Vivendi and Activision to merge, Marc Cashman opens One-on-One Voice Coaching, New Voice Casting Podcast, Adam Fox answers your podmail and a special announcement about the 2nd Annual Voicey Awards.
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Vivendi, Activision, Marc Cashman, Voice Casting, Podcast, Stephanie Ciccarelli, Adam Fox
Transcript of Vox Talk #50
Male: Episode 50
You’re listening To VOX Talk, the voice over industry’s number one podcast brought to you by Voices.com. It’s about voice acting, growing your business, and sharing your knowledge. VOX Talk is a show that you can be a part of. Getting involved is both fun and rewarding. It’s time for this week’s episode of VOX Talk with your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Hi there and welcome to episode 50 of VOX Talk. This week, you’ll hear about a video game company merger and new way to get some voice coaching and hear some podmail answered courtesy of Adam Fox. But first, into the Loop.
Male: The Loop, informing you of news and current voice over events.
Dan Gorham: Our top story as published by the Hollywood Reporter is a move that will likely revise the video game landscape. Vivendi has agreed to pay $9.8 billion to merge it’s Vivendi Games unit with Activision Inc. and take a controlling stake in the new firm, which will be called Activision Blizzard.
According to sources, the new gaming giant would house such hit franchises as World of Warcraft, the world’s biggest massively multiplayer online role-playing game with more than 9.3 million subscribers, also, Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk, and it will match or overtake market leader Electronic Arts in key performance measures.
To learn more, go to hollywoodreporter.com. You can also find that linked directly to the story in the VOX Talk show notes.
Moving right along.
Los Angeles-based voice actor and prominent voice over coach Marc Cashman has recently announced his new one-on-one voice coaching services. After much demand and increasing requests, Marc will be teaching students privately through telecoaching and e-mail.
Want to know more? You can call Marc at area code (661) 222-9300 or e-mail him at [email protected].
To wrap up, I’d like to announce a new podcast produced by Voices.com called Voice Casting. The podcast takes the concept of voice casting and spins it on its head, turning this intimidating craft from an art into a science for first time customers of voice over services. Now, anybody can find the perfect voice for their project and sit in the casting director’s chair comfortably and confidently.
If you’d like to listen to the first several episodes, you can go to podcasts.voices.com/voicecasting or find the podcast in the iTunes Podcast Directory.
Male: The Biz, helping you grow your voice over business.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Hi there and welcome to the Biz! Briefly, I’d like to turn your attention to the VOX Daily blog where South member, Lin Parkin of Voices.com has compiled several wonderful articles about the unions. If you’ve ever wondered about the unions such as you know, AFTRA, SAG, ACTRA, Equity, any of those, just pop over to VOX Daily and you’ll find an article on each of those unions as well as some other topics that you’d likely be interested in.
So, why don’t you head over, go to blogs.voices.com/voxdaily. Be sure to subscribe to get daily updates and to stay in the loop. You don’t want to miss any of these.
Male: Tech Talk, walking you through the technological landscape.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: All right folks, get ready. Hang on to your hat. Here comes Adam Fox with yet another wonderful Tech Talk segment.
Male: You’re listening to another DefiantDigital podcast for Voices.com. Here’s your host, Adam Fox.
Adam Fox: Hey, folks! Welcome to another edition of the cast. I hope everybody who celebrated holidays last week had a great holiday and had an opportunity to spend time with family and friends. That’s always a wonderful, wonderful thing and I wish it for everyone.
We’re going to cover a piece of podmail today that brought up a very interesting point and it’s something that we should definitely discuss. This piece of podmail is from John (Speck) and he writes in his letter about an experience he had working out of his home studio and having his computer gave him a full and total crash and how nice it was for him to be able to jump in to the studio before he had to fly out on to business and be able to cut that commercial and met the deadline.
So, I’m just going to take a piece of this e-mail and so it might sound a little out of context but here we go.
In the e-mail he also writes, “Then on Monday, my computer gives me the blue screen of death, total crash. I rebuilt it but you know how long that takes to rebuild Windows, drivers, etc. I thought what would I have done had this happen Saturday morning when I had to catch a plane and wouldn’t be able to have served my client.”
He doesn’t want any of his clients obviously to not be able to count on him and of course that’s a common thing that all of us want. We want to be able to be as reliable and as rock solid as possible at all times for our clients. So, what was his remedy for this?
Well, he bought a second computer and that’s a wonderful thing to be able to do, I’ll tell you because you know, so many times we – running this businesses out of our homes, we’ll be using our computers for audio recording, billing, tracking, advertising, you know so many other things that we have a tendency to use these machines for and that’s you know, every time you had another piece of software in there, it definitely increases your risk of having a crash.
It’s a good solution because that’s you know, pretty much what I do. I run my business, the audio recording and pretty much all the studio business that happens works on one machine and then all my other software, billing, and advertising and things like that run off the notebook. And that’s definitely something that I learned a while ago as well, having a crash and having to rebuild everything and having this one machine be so over taxed that you know, you can definitely increase your risk of problems as well as it really decreases the performance of the machine that you’re using at the same time.
Because let’s look at that, so you have your audio software on your machine but you also have on that C drive that you’re going to be keeping most of your audio programs on for scratched disc purposes and things that we’ve covered in the past, while you also on that same C drive have all your program files.
So, if you have Art programs and you’ve got internet stuff and you’ve got you know, accounting software and your word processing and your Microsoft Office and all of your applications maybe for website building and all those other things that you’re going to put on the machine are all on the C drive.
And that will substantially slow down your performance in an audio setting because the quicker it can read and write from that drive then the less it has to search even with optimizing the drive as often as you possibly can, the last stuff that’s on there, the better performance you’re going to get out of your audio machine.
Not to mention that you’re also going to have more space for scratched disc, which is obviously also going to increase your performance and so many other things that go into running the studio off of a computer-based environment.
Well thanks, John. That was an excellent letter and definitely a viable topic for the show. So, if you have any questions or comments, you can certainly shoot those this way. Great topic or discussion for this week, how about your set up? How’s your studio set up? Do you have one machine? Or are you running on two, maybe a notebook and a desktop. Maybe you’re in fortunate circumstances and you’ve got you know, a couple of desktops running high speed stuff. You maybe got in a bay studio and maybe in your bay studio that’s where you run your internet stuff. Maybe you got a small network in your house, tell us. Let us know what your set up is and we’ll definitely share that here on the cast.
And of course, the cards and letters that you have been sending in on the topics for the Listener Show have definitely been heard and understood. And please continue to send them because we only have one topic left. Well, we may have two but I’m waiting on somebody to agree to take on one of the topics, hint, hint, nudge, nudge and hopefully if that person will be able to do something like that, we’re looking into a very full-featured show and would certainly love to get that last topic finished up and start putting this piece together.
I’m already starting to get the segments from folks. This is going to be a great show and this is your podcast so I am encouraging everyone out there to send in your ideas and your wishes to be involved.
Stephanie and David and the Voices.com staff here have done so much. I mean, it’s been made abundantly clear that input is well-received and appreciated and you know like we keep saying, this is your podcast. So, anything you want to contribute that’s just, that’s the way that this thing gets moving and this is the way that it keeps fresh and interesting and it’s new ideas, new submissions, and we’re always welcoming those here on the cast.
So, if you’d like to talk about this week’s topic or get in touch with me regarding The Best Top show, please do so. You can hit me right here at the Voices.com website at AdamFox.Voices.com or at the DefiantDigital site at DefiantDigital.com.
I’m having a lot of fun over there with the new blog. It’s really great and love to see the involvement, would love to see it grow and have more involvement and you know, this is your environment. Take advantage of it. This is a great community and it’s a way to keep things moving and fresh and definitely with new ideas as we’ve been saying.
So, get involve! Take the time. Send that e-mail. Send those ideas. Send me your studio set up so we’ll get them into the next week’s show. All right? And thanks so much for listening today, folks. And great opportunity to get involve. Keep sending those cards and letters. We love hearing them. This is your cast.
And stay safe with your families. We’re starting to get a temperature drop out there. We’re starting to see some block ice. I know in my area, we’re starting to see the accidents arise so please be careful when you’re traveling around, doing your holiday traveling. And love your families and we’ll see you very soon next week and on to the Listener Show here in a couple of weeks. It’s going to be a great one for the best of. Until then, bye for now.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Thank you, Adam. That topic, any time of the year is quite relevant. In fact, I had my own blue screen of death this week and it was not fun. Also, I’d like to say and Adam didn’t mention this, but it was Adam’s birthday this week. December 4th was Adam Fox’s birthday. So, you can always go to AdamFox.Voices.com or of course DefiantDigital.com, leave a comment, say happy birthday. It will be a belated one at this point but you know, just let him know that you appreciate him and hope that he had a great day.
Male: VOX Box, sharing your audio feedback.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: This week in the VOX Box, I’d like to talk a little bit about the Voicey Awards. Now, the Voicey Awards are coming up and the nominations will open on January 1, 2008. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Voicey Awards, the Voicey Awards honor professional voice actors for their talents and contributions to the voice over industry over the past year.
We’re working really hard to get the website up for you and are adding more categories as was hinted on in the VOX Daily blog. As I mentioned, there will be more to follow and nominations will open January 1, 2008.
Well, that’s all for this week’s show. I want to thank you again for listening and if you have any feedback on any of the topics that you hear on VOX Talk, you can always send me an e-mail, [email protected] and if you would rather just shoot me an MP3, that’s perfectly fine too. All you need to do is record that comment that you would have otherwise sent in the e-mail and send that off to me and we can air it here on the show if you like.
I want to thank you for staying subscribed and if you haven’t yet subscribed to VOX Talk, you can always do so by going to iTunes, that’s the podcast directory there by Apple. If you don’t have iTunes, you can go to Apple.com/itunes and you can download the appropriate version for your computer.
That’s all for this week. We’ll talk to you later. Bye for now.
Links from today’s show:
Vivendi to merge with Activision
Voice Casting Podcast
Stephanie Ciccarelli
Adam Fox
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