Quality voice-overs can bring your video footage to life, giving personality to your message. Whether you are looking to add narration to your footage or translate dialogue, voice-overs can connect with viewers on a more relatable level and maximise the impact of video campaigns.
In this article, we explain what professional voice-over services entail and look at five of the biggest benefits you will get from hiring the right voice over agency.
What is a professional voice-over service?
A professional voice-over service provides everything you need to produce voice-over tracks for your video content. The specifics of such a service can range from one agency to the next, but you should look for the following from a complete voice-over service:
- Planning: Specifying your goals and requirements for the project.
- Talent acquisition: Recruiting voice artists and any other talent required for production, such as sound engineers and editors.
- Script development: Crafting your voice-over scripts for each voice artist, ensuring they have all of the information and direction they need.
- Script translation: Translating your source language script for each required language.
- Voice-over production: Bringing together everything you need for the recording and production of your voice-overs – such as recording studios, engineers, etc. – and ensuring resources are available when you need them.
- Video editing: Adding and synching your voice-over tracks to the required footage.
- Review: Reviewing the final version of each video to ensure the right standard of quality is delivered.
Depending on your specific goals and requirements, further elements or adjustments might be needed that aren’t included in the list above. For example, when needing to add translated subtitles to parts of video footage or as a backup to your voice-overs.
Now, let’s take a look at the top five benefits of having a professional voice-over service.
Also Read: Voice-Over Translation: Why It’s Important
#1: Every stage of voice-over production is handled for you
Arguably, the biggest benefit of hiring a professional voice-over service is that every stage of production is handled for you. As you can see from the list we looked at in the previous section, voice-over production involves many stages, from planning and talent acquisition to voice-over production, video editing and more.
So it is not just about simply hiring a voice-over artist and expect them to handle everything for you. A comprehensive voice-over service will equip you with everything you may need across the production process – at least, the parts you are unable to handle in-house.
#2: Find the right voice(s) for every message
Finding the right voice for your content is one of the biggest challenges in voice-over production. You need a voice artist that can deliver your crafted message as it’s intended with a voice that supports your intent and the technical capability to deliver the right intonation, emphasis and other speech characteristics.
A professional voice-over agency will have contacts to a vast array of voice talent, studios and facilities, making it easy to detect the right voice for your videos and every message you create.
#3: Quality assurance guarantees standards
Likewise, voice-over agencies have comprehensive quality assurance systems to guarantee consistent results across every project. This means you can expect the same level of quality across every stage of production and the same standards on any future projects you have.
This is important for on-off projects but, if you have ongoing voice-over needs, developing a long-term relationship with an agency you can trust is invaluable.
#4: You can incorporate additional language services
Many voice-over projects require additional language services, such as subtitle translation, video localisation, transcreation and a variety of other potential services. If you specifically look for a language service provider (LSP) that specialises in voice-overs, they will be able to provide any of these additional services you may require from one project to the next.
#5: End-to-end project management is handled for you
Earlier, we looked at a list of seven key stages of voice-over production you should expect from a professional voice-over service provider. In each of these stages, you have to manage an extensive set of tasks. This includes the many aspects of voice-over recording alone.
Given the amount of work involved in voice-over production, project management is a challenge in itself. Professional voice-over service providers have developed project management systems and already have efficient processes in place to help with the delivery of these tasks so you don’t have to worry about the logistics.
How to find the right voice-over agency
At translate plus we specialise in voice-over services and regularly work on many video projects that require such services, both externally and with many fellow agencies within Publicis Groupe to deliver engaging and culturally relevant campaigns.
If you need help with getting the right talent on board for your next project, get in touch with us by filling out the form on our contact page to discuss your needs in detail.