May 7th, 2009
Two useful services for making voice-over for screencast or video
Recently, we needed a presentational video for an affiliated service that allows health conscious people to track their diabetes, blood pressure, or body weight records and to share the results.
The main difficulty of the project was a voice-over for the video. We needed a clear, calm and native English speech but there are no native English speaking members in our team.
The two services helped us in this matter.
EditAvenue.com is a proofreading and editing service marketplace that helped us to proofread the draft of the written script for the voice-over.
If you are non-native English speaker then through EditAvenue you can access hundreds of professional editors who can correct and refine your written communication. The prices start from about $4 per page (300 words). A relatively small task may be accomplished likely in the same or next day even if you don’t pay for express delivery service.
Once we’ve received the edited script we started to look for a talent to record a voice-over for our demo. That was a problem until I spotted a link and recommendation for Voices.com on JoS boards. That’s was amazingly helpful service!
Voices.com is another marketplace where you can hire a voice artist for almost any type of job - from commercials and presentations, to cartoons and audio books. For presentations, the rates are about $300 per 5 minutes of speech.
After we had posted a job description we received about a hundred of responses with sample records in several hours. We selected a talent, made the deposit and received the final audio files by the end of the day. That was really, really cool.
I highly recommend the above services to everyone who needs to create impressive presentations for his\her products.
Here you can see the final video with the voice-over.
Interesting article - although the rate for voice overs seems expensive to me. How much talent does it really take to provide a voice to a script?
Also my editing service for non-native English speakers is more affordable at $8 for 1000 words.
> How much talent does it really take to provide a voice to a script?
For our 750 word script we received about 150 bids from talents with cost ranging from approximately $50 to $600. Finally, we get 6 minutes of speech for $275. The turnover was ~6 hours.
The benefits of using the services are:
- speed of response and deliveries
- easy of payment
- wide choice (especially important for voice-over)
- ESCROW service
- infrastructure\usability\engine
Nick: Have you ever wondered to offer your services though similar marketplaces?