Hi! I've recorded VO for 6 episodes of a local access cable show for a friend of mine...
http://www.myspace.com/videobot
The setup was 4 voice actors in one room, so there was a lot of bleed through all the mics. In post, I manually cut out the dead spaces between each actors spoken parts. We also recorded 1 or 2 minutes of room sound with all mics open and total silence (except for any ambient noise) to fill in between spoken lines. Overall, it came out sounding pretty good for my first attempt at this sort of thing, but a lot of time was involved in cutting out the dead air on each mic/track.
Is there a VST plugin gate that would work to kill the bleed through on the open mics between speach? I pulled up one of the un-edited files and tried Floorfish on it, but couldn't find a way to keep it from "fading in" the spoken part while still keeping out the bleed through. I'm suspecting hardware gates on each mic might be the best bet, but if there is a good free or cheap VST gate that would be better and cheaper! We're going to be recording more episodes about 2 weeks from now, so I want to see what my options are before I plunk down more money.
As for hardware gates, I really haven't looked into that yet, but I'm about to go research this aspect. There are 4 mics involved, so I'd need 4 gate channels I suppose. I was thinking the cheapest route here would be the Alesis 3630 comp/gate, but I don't know if the gating it accomplishes would be any better or worse than a plugin like Floorfish. I'd hate to blow $200 and find out I could have done it as well for free. Thanks for any ideas! ANDY