3 Ways to Lower Voice-Over & Dubbing Pick-Up Session Costs

Pick-ups are the bane of multilingual voice-over recording projects. But content can require updates after recording, clients can make script changes, and in-country managers can ask for tweaks. In short, sometimes there’s just no way to avoid a pick-up session. Fortunately, there are a couple things you can do to minimize their cost and disruption to a project’s timeline.

This post will list 3 tips that may save you time and money the next time you have pick-ups.

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What are voice-over pick-ups – and why are they so bad?

Pick-ups – often called PU’s – are recordings that take place after an initial voice-over or video dubbing session has been completed. They’re always done with the initial recording talents, and the content is a short addition or a change to the original text. These additions or changes are almost always unplanned, so that the project’s budget and timeline take a hit.

We won’t go into more detail on how to avoid pick-ups – for that information, check out our previous post, The dreaded voiceover pick-up, and how to avoid it. Rather, we’ll deal with what you can do once you’re past the point-of-no-return – and it looks like you have to record pick-ups.

Let’s jump right in.

1. Find a way to make the change via post-production audio editing.

This is usually the best way to avoid pick-up costs – to correct your audio by having a post-production audio engineer edit it. For example, if the phrase you need to re-record is elsewhere in your audio, you may be able to cut it in. Same for words that appear elsewhere in your VO files.

You can even do this for common elements in a language, like the endings -ada and -ado in Spanish voiceover. These endings often denote gender in adjectives – like in the adjective reparada/reparado (“repaired”) – and are easy to get wrong in a script translation. However, the endings are also very common in Spanish, and can sometimes be cut in from another word.

Of course, to pull this off you need a professional audio editor with foreign-language expertise, someone who knows how to cut voice or dialogue audio and make it sound seamless. This is easier said than done. You also need professional audio editing software like with ProTools HD, which is installed in both recording studios at JBI. Finally, you need a little luck. Sometimes a cut just won’t fit – the tone won’t match, the section you’re trying to fix is elided with another word, or you just don’t have the content to cut in. But if the cut does work, it can be a very cost-effective alternative to a full pick-up session.

2. Consolidate pick-ups for multiple voice talents.

This is a particularly useful option on video games localization, in which you can have a cast of 60 to 100 talents, each with dozens of characters assigned to them – and often many more. Because minor characters often have only one or two lines, pick-ups for them can be very costly – especially if you have to bring in several talents to re-record just minor characters. In those cases, it makes sense to consolidate pick-ups of minor characters to talents who have a larger scope to re-record – as long as these talents can change their voices enough so that the performance quality doesn’t go down, and the game is still believable.

Remember, though, that this option will require some casting services, which take time and may involve cost. Likewise, this really only works for small parts, and for characters that don’t interact with many others in the game. In short – this option requires a little luck as well.

3. Wait for the next recording round – if you can.

If you have a follow-on recording coming up, it may make sense to wait until then to record your pick-ups. After all, adding a few words to an existing session is almost always more cost-effective than scheduling a stand-alone pick-up session. But you must remember two things.

First, the session coming up has to be with the talent with whom you’d need to record the pick-ups. Second, this only works if your release can be delayed, or if you can move up the next round of sessions. That means this is not a good option for administrative, compliance, or e-Learning courses, or any other corporate content that has legal consequences or which affects employee and user safety.

But it’s often a good option for on-going projects, like online how-to videos, educational series, or even web series or TV shows. In fact, some producers of recurring content schedule follow-on sessions right before the previous video’s release, to catch any last-minute changes. If you have an on-going project, this kind of scheduling can help you minimize potential pick-up costs, as well as build a little buffer into your timelines.

Finalized voice-over script & Pronunciation Guidelines

While these tips are great if you have to record pick-ups, nothing beats making sure you don’t have them at all. After all, even if you can avoid the costs associated with them, pick-ups can impact your timeline and delay the release of your audio or video localization project. For this reason, best practice is to make sure that your scripts have been finalized and approved by all stakeholders before translation, and that the localized scripts get approval both internally and in-country if at all possible. This requires a significant amount of work up-front, but it makes all the difference in multimedia localization. Thorough script and translation reviews, coupled with JBI’s Pronunciation Guidelines, are the best way to keep foreign-language audio and dubbing projects on schedule and on budget – and to avoid pick-ups.