 Hey, it's time for voiceover body shop tech talk tech talk Take talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk Great time for the phone to ring Anyway, it's big moment if you have a question for George or I on home voiceover Studios put it in the chat room and Jeff Holman who's sitting there right now still talking Tech talk is going to write it down and Give it to us in the next half hour. We will get to your question great opportunity for you right now Anyway, it's time for voiceover body shop tech talk. So don't go away. It's time for that right now Oh Voiceover body shop tech talk is brought to you by Voiceover essentials comm the home of Harlan Hogan signature products source elements the folks who bring you source connect Voheroes comm become a hero to your clients with award-winning voice over training Voice actor comm your voice over website ready in minutes Voiceover extra your daily resource for voice over success and by world voices the industry Association of freelance voice talent And now here's your hosts Dan and George Hi there. Guess what? I'm Dan Leonard. Hey, and I'm George with him and this is voiceover body shop or VO BS That's Jeff Holman by the way who's sitting in our chat room and getting all of your questions to us Just to make sure that it's all complete. Yeah, I like the big headshot. Let's let's switch to the big heads I mean this one. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do let's go big head tonight. Okay. Let's try the heads We have well, we'll try this for a little about tech. That's right big heads about tech Now it's too distracting. It's too much. It's just too much just too much. Let's go back to that view Okay, cool Anyway, what is it that George and I do we do home voice over studio tech you want to talk about a niche Yeah, there's a bunch of other people out there saying yeah, I do this and yeah I can help you with it. I can generally count on less than two hands The people that actually know what they're talking about I won't mention any names and I certainly won't mention the names of the people who we think I have no idea What on earth they're talking about just to remember that most people are experts in one studio their own and What works for them may not necessarily work for you in the environment in which you are working and What George and I do is we help you Understand all of the important things that have to go on in your home studio and we will physically if you Hey, we happen to be close by I mean we do house calls here in LA George You go all over the place, you know when you're traveling you offer the opportunity for people to have you come over and work on There's to the action next week or actually as you're watching this in replay I'm heading to Boise, Idaho of all places if you if you happen to be Boise, Idaho, and you'd really like me to come by You know, you know where to find me. Oh Boise. All right And so if you want to work with one of us because clearly if I'm watching this show, you know what we're talking You know, we know that we're talking about You can work with either one of us like for instance if you want to work with George you where do you go? You go over to There it is George the dot tech weights that when I'm sort of slash VOBS because that's where you get our special deals Oh, okay. Yeah, but never nothing wrong with that. But yeah, George the dot tech is the site and we are a growing in terms of our content and our service offerings and our team There are there are a growing number of team members. We have a lot of getting bigger and bigger And and we've got that the 9-1-1 tech support service, which I'll tell you it fortunately for the last month It's been pretty quiet There's really been very very few emergency tech calls coming in which it it's a good thing We don't want to see emergencies But if you do you can call us 4242 to 68528 and press option 9 And you will actually reach live dispatch Dispatchers who will get you to one of our emergency on-call tech team So pretty amazing stuff that over George the dot tech Dan What you doing over there at home voiceover studio comm Well, I tell people the reality of a home voiceover studio It's not like it's something with lots of dials and buttons and a mixer and and nice furniture and guitars hanging on the It also is in a gamers headset. No, no, it is not and although I've seen it There are some good headsets, but you can't afford them It's it's important to get your setup done, right I will teach you about acoustics and proper microphone technique and why I always sound fabulous even if I have a cold And and you can sound that way too if you use your microphone, right and setting levels No one seems to understand that stuff if you want to learn how to do it, right? If you're here in the Los Angeles area, I do house calls And I just love going into people's homes and ripping out all the wires and making things a lot simpler for them And they're like geez it sounds so much better. How'd you do that? I got rid of all the stuff that you had plugged in and and and stuff It's not about the technology. It really is all physical the technology is kind of secondary You don't want crappy technology But you certainly do want to have stuff that is going to work properly and we know Exactly what will work properly in your particular environment without all of those equations that acousticians use It's like sounds good to me, you know, and generally if you send in a sample to me at my specimen collection cup You know, it's like I want some silence I want you to read some copy and I want you have more open mic silence And I will listen and within five seconds at the Least I Will know what's going on in your studio, you know, I can see the background noise. I can hear what the reverberation is You do this a couple thousand times you actually get to know what you're doing so go on over to homevoiceoverstudio.com and You'll get your home studio put together right look you're looking at the two top guys in the business here That's why we do this we give you lots of free information But we really would like if you really need some help Specifically with your home studio, you can't do better than either of us Well, I know you'll do great with George What happens with me is you'll have a great time because I end up talking about the voiceover business with people You probably a lot more than you bargained for with Dan. Yeah, most likely most likely has a voice actor I there's there's an awful lot. I know about the industry and It's it's and I have a great time talking with people. Anyway, it's time for George's tech update We got lots of stuff. What do you got for us this week? Well as timing should have it this never happens on the show, but Apple decided it was time to have their scary fast Release Which normally they do their big press releases launching a brand new Mac in the fall. That's nothing new This time they squeeze they squeaked it in they decided not to do it on Halloween But do it the night before call it scary fast and launch a few big Well, I don't know big announcements. Maybe just faster computers that the computers are Exactly the same in terms of performance Let's take a look at what you're gonna see The this is from the verge by the way the verge does great They do great reporting on their live events. There's an M3 chip now. It's the M3 chip. That's right So all the you're not gonna see in the MacBook Air yet, but strangely you will see it in the iMac Yes, they released a new iMac new meaning Exactly the same as the other iMac that was already out just with a faster chip So if you've been thinking about buying an iMac now is probably the time to get the iMac now Who's an iMac for I it's not my first choice for a home studio. I'm always gonna go these days to a Mac mini For a home studio. I just like that you can get any size monitor you want. You're not stuck with a specific size But if you like an extremely minimalistic Looking setup. Well, look at those pictures of the iMac. You can't get more minimal than that That is an extremely clean looking little computer and I've set up a few in some home studios and they they work fine They don't make any noise and they're plenty fast I mean listen guys anything with the M1 or higher chip is a light year ahead of anything made before it from From Apple it really is true. So it doesn't matter what you get just they're faster now than they were M3 Confusingly is double the speed of an M1 if you're looking trying to compare apples to apples. Yeah, in the apple Exactly. So it is definitely faster. Will you notice it? I guess if you already have an M1 and you use it all the time you might notice it if you're coming from an older machine They're all faster. So you're not gonna you're not gonna notice crazy how much crazier fast it is And then the MacBook Pro is released as well with the newest M3 chips going up to the M3 max You'll notice that you can for the mega power users who are ready to spend $7,100 on a new MacBook Pro. Holy crap. You can get 128 gigabytes of Memory or RAM in your MacBook Pro and 8 terabytes of storage So that is one monster computer in a portable computer and it supports up to four External screens and it's 16 core or up to 40 core. I mean, it was like two cores was really cool It's insane. It's clearly for video professionals and photography professionals It does have a memory card slot in it again So yes, and you don't have to carry another freaking adapter when you want to dump your cards to your computer But it is a it is an absolute beast But the even the base base model the M3 MacBook Pro 16 inch It starts at six fifteen ninety nine. So You know, it's a reasonable price point. A lot of people buying a new computer for work have no problems spending 2000 plus so 1600 for them MacBook Pro 16 no 14 inch It's a pretty good. It's a pretty good deal if I hadn't just invested in the 20 what is it the 13 inch MacBook Air M2? Would have considered this one, but I'm fine. I'm cool or Matt. So that's the new things from from Apple You know, I I'm not gonna go buy a brand new Mac day-in-date when it comes out I don't care how many generations and I just don't think it's a good idea to have not only the new Mac That's not even what I'm worried about. It's the new OS If you get a brand new Apple computer that comes out, then they start shipping November 7th It's gonna have Sonoma on it. You can guarantee it. That is the newest newest newest OS and it's just it's still Not quite. We're not quite ready folks Give us give everybody some time to to get used to the new version find all its quirks and features and the developers can find all the quirks and Let the everybody else deal with that before you put that into your production computer If you have two computers put it on the one you don't rely on to make a living with if you really want to try it out What which is what I did with my MacBook Air. I'm like, I gotta try this Totally seamless seamless. Yeah, it was if you don't use a lot of hardware and devices And you just really use it as a laptop with mostly bread browser stuff and apples software and stuff You're probably fine. You're probably fine. It's it's always the the things that the surprises always come with hardware and like Hardware drivers and like plug-ins, you know, that's where things will sneak up on you. So In a totally different area Just a little update from Sentrance. I've been getting you know, the occasional email or comment Hey, what's going on with that audio interface that you helped kind of invent Whose name I can't remember nobody seems to be able to remember the name of this thing the Passport VO Well, I did get an update from Michael and I did encourage him to release this to the Investors who have purchased pre-purchased theirs But he said essentially the good news is the prototyping machine is finally working and is assembled to of the chipboard of the Boards so far the boards are the circuit board inside the product So they have their own in-house chip bot that will make the circuit board And so he said, you know, that means we won't need to rely on China so much I don't know if that means they won't make any in China or if that's just for the prototype Not sure on that one, but that's what I've got from them so far They've pretty much they've drawn up all the analog schematics for the product The last thing the last X factor is the USB chip for the product He said I asked a friend who lives in Taiwan to go down to see the manufacturer And we're still waiting to hear the results of the evaluation. So There you go TMI, but you know, this is what it takes to get a new product to market when certain things like you pardon me like your USB chip just Vanishes in the thin air and you have to find a new chip and redesign the board and make it all over again So that's what's up with PS the passport VO. All right Now I've got a little quick. I'm gonna take a snippet from a 14 minute video Show you what I think maybe one of the more interesting parts then some of you This is gonna feel like watching this old house for a few minutes This is the a little clip from the factory tour that I took Vocalbooth.com when I was up there a few weeks ago And this is the segment segment where we start looking at the doors and how the doors are made So let's take a look at this Building those doors pretty serious piece of machine or mill All right, this is the the infamous door machine Nate's gonna demonstrate it for us So He's rattering out the little tabs, you know the little plate where the plates go for the hinges does that first And you gotta have three of those You gotta have three and if the door is big enough it might have four And as you can see this is a solid core door Is it made out of oak or what did they say it was made of I shouldn't ask them what materials They make the doors out of you know, I don't I don't know they get the door blanks sent to them, right? They don't make the door blanks in the house. That's done somewhere else But this huge machine which was the first thing I'd really notice when I walked in the facility this and the plasma cutter Which they also have this thing is cutting where the doorknob goes It's got a Forstner bit thing that pokes through and just cuts that hole. That's all it does And then on the bottom is another one punch in the hole for the plunger You know and it that's all that thing does it does one job And then he goes on and he cuts the rest of the hinge plates This is real-time. It takes about three minutes to cut and mill all the different parts of the door and This huge machine they only have it because the door supplier that they were using for their doors close their doors and Calvin the owner I have another video by the way interviewing Calvin you guys can check out on the George the Tech YouTube channel He said hey, can we buy that machine from you guys and they did so They have this very very large machine. That's just for precision milling all the parts of a door Which I thought was obviously really fascinating and probably impressive piece of machinery Yeah, and the door is probably when it comes to a vocal booth Probably one of the most important pieces of any particular You know soundproof booth because without the without a solid core door and the right Fittings and it's fitting just right. Yeah Here's another another router underneath. So it's an upside-down router It's cutting the strike plate area. Oh, I'm so glad you know the actual technical nerves There's the strike and the strike plate having done a lot of videos on how to install doors. So Yeah, yeah, so there there that's done And then he drills the holes I love air drills man, they're so fast It sounds like the Indy 500, I know Actually worked for a couple of different door companies. Oh, yeah, different different That I would hope not. Yeah. Anyway, nothing's more fun than trying to hang a door Well, I mean a Calvin made a good point as well. He said, you know, listen, it's not it's one thing to have this big heavy door That's one thing. It's another thing to hang a big heavy door off of a thing that you assembled at home And have it, you know that the weight of that door when it swings wide open That thing's pulling on the structure, you know, all that force is pulling on the thing It's essentially a flimsy door frame is what it is because you're just screwing It's not framed and hung and mounted to the house So it's even trickier to get those things To get those things dialed in right so yeah, I was I was really impressed by that really really really cool Seeing that stuff being done in person All right. Well, that's it for my tech update and Dan. We're talking about The cloud the theory of the cloud. No, it's the theory of the cloud panel Now this is then it's not even a theory. I mean I call it a theory But in working with a lot of people and you know and and how many of you are in a closet? Deliberately and if you're you're in there Closets can be very different. I mean the every closet is different. I mean, there's a standard closet There's an a 12 inch or an 18 inch deep closet with the sliding door And then there's a walk-in closet you open a door and all your clothes are in there and stuff and the ceiling is generally pretty high Or if you're in a smaller closet, it's built into a wall that has a higher ceiling and That ceiling is sort of like that big hole in a guitar It creates a big acoustical space above you that is going to create bass reflex like you wouldn't believe And it's gonna sound like you're down the hallway or something along those lines so one of the things that The George and I have been doing with people is we've been creating what we call clouds and What is a cloud? Well, if I if I use my camera here and I can actually go up and show you what a cloud looks like Yeah, look at that isn't that cool that I can do all that yeah, that that is what clouds look like there They are panels that are made out of wood They can be fiberglass or rocks all filled and and then I usually put like a backing of weed block behind it to keep the fiberglass of the rock soul. Yeah installed and See goes right back to where it's supposed to and What a cloud does is you know, it's like a regular sound panel that will Absorb sound and not let it reflect back to your microphone But here's the theory about this that I find fascinating That is if you if you're in your booth and And you go up and down like good, you know trying to go down on your knees or and or stand up really straight You will find that as your your your mouth goes higher or lower inside that space It will change the dynamic of of the room, you know, and if it's a very small room It's going to really affect the sound. It's gonna become very very hollow sounding So by hanging a cloud, you're doing a couple of things one You're reducing the the upper area of the of the closet or the room you're in so it's not It's not going up into that chamber and reflecting all over the place and then coming back down But here's the cool thing because I was as I was just describing going up and down and Listening in your own ears how the sound changes depending on where in the particular booth you are I Came up with this idea that I was proven to be 1,000% correct because it just made sense and that is when you're hanging a cloud Make it adjustable. Maybe put it on a pulley. Maybe have you know having been a sailor in knowing an awful lot about pulleys and all that stuff You can make something that is totally adjustable so what we're trying to do is we want to create a sweet spot in your in your booth that will Work every time and if you're you know if you're standing or sitting you can adjust that cloud to maintain a consistent sound within your booth And I know some booth manufacturers and we've talked to them and they're like I'm like Why don't you put a cloud in here and make it adjustable and they're like we don't want to do that Well, that's their problem because it works great in a closet. I just installed one in some of these closet the other day and it sounds sweet and Before I put it in it sounded pretty sour. It was very very reverberant and it was The thing is is it has to be custom-cut for the for that particular room and If you've ever watched me measure something and cut it, you know, maybe I'm not the one to be building those but It's I thought that was 21 inches. Why is it? You know, yeah, it's a lot of work. I don't like making that stuff more than I have to either yeah, I Mean, I just made a clock out of a zenith cloud of a radio face and I built a wooden frame with it and And did and did it all by hand you do it by hand. It looks like crap so Until you're really really skilled at it like that door machine You do it by it's perfect, you know, what do they say measure twice cut once? That's right. So it's Yeah, it's it's not it's not perfect But if you can get it, you know fitting inside and not necessarily really tightly so you can get it So it moves up and down, you know It cuts off the angle of your voice and doesn't let it reverberate up in the in the upper chamber of the closet And so that's something you might want to consider when you're building your home studio Or if you have no idea what you're doing what you do is you go over to one of our websites home voice your voice over studio calm or over to George V dot tech and Tell them what we know you want to tell us what you want to do and we can help you out But making one yourself is not that hard. I can build one with an electric staple gun in less than an hour Which is actually kind of cool considering the kind of space I have here to actually do that Your thoughts mr. Woodham. Yeah, I agree totally. I mean a sound cloud acoustic cloud whatever you want to call it It works so well It does a very good job of dealing with a lot of issues in small spaces It doesn't take up more wall space so you can kind of use more wall space for other purposes It can really Really make a dramatic improvement with you know, the hardest part really it's just a physical Hanging of it from the ceiling that is the hardest part of the install, you know other than that Absolutely worth the effort. No no brainer. Yeah toggle bolts are fabulous Yeah, these is ones that like you there's like a plastic thing you shove it in the hole and then it goes like Yeah, yeah, I was into the ceiling Yeah, there are a lot of those in this studio this George will attest to and they're all still holding so that's even better But if you put it up there with rings and the right type of rope it can you can Really make it very very precise to make it sound exactly the way we want it to sound So that's that's a good thing to know and that's why I figured I'd talk about my cloud theory Love it. I love that you could show us too. Yes Anyway, we're gonna take a quick break here and if you have a question We would like to see your questions here on voiceover body shop tech talk because that's why we're here I see there's a bunch of people watching. I know you have questions Even if it's about, you know marriage difficulties or about about your medical issues. Yeah As long as it relates to voiceover put it in the chat room right now and Jeff Holman will get that to us In the meantime, we're gonna take a break and we'll be right back here on voiceover body shop So do not go a way. Hi, this is Bill Farmer and you are watching voiceover body shop. It's great Oh, hi, you know if you live in a house and your voiceover studio is in that house You don't want to disturb everybody else who's living in there So what you need are good headphones that are made specifically for voiceover And that's why we have Harlan Hogan's signature series voice optimized headphones 2.0 What's so great about these? Well one they have a very flat response So you only hear exactly what it is you sound like second Incredibly comfortable leather leather pads on the outside filled with memory foam of Really comfortable headband that really it really works with your head The most important thing you can wear them for long periods of time That's really important. Where do you get them? Only at voiceover Essentials.com that's voiceover essentials.com. Just go there look at the headphones and get them now Tell them we sent you. Thanks Harlan All right, well, it's time to talk about source elements It creates a source connect and source nexus 2.0, which was just released very recently And it provides a different set of tools that you're not probably accustomed to from source elements Now the nexus thing's been around for a while It's a virtual sound router for your computer works on Windows or Mac and allows you to take any Audio source or destination on your computer whether it be a Chrome web browser Zoom Skype Whatever it is you can assign them their own unique sets of audio drivers And what that allows those things to do is to communicate with other Applications in the computer and nexus is basically the traffic cop. It's the nexus It's the intersection of all those things But it also creates a driver so that any one of those sound sources or destinations can show up and become a plug-in The plug-in in your multi-track software where they're using pro tools logic reaper Whatever use new endo for your post-production can now Allow those signals to stream in and out seamlessly so if you're doing a zoom or a Skype and You are producing and you need to get the talent in and the client listening in on their favorite zoom platform Maybe they're using Google Meep or it's corporate and they have to use teams From Microsoft no worries You have a way to get that audio in and out of the production smoothly to make everybody's Life easier and make it work The way it feels like when they're all in the studio with you which seems to happen so much less often So if you want to learn more about nexus and of course if you want to get source connect because you're you're starting to Get the big job auditions coming in that say must have source connect Head over to source dash elements calm and get started and tell them we sent you we appreciate it We'll be right back with your questions. Send them in right after this. Well. Hey there It's David H. Lawrence with VO heroes and wouldn't it be cool if there was a very simple tool Drag-and-drop tool that would guarantee that the audio you need to upload a CX or any other audiobook platform Is perfectly set up in terms of the tech standards that you root mean square normalization the peak Normalization the noise floor guess what there is and I want you to have it absolutely free It's called audio cupcake and you can find it at audio cupcake calm I helped create this software It was built to my specs and my standards for when I do audiobooks and I know it's gonna work for you Now it's only available for Macintosh Because you windows users you have the ability to use other tools that work for you But in this case you edit your final raw what way file for a chapter you drop it on audio cupcake and out comes the 192k mono MP3 file you can upload immediately. That's audio cupcake calm audio cupcake calm. I hope you love it This is the Latin Lover narrator from Jane the Virgin Anthony Mendez and you're enjoying Den and George on the voice over buddy shop All right. We're back here at voice over buddy shop again. If you have a tech question for us And it could be anything at all regarding your home voice over studio George and I will talk about it incessantly for hours on end Anytime I mean that's why you better ask some questions otherwise We're gonna just go off on it on and on and on and on but but we've got a couple of questions So we're gonna get to in a minute here, but by the way Jeff Jeff. What were you so angry? I see you going Oh What is that Jeff everybody agent? I think it's all gonna zagen We got to unmute you here there you go. Oh Oh, everything's fine. I just you know, it's just like George said like that's that's my moment for the show and Get a phone call right then. It's like It's just you know All right Is somebody's had a case of the Mondays right anyway if you've got a question This is where it's going it before it comes here. So if it gets kind of weird before then now, you know why thanks Jeff Thank you. All right Anyway We have a couple of questions here and again just throw it in the chat room George and I will be happy to answer your questions on your home voice over studio or technology We'll start off with the question from Jeff Since he's in there he gets he gets priority because that's right He's typing he says he says every time I hear artificially produced voices on youtube videos. I think they sound like total crap I won't use the word he used But where are these great ai voices? I keep hearing about the canned tomato sauce of voice over That's what I call it. Yeah The reason why you're hearing all these like lousy voice models on youtube Is they're mostly extremely cheap or free They're built into the free freemium or free apps people are using And uh, that's why I I just thought I mean when you mention that question the name the the idea of the canned tomato sauce Comes to mind because listen if you were a chef at a restaurant And you made pasta And you literally opened a can of tomato sauce You would not be a chef for very long, right? Yeah, exactly those restaurants pride themselves on that sauce They make the sundae gravy, right? You make the best sauce you ever had. That's why you come back for me It's pizza the best taste in sauce Imagine imagine if voice actors were to just be using an ai version other of a voice And that would be accepted as a great performance. Ain't gonna happen. Is it good enough for at home? To feed the kids. Yeah, that's what the that's what the canned tomato sauce is for Can a chef boy rd. It'll get him to shut up. Yeah But you wouldn't dare share that with guests or is like with a word a restaurant, right? So that's the way I kind of look at it Like these are just the canned tomato sauce voices that are cheap free built into the apps You know, and you're hearing them way too way too often now, right? Yeah, I mean we had pj oculinan with us last week and we were talking about this You know, I look at ai and everybody's oh, it's getting better. It's all this. It's all that I got quoted in wired magazine a couple weeks ago about ai voices and which I was totally honored to be Yeah, uh as president of world voices and they contacted me. So do you have a comment? I'm like as a matter of fact I do Um To me I am convinced and they'll tell me oh, it's gonna happen and I'm like yeah, I'll believe it when I hear it That a computer cannot cry A computer generated voice cannot sigh a computer generated voice cannot laugh Yeah, it can You can program it to do you can program it to do those things But it'll do it over and over and over again and every time Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh or at the end of a sentence you'll hear And then you'll hear the exact same breath throughout the entire thing You know or if you're watching something like ancient aliens, which we've been sort of hooked on but You know, it's an ai voice because ancient alien theorists, you know suggest It's the same intonation constantly and it is perfect every time variation. There's no variation It actually gets kind of droney, yeah, a little bit and but you know, they said, you know, the horseless carriage will never take off, but what did we know? Look, as technology changes, human beings do what human beings do. We adapt. And if you're a voice actor and you see a change in the industry like that, make the changes in your marketing to show people that you're a human being and that you can laugh and that you can sigh and you can cry. I'm sorry, a computer can't do it. It cannot replace humans. Yeah, I mean, I just saw an incredible musical musical artist last night, Pat Matheny. He's a renowned jazz guitar player. Legend. Yeah. The sound, his tone is unique, his style of playing is unique and it crosses borders between classical and jazz and it's just incredible. He's one of the most amazing guitar players alive, right? And on stage, he had at least nine different guitars. He had some of them covered in a black duvetine so you didn't see it until the last second. He'd pull it off and then play it. He had other, a whole, this huge, crazy automated instrument that he created a few years ago that he triggers from his guitar and it's playing mallets and bells and drums. I mean, it is just an unbelievable thing. The thing is, that is entertaining. It's real equipment making real sound in a real space. By a human. By a human. Yes, you could program all of that in a computer. You could sequence it and you could walk on stage and hit a play button, right? In fact, I actually saw an artist a few six months ago where it was the weirdest thing. The lead singer guy basically yells at the audience and the musician has a laptop and at the beginning of each song, he hits play and then he dances around. It was the weirdest freaking thing I've ever seen. It was called Sleaford Mods. Anyway, my point, I'm getting at. Hire the human. People still are going to want to see humans, be human, do human things, share human experiences, listen to human voices. Yes, there's always going to be a place where AI voice comes in and yes, it's going to get better. Just like synthesizers came and changed a lot of music, just like, you know, there's a lot of things that have been substituted in over the years, but it's not going to replace it. I just, it's not going to, it's not going to, and I keep saying this, it's going to be more work to make the fake version sound real than it will be for a real person to provide the real voice. It's going to take more time, more programming, it's going to be more difficult. So humans win. Absolutely. Yes. Humans win. Humans win. Computers zero. All right. Justin Ramos asked a question. This is regarding the cloud thingies, you know, these guys up here. Any problem regarding earthquake safety, nah, unless you're living in a, I think earthquake wise, first off, if you're in Los Angeles, it's not a problem. Nothing breaks here. Everything out of wood. It just goes, everything's designed to handle that. But I guess, don't just, just don't use good quality, good anchors, you know, the things are going to swing around in the ceiling and that's probably fine. I don't know if I'd want to be underneath one in a major earthquake. If they were swinging around over my head, I might consider leaving the room. But I don't think you're going to have too much to worry about. Interesting question. Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you set it up right, if you've got more, a couple of anchors in there, if the whole ceiling doesn't fall down, it's not going to hurt you. Plus it's made out of soft stuff, except for the frame. So if the frame doesn't hit you, it's like getting hit on the head with a pillow. As long as it's not the very edge of the frame. Right. Right. And on to a different subject from the same questioner with the same sort of question, someone asks, speaking of clouds, cloud storage recommendation for backups of auditions, et cetera. What do you think, George? Clever. Clever. I'll just tell you what I use. I use Odrive, which is a way to like synchronize and move files between your computer and different cloud storages. So it works with Odrive. It works with Google Drive. It works with Dropbox and that's what I'm using with those two services. And it just makes it easier for me to have more than one Google Drive account synchronizing to my computer at the same time. So that's what I use. All of my work exists on Google Drive, right? So that is my file syncing, file sharing, cloud backup, all wrapped up in the one bundle, right? It's there. If it's in those folders, it's a backed up, it's in the cloud. If I have to run out of my house with my laptop and my girlfriend and my wallet, I'll get all my work back because I can download that again from the cloud. So that works for me. Dan, what do you do? Same. You know, I use, you know, as much problem as Google is getting themselves into troubles to Google's getting themselves into in different places, Google Drive works great. You know, it's, you know, you just set up your folders. It's there. It makes it easy to share them. But I also use iCloud, which is why when I open my laptop in the house, everything that was ever on my desktop suddenly appears on there. I'm like, I don't want that stuff and you should start moving it around and stuff. iCloud is great for saving the stuff that is actually the downloads in your computer and stuff like that. But for actually, for transferring files, because you can make them huge, GDrive works just great. And it's not expensive to have a couple of terabytes of GDrive. And totally worth it if you're moving a lot of files. Otherwise, you don't really want to storm on your machine. Yeah. Don't think of a drive, a file just sitting on your computer as permanent. Exactly. We like to say if it doesn't exist in at least two places at once, consider that it doesn't exist at all. Unless you put it on a CD-ROM. Right, right. If you happen to have a CD-ROM burner, which, you know, if you have a 1911, or a 2011 computer, you might actually have it. I do still use a time machine hard drive. So I mean, just an external laptop-sized hard drive plugged into my computer to do another backup onto the physical disk. And I just, I haven't had to restore from one of those in a very long time. Maybe I've been lucky. But I haven't had to worry about that at all. But OSes are just incredibly stable now. You think they figured out how to make them now? So they're... Yeah. I mean, they're stable. They're a little memory chip that stores everything, can fail. Like, when is that going to happen? That happened in the early days of flash storage 10 plus years ago. Yeah. It was more common. It is very uncommon nowadays. You'd need an EMP, electronic, or EPM, what is it, electronic pulse weapon or something? Yeah. Somebody drops a nuclear bomb over your house. One, your hard drive is the least of your concerns. There ain't no coming back from a nuclear attack. Anyway, yeah. Okay. So, we got another question. You get it, George, from Dave. Dave just upgraded a mid-2012. He just upgraded a 10-year-old MacBook Pro just now from stock to two 1-terabyte solid state drives, good move, 16 gigabytes of memory, good move, a new battery, and it's a 2.5 MHz Core i5. It's like a mid-level MacBook Pro. Do you think this can be a decent backup laptop for the road? Yeah, of course. I mean, the thing is, once it's a 2012 or older, really, if it's a 2015 or older, you're going to start running into web browser compatibility problems. Some things are just not going to work on that system. Browsers won't stay up to date any longer. There's going to be some issues, and it's not because of the hardware. It's because of Apple just rolling out new machines and sun-setting the old ones and stopping supporting the old ones with the newer OSes, and it kind of rolls. It's like this time of year, when the new OS comes out, something just lost support. So I think maybe that was High Sierra maybe, maybe Mojave is kind of the end of the road in terms of getting support and staying supported and current. So yes, it'll work. If you just need a computer to travel with and record, that's technically overkill with all those specs, but it'll work fine. He says, can I get a second Twisted Wave license on it? Yes. When you want a Twisted Wave license, you can install it on as many computers as you want. It's actually very different from a lot of other platforms. Yeah. Either have one or two or five limit, I mean maybe five or something. Right. Right. And it's great because then you've got it on one computer, it makes it easy to transfer to the other, and you're working in the same environment. And Twisted Wave's great software. And just for relative speed, he made a little observation. Even with all those upgrades, the faster storage, the more memory, it's still one sixth the speed of the M1 storage or performance. I don't know if he means the speed of storage or the speed of the computer. But yeah, the M1s are dramatically faster, no doubt about it. The storage on the silicon chips, because everything's unified into one small chip, the storage is lightning fast. Yeah. And at the end of the day, that's what makes a computer from a day-to-day use case. Just opening the apps, loading files, saving things, exporting this, that's the speed of that storage. Is it really what you're going to notice? That is what makes the computer feel extremely snappy. That's what keeps you from seeing the spinning pinwheel all the time. That's what you're really going to notice more than anything, I think. So yeah, it's a good experience for most people. Keep an old machine around as a backup. I do the same. I just, believe it or not, I took my old backup computer that I gave to my daughter. She's like, this thing stinks, dad, it's slow. So I gave her my 2019 MacBook Pro, which is a very base model, right? And I cleaned it and put her system on it. She's fine. She is a camper. I took her old MacBook Air 2015 and I wiped it and installed my user account on it. And it's fine. It still works fine. Yes, it's slow, but it will still do basic things. And if I need to run an Intel-specific thing, like I have a Windows version on there, runs. Windows 32, Windows 7, Windows 7, whatever, Windows 7, it will actually run on that old Intel Mac and it won't run on my new one. So I still keep it around. Very cool. Use a Mac. I mean, a lot of people out there are, you know, like, oh, I'm a PC person. That's fabulous. If you're good at that, I'm going to get that skeeter. I'm telling you, this guy, we support Windows over at George the Tech. We've got a few on our team who are very Windows-centric. Yep. Even the ones that are the most experienced still, we run into technical brick walls where it's like, I don't know why it's glitching. What's going on there? I'm, you know, it's like, at the end of the day, I don't want to be the guy who says, why don't you try getting a Mac? Because people on Windows hate being told to try a Mac. They just, it just makes them crazy. And okay, whatever the reasons you might maybe have some political reason, you know, like Apple, I don't know. It's it just is proven to be a great, stable, easy to use, well-supported platform for creating media, which is what we do, which is what it's really designed for. I mean, yeah, like PCs are great for doing spreadsheets. And they're great for maybe doing some graphic work and stuff like that. Yeah. And definitely for gaming. Do not game on a Mac unless you can. But for voiceover, nothing is simpler than a Mac. You don't want all these different variables in the operating system. And Macs just are really designed for creatives like us. And that's why we virus scanners running all the time. Absolutely. No one's infected my computer. Now, of course, someone's going to attack it today. But that would end up the Monday night sleep. When exactly after the show, you had to hack my computer after the show. Please wait. Yeah. Exactly. So I think that's it for most of the questions tonight. Thanks for all of those. Again, if you want to if you want to write to us and you've got a question, let me get the right banner up there so I can show you exactly what it is you're supposed to say, write to you, write to. The guys at VOBS dot TV. How do you like that? If you write to that address and you have a question for us any time of the week, you wake up in the middle of the night going, what about this interface I've got? Write to us at the guys at VOBS TV and we'll be happy to answer it on our next show. Your head is set in like a suction cup on a glass wall. Don't make me do that again. OK. And so that's an important thing to to know. If you've got a question, you can always ask one of us. Come on. Yes. So anyway, I'm going to wrap this, you know, we should wrap it up into a nice tight little ball and get rolling here. So don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages to wrap things up and make it more important to you, because we'll be talking about you. We'll be right back here on Voice Over Body Shop. So do not go away. Yeah. Hi, this is Carlos Ellis Rocky, the voice of Brocco, and you're watching Voice Over Body Shop. Your dynamic voice over career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. There's one place where you can explore everything the voice over industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com. Whether you're just exploring a voice over career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level, stay in touch with market trends, coaching products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls. Voice Over Extra has hundreds of articles, free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed. Learn from the most respected talents, coaches and industry insiders. When you join the online sessions, bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, home studios, setup and equipment, marketing, performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one stop daily resource for voice over success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. All right, it's time for me to talk about a great product, a great website. And that is voiceactor.com. Yes, voiceactor.com. An affiliate of voiceactorwebsites.com. Now, what do they do over at voiceactor.com? They have templated websites. If you've tried to build your own website using Wix or you're trying to do things with HTML and WordPress or one of the... There's a lot to learn. We've taken that problem out of the equation because a templated website gives you all sorts of options, different designs, different ways to present your name, your demos and your contact information, which is by far the most important stuff that you can have on your website. And you can change the background picture. You can change the colors. You can add anything you want. And it's all menu driven, not code driven. And what they've been able to do is the technology has been updated so everything is just a menu, a dropdown. OK, use this color, use that. Is it simple? Yes. Do you need something complex to show that you're a great voice actor? What you want to show as a voice actor is what you sound like and how to contact you. And that's really the most important thing. Other people spend six months designing the perfect website. And in two years, it's out of date already. Or it's too elaborate. You don't want people going in there and going to all these different places. They want to see your name. They want to hear your demos and they want to know how to contact you. That's what your website is for. So go over to voiceactor.com and get yourself a website really, really quick, like in 20 minutes. So go over to voiceactor.com right now. We are the World Voices Organization, also known as Wobo. We're the not-for-profit industry association of freelance voice talent. VoiceOver is a complex entrepreneurial business. Wobo is there to promote the professional nature of voice work to the public, to those already established in their voiceover practice and to those who want to pursue voiceover as a career. Membership benefits include a supportive and creative community, a profile and demos on voiceover.biz, our searchable directory of vetted professional voice talent, our exclusive demo player for your personal website. Our mentoring program, business resources and our video library. Our annual WoboCon conference, a fun and educational weekend with other members with a chance to learn and network. Webinars and great speakers and weekly social chats with other members around the world. If your world is voiceover, make Wobo part of it. World Voices Organization. We speak for those who speak for a living. This is Ariana Ratner and you're enjoying VoiceOver Body Shop with Dan Leonard and George Wittem, VoBS.tv. All righty. Unmute, we're unmuted, aren't we? We're unmuted and we'll mix it up. I'm mixing this back up again. There we go. No, OK, is that the way you're going to be? No, we're going to switch it around again. OK, having fun with the switcher. OK, let's go back to where we usually are. OK, hey, technology. It's fascinating trying to direct this and catch a mosquito at the same time. I must say. Anyway, thanks for watching tonight. It's always fun doing this show. And Mr. Wittem, it is always a pleasure doing it with you. Thanks, it's fun. Next week, Jeff. Why can I never remember his last name? Howell. Jeff Howell will be our guest. Hey, I don't don't laugh. I'm amazed I pulled that name out of my butt, too. I'm just as amazed as you are. I'm, you know, I'm I'm taking I'm taking the lion's mane. It actually is helping a little bit. Actually, OK, good to know. Lion's mane coffee. This is a mushroom. It's a it's a it's a good kind of mushroom. It's not, you know, like one of those things that will send you off to another planet. Hey, what's wrong with that? That's true. Anyway, if you want to work with one of us, we have to remind you once again that if you want to work with me, you just got to go on over to homevoiceoverstudio.com and, you know, put put in your specimen in your in my specimen cup and for twenty five dollars. I'll give you stuff a listen or you can go over to george.the.tech. All right. And you can head over to the slash V.O.B.S. landing page to remind me reminded what our coupon code is, which is V.O.B.S. fan ten. All right. Ten percent off anything on the website. All right. Let's see here. You're still selling the Studio Bricks and the Vocal Booth. Oh, yeah, we do. We we have a Vocal Booth.com diamond. You know, the diamond shaped one for sale. Still here in actually belong to Alice Talent. Oh, it's out there. They don't need it anymore. They don't have actors come in. So they shoved it in your closet. No, it's still there. Thank goodness. It's still there. It's just over in play of this to near Marina Del Rey. And you can come check it out. Yeah, email me at george.the.tech. And we also have two Studio Bricks booths for sale that my friend, our friend, actually, our producer, Sue, is helping us get sold. And so again, just email me if you're interested in finding out more about those Studio Bricks booths that are for sale. They're there's some pretty big ones. Oh, and those are the twice as big as this. Right. Oh, wow. And then the small ones are nice, too. So anyway, we need to thank our donors of the week. And you can donate to our show by going to our page. If you're already there, it says VOBS.TV right underneath all that stuff that says donate now. Click on that and you can a dollar a month be fabulous. It all adds up. It makes it sound like public radio, but we're better than that. We give you stuff you actually need and not anything spun a certain way, except our way. But we need to thank our donors of the week, like Greg Cooper, Grace Newton, Christopher Epperson, Robert Liedem, Steve Chandler, Casey Clack, Jonathan Grant, Thomas Pinto, Greg Thomas, a doctor voice, Antland Productions, Martha Conn, 949 Designs, Sarah Borges, Philip Sapir, Brian Page, Rob Ryder, Shona Pennington-Baird, Don Griffith, Trey Moseley, Diana Birdsall, Maria Makas, and Sandra Manwheeler. Also, we need to thank our amazing sponsors like Harlan Hogan's Voiceover Essentials, Voiceover Extra, Source Elements, VeroHeroes.com, VoiceActor.com and WorldVoices.org. Wovo, the industry association of freelance voice talent. Yes, I am in charge of that right now for the next year or so. We're making lots of changes. It's going to be a great organization with some great benefits for people. So go over to world-voices.org and join up. We need to thank Mr. Jeff Holman. Where is he, Jeff Holman? There it is. Yeah, Jeff Holman and there he is. Jeff Holman. See, it's like BJ Leaderman. They have to mention it every Saturday morning on National Public Radio. But there he is. There you go. There we go. He is in all sorts of stuff. He's making. I hire him. Absolutely. Go to find him at imdb.me slash Jeff Holman. One L, one M, one N. OK, very good. Thanks for all your help in the chat room tonight. Sue Merlino, we thank you for just being Sue because she's got a real bad back problem and she could not help us out tonight. So I've been doing all the switching and doing the best I can. And of course, Lee Penny, simply for being Lee Penny. Well, that's going to do it for us this week. Thanks for tuning in. You know, voiceover is a very difficult entrepreneurial freelance business. You've got so much you've got to learn. One of the most important parts is do you sound good? But we found that if it sounds good, it is good. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whidham. And this is voiceover. Body shop or V.O.B.S. Tech talk. Tech talk, tech talk, tech talk, tech talk, tech talk. Tech talk. All righty. Have a good week, everybody. We will see you next time here at Voiceover Body Shop. OK.