silence Finder at 0.8, and only have a handful of labels pop up, you've probably overedited and I will weep tears of sorrow-j/k!. If you want something for comparison, when I run Silence Finder at 0.8 seconds on one of my 45-minute podfics, I am given 314 silence markers. You probably won't read at the exact same rate I do, but it's something to consider.
If you're having trouble deciding what works for you, I would err on the side of pauses that are on the longer side and seek the advice of a trusty beta. Or post a clip here on podfic_tips! We'll be happy to help you gain your stride and build your confidence!
P.S. One thing you might keep in mind is that not all listeners will speak English as a first language-comfort levels with the language will vary; a steady pace with reasonable pauses are even more helpful to people who need the pause for mental translation.
Suggestion: A useful exercise would be to open a podfic that you like and think was done very well in your audio editing program and take a good look at what the pauses in that podfic average out to.
Comments? If you have anything you'd like to offer (maybe you'd like to share your own breathing/pause standards), please feel free to speak up!
ETA 10/28/2013 @ 6:15CST: Lots of great discussion is happening in the comments! There isn't One True Way to do things, so be sure to take a look at what other people are saying. :-)
[I have no clue how best to tag this, lol.]
Breathing is a normal, natural phenomenon. When we speak to people during everyday conversations, we hear their breaths and they hear ours. Although your breathing may seem loud and distracting to you, I can assure you that most listeners will expect to hear it-and may even react strangely if they cannot (possibly without even knowing why). If you listen closely to any professional audiobook, I can almost guarantee that you'll hear the narrator breathing in the pauses. As one podficcer put it for me, "Please leave [your breaths in]! If I don't hear you breathe, I forget to." Some people do feel sympathetic breathlessness if they don't hear you breathing. I'm not saying that you can't silence any breaths that you find especially distracting or which you believe disrupt your flow, but there is no need to painstakingly remove them all.
While recording, you may notice that you tend to take breaths when you meet punctuation marks, paragraph breaks, and scene breaks. You naturally pause at these spots. These pauses for breath give the listener time to process your words, comprehend, and visualize the scene. If you trim your pauses too much, you run the risk of becoming incomprehensible to your listener. You may seem to be speaking very quickly.
Here are some suggested standards for pauses in your recording:
- after a comma: 0.3-0.5 seconds
- between sentences: 0.5-1.0 seconds
- between paragraphs: 0.8-1.2 seconds
- between scenes or chapters: around 3 seconds
After I do my preliminary edits (that is, after I edit out all my flubs) in Audacity, I usually go to the toolbar, and select Analyze > Silence Finder and search for a minimum duration of silence [seconds] of 1.3. This will leave a label at all the spots in the recording with a silence of 1.3+ seconds, so I can go to each, listen, and determine if I need to trim them down a bit. If you record a 30-minute podfic when you're finished, run the Silence Finder at 0.8, and only have a handful of labels pop up, you've probably overedited and I will weep tears of sorrow-j/k!. If you want something for comparison, when I run Silence Finder at 0.8 seconds on one of my 45-minute podfics, I am given 314 silence markers. You probably won't read at the exact same rate I do, but it's something to consider.
If you're having trouble deciding what works for you, I would err on the side of pauses that are on the longer side and seek the advice of a trusty beta. Or post a clip here on podfic_tips! We'll be happy to help you gain your stride and build your confidence!
P.S. One thing you might keep in mind is that not all listeners will speak English as a first language-comfort levels with the language will vary; a steady pace with reasonable pauses are even more helpful to people who need the pause for mental translation.
Suggestion: A useful exercise would be to open a podfic that you like and think was done very well in your audio editing program and take a good look at what the pauses in that podfic average out to.
Comments? If you have anything you'd like to offer (maybe you'd like to share your own breathing/pause standards), please feel free to speak up!
ETA 10/28/2013 @ 6:15CST: Lots of great discussion is happening in the comments! There isn't One True Way to do things, so be sure to take a look at what other people are saying. :-)
[I have no clue how best to tag this, lol.]