Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Editing Engineer
Voice-over editing takes time and patience. An editor's job is to take the
raw voice-over session and cut it up line by line, creating unique i les
that follow a i le naming convention set up by the producer. It cannot
be stressed enough at this point how important a coherent and well
thought out i le naming convention is. Usually, the producer works with
the programmer to dei ne this convention, so when they get the i les at
the end of the day, they know exactly where each one is supposed to go
in the game. Remember, in most games there are an incredible number
of assets, each of which has to be kept meticulous track of. If there is no
naming convention, things can get very messy, very quickly.
During the course of the recording session, either the producer or the
voice director should have been listening to lines and picking takes.
When they hear a line read they prefer, they mark their script. After all,
if they do not choose lines they like, then the editor will be forced to
choose the best take for themselves. This is probably not such a great
idea, as they may or may not have any understanding or previous
knowledge of the game. The other solution is to edit every single line,
which can add drastically to the turnaround time and budget. The
dif erence between editing one take per line and in some cases as many
as ten is huge. At the end of this part of the process the editor usually
has all the individual i les on their hard drive as either .WAV or .AIF, high
resolution audio.
The next thing the editor will do is to volume balance each i le, so that
when the characters are speaking in a game, one is not louder than
the other. You've all heard games where this process was skipped, and
one character is super loud, and the next super quiet. If the game is
small enough, they will do this by hand, one by one, in a stereo editing
program. If there are too many i les (usually over a couple of hundred)
they will batch process the i les or automate the process in some way.
The i nal job is format conversion. Depending on what platform the
game is being authored for, the i nal voice-over i les will need to be
delivered in a designated i le format that works with that platform. For
example, games with built-in Flash often use MP3 compression to keep
the i le size down.
To get an idea of what it's like to deal with editing and mastering voice-
overs for video games, we were fortunate to get the expertise and
experience of Jory Prum. He's done voice-over recording, editing, and
mastering for well over 50 adventure game titles, including Telltale's best-
selling and critically acclaimed
Walking Dead
series. Let's hear what it's
like—straight from the horse's mouth.
