It's time for tech talk number 16, but we got lots to talk about tonight we've got stuff on some microphone stuff and Other things and your questions traps not bass not bass traps Yeah, you might want to you're not gonna want a bass tournament, but you might want a bass turn We'll talk about all that and more Tonight on tech talk and we definitely want your questions, please Please please please put them in the chat room for us tonight. We love having them I'm sure you have plenty of them. So stay tuned voiceover body shop tech talk coming up right now From the outer reaches they came Bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record your voice over audio and Together from the center of the VO universe. They bring it to you now George Whidham the engineer to the VO stars of Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build set up and maintain The professional VO studios of the biggest names in VO today and you Dan Leonard the voiceover home studio master a professional voice talent with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional sounding home VO studio and Each week they allow you into their world making the complex simple Debunking the myths of what it takes to create great sounding audio Answering your questions showing you the latest and greatest in VO tech and having a dandy time doing it Welcome to voice over body shop tech talk Voice over body shop tech talk is brought to you by voice over essentials comm home of Harlan Hogan signature products source elements remote studio connections for everyone voice actor websites comm where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt VO heroes comm become a hero to your clients with award-winning voiceover training J. Michael Collins demos when quality matters and voiceover extra your daily resource for VO success and Now live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks, California Here are the guys Hey there wherever you are. I'm Dan Leonard. I'm George Whitton and this is voice over body shop or VO B s tech talk Yes, well boy a ton of stuff to talk about today We appreciate your questions if you're watching the show live throw them in the chat room And we'll be happy to answer them because we know the answers We may have varying opinions, but one way or another you're gonna get the right answer. Yeah, so Well, it's way better than Google. Yeah, say that right now but an interesting week here at the voice over body shop, you know dealing with people's studios and Lots of other stuff. Also, I need to make a little announcement. Yeah, if anybody wants help with their auditions I Will soon be offering audition direction For a small fee cool, but you got to audition for me. I'm not just you know I don't want just everybody's thing. Well, you can help, you know I want people who really know what they're doing Because directing is fun stuff, but it's vital especially because self-direction is so hard very hard So even our guests last week Eliza was asking Ella for notes right on her audition Right because getting another person's opinion sometimes is helpful. That's right. Ella's ten But she was doing a character voice of you know for a kid's show, right? So she asked him, sorry So if you get yes, we know you're here. I was hand there Anyway, so, you know email me and we can discuss that. I'll be happy to Audition directions or it's like what is who's the character? What's going on? Anyway, we got lots to talk about tonight and so what do you got in your update? Well, you know, I just I think of things that have come up lately and one of them is Playing around with your mic pickup patterns. Oh, yeah So, you know, we talk a lot about if you have a variable Yeah, we talk a lot about a lot of the mics that we talk about on the show are definitely simpler single Capsule single pattern microphones your VO1 a your AT 20 30 20 20 20 35 All of these mics are single pattern mics But if you happen to have a mic with more than one pickup pattern, which some of you may you may have a Well, I would say you 87 is the first one that comes to mind. That's of course a $3,000 mic But there are a lot of less expensive mics that have multiple patterns And one thing you can try with these mics instead of using the usual cardioid pickup is try Using a figure 8 pattern. Now, what does that do that makes the microphone behave really pretty differently? Yeah, so with cardioid, you know, it's picking up Mostly what's in front and not so much of what's behind with figure 8 It's picking up what's in front in a smaller sweet spot What's in back also in the exact same pattern in the back That's not what's interesting about it for a single voice. What's interesting is that it doesn't pick up anything around the middle tops sides and bottom right why is that useful if you're using your mic in a really small booths a really small space and You've got a big piece of glass right next to you or something like that If you put that mic in figure 8 now that big reflective thing That's making, you know, it sound like you're in a box. It's in a null zone. Yeah, it's tuned out Yeah, and so you're not so usually worried about the back the back of the mic in any good booths It's gonna be a dead. It's facing a dead wall, right? So that side of the mic is not picking up much of anything. It shouldn't be What else has happens is it gets a bigger More pronounced proximity effect and if you ever noticed if you have a chance to play around much I mean a lot of the mics we have here are not Multi-pattern if I'm playing with my ribbon mics which are definitely mics which are definitely figure almost always are figure 8 Yeah, that's right perfect perfect figure 8 in fact. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, so those they're fun to play with but you know Using a figure 8 may give your voice more depth Because sometimes I think people tend to use proximity effect too much right the mic will reach further, right? Right because the proximity effect is sort of extended out from the mic So if you have in figure 8 you don't want to work it's so close You can afford to have the mic further away and some sometimes right and if you see pictures Say from the 30s or 40s where they were using ribbon mics in the big studio Way up here like this one is here pretty high sometimes Yeah, you know and but it sounds like the distance between somebody you're actually talking to which is with the effect That you're going for and I tend to think that a lot of people overlook that when they're doing their voiceover work Is they're like I'm concentrating on the mic and I try to forget that the mic is there Yeah So if you just happen to have a mic with more than one pickup pattern give it a shot try figure 8 All of you with those mics will also have omni Usually not nearly as useful for voiceover it gets rid of all proximity effect and now makes the mic sensitive to everything in the room Which is generally bad Especially got a really good room once you have a really good room. Yeah, so there you go figure 8 Another thing about acoustics and sound in your studio is bass traps And somebody actually asked on one of the forums about bass traps saying asking basically if I put bass traps in my booth Can I save money on my booths soundproofing? So in other words the thought being that well it traps bass So if I put them in my booth won't it trap the noise from coming from the outside? No, that's not what a bass trap does it sounds confusing But it's a bass trap is designed to Control the low frequency that's inside the booth. That's coming from your own voice That's what a bass trap is doing and in voiceover. We're using them often Into the mid-range, right? Let's say we're we're not trying to stop a bass guitar from resonating really low 80 Hertz stuff We're trying to control that low low to mid-range Bass traps most of the ones you guys are gonna find like the RLX foam Ones do a really good job in that critical 100 Hertz to 120 Hertz range But that's basically what we're talking about with a bass trap Right, it's not gonna stop bass from inside from the outside coming in right now and the thing is is You have to you have to understand what it is You're listening to if you have that sound of like you sound like you're in a booth Where you get these standing waves and It doesn't sound focused. Yeah, it sounds a little boothy Yeah, that's and what bass traps do is they essentially, you know, because we're dealing with a lot of 90 degree angles Mm-hmm And what the bass traps do is they prevent the sound from bouncing off those those acute angles corner bass traps Right ones that we shove up in the corners right in the corner Yeah I mean you'll find them in bigger recording studios that are like freestanding and stuff like that Or sometimes we're hidden in the ceiling right and and and what are they for to prevent? You know those those standing waves and really building up and but in us in a small boot They can be very critical because as we know small recording booths We're not really designed originally as Recording booths they yeah while they keep sound from coming in their primary function was to keep sound from coming out So right somebody could practice their trumpet or saxophone or they weren't supposed to sound good per se They were just supposed to trap the sound and said so we're trying to make these little boxes sound good and bass traps almost always Helps so trust us on that. Yeah Another thing is It's just been you know, these are things that they come up on forums that make me think Gear failure I would love I want to create like an awesome massive database of Gear that people are using that has failed on them And so I want and what I basically I'm gonna crowdsource this a little bit I'd love to have your input you folks out there watching and listening to the show as to what's the best tool for doing this Is it a survey thing like survey monkey? Is it a Google doc? Is what would be the great way to the best way to gather this information? Because I basically want to be able to start building this thing and have it be available to everyone Right again to then go ahead and look at and say oh wow I didn't realize this particular product has been failing for a lot of people. Maybe I should avoid it Might be good to let the manufacturers know that what's going on. Yeah, I mean they may well any legit good Manufacturer they would probably like to have this data, right? They'd want to know what products that are out there are the people are having trouble with yeah I mean most of these things are their solid state They really shouldn't fail. I mean what are some things that fail on these things, you know usually power supplies power supplies Switches and dials and buttons. Yeah things that move right and switches fail Plug plugs where you know if your connectors connectors where you plug your headphones in you walk away tears that yeah Broke a really nice USB ports. Yeah anything with mechanical connections fail But when it's something mysterious inside the box That's the stuff. I'm most concerned about I mean whatever can fail I want to know but that those things that are like mysterious failures I just had to throw it away kind of thing. That's that stuff. I'm really interested How many failures do you think are really caused by firmware more than? Perhaps the actual physical Structure of a device because we know interfaces. There are certain interfaces. We keep hearing reports of well This isn't working yet. I might as not working either. It's like Is it a design flaw? Is it a firmware? Design flaw. Is it an update to another piece of software that's making it not interact properly? So it may not actually be defective That's something I should put in the in that survey like it's not just what is it that you had that failed But what is it they had that you failed and what was what did you do at the time when it failed? Did you just walk away? Did you install something what caused that thing to stop working for you? So again, if it is a firmware update, we'll know. Yeah, I haven't had a lot of clients tell me I did a firmware update and my thing is dead now and I can't use it That's been pretty unusual lately in the old days. That was a bigger problem, right? But if it's say an OS update, yeah, that seems to be driving a lot of people nuts Yeah, some things just stop working because they literally will not work on your system anymore Right. That's another kind of failure too. So there's multiple ways things can fail Yeah, so anyway, I'm curious about that if you have ideas Send an email to the guys of EOBS TV. Tell us I got an idea on how to do this. We would really really appreciate it. Yeah Let me ask one more thing about This is just general information, okay, I'm really curious how many people out there would actually Dedicate an entire suitcase, right? Roll not not like a carry-on, but a whole suitcase. You have to check and probably pay back it for to a voiceover booth Like for your for your studio that you would take with you on traveling and going to hotel How many of you would dedicate that much of your luggage like something much larger than this? Do you think that's something that's inch of interest to you? I'm curious I definitely would love to know I mean send an email to you can send an email to the guys or And let us know how many people like that sounds interesting. I'm just curious. I see I find traveling With your voice over gear to be and I and I've been I've come to this conclusion if you're many years of doing this Unless you really have a pair of golden handcuffs, right?  Auditioning shouldn't be about the quality of your audio so much as it is the quality of your read if somebody there Remember most of these guys are listening to these auditions You know on their phones, right or their laptops or something like that If you record properly using your phone and your phone only in your car Using it so you're not you know using you're not talking directly into the mic and you're using the right, you know Probably and the rules like me still rules.  So do you need to dedicate a suitcase? I used to auditioning no way Yeah, you know if you're if you have to finish a project You can't finish something on the road that you started in your own studio because it's gonna sound completely different So Would you I don't know I guess if you're you're into the technology of actually being able to do that Yeah, you would do that, but is it necessary, but that's just my perspective as a voice actor Yeah, I'm curious to find who gets around so the rest of this show is dedicated to your questions Absolutely got a bunch coming in, but we'd love to have more so send them in right away All right, and we'll get to those questions here on voiceover body shop tech talk right after these incredibly important denounce Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer that place is voiceover extra comm Whether you're just exploring a voiceover 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 Voiceover 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 casting home studio setup and equipment Marketing performance techniques and much more It's time to hit your one-stop daily resource for voiceover success sign up for a free Subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voice over audition It's all here at voiceover extra comm. That's voice over XTRA comm As a voice talent you have to have a website But what a hassle getting someone to do it for you and when they finally do a break or don't look right on mobile devices They're not built for marketing and SEO. They're expensive You have limited or no control and it takes forever to get one built and go live So what's the best way to get you online in no time? Go to voice actor websites comm like our name implies voice actor websites comm just does websites for voice actors We believe in creating fast mobile friendly responsive highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use You have full control. No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change and our upfront pricing means You know exactly what your costs are ahead of time You can get your voice over website going for as little as $700 So if you watch your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options Go to voice actor websites comm where your VO website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what Hey there, it's David H. Lawrence the 17th, and I'm very excited very happy to announce that as of today VO to go goes sponsorship with voiceover body shop is over Long-standing relationship. Bye-bye VO to go go and the reason I'm happy and excited about it Is that we're about to embark on a brand-new sponsorship arrangement with voiceover body shop with the new name of our website and our company The name is now VO heroes comm and there's a big reason for that I think that voiceover body shop and our company share a mission and that mission is not just to teach you how to do voiceover Really well, but to really help you become heroes to your clients your clients don't come to you just to do voiceover Your clients come to you to help them to save them to help them sell products and services to help them explain their company To help them narrate their audio book There's a million reasons why they come to you and it's all about making their lives spectacular And that's what we're going to do at VO heroes comm the new website is up I'd love to show it to you the heroes comm front page is basically a very modern clean look that tells you everything You need to succeed. It helps you meet our coaches What we do in three simple steps. We let you figure out if VO heroes is right for you We think it usually is if you're watching the show We have the same classes, but they've been heroically updated for VO heroes comm and again the look and feel is fantastic and The big thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to get off Facebook Because people have been telling us we don't want to be on Facebook. So now pro connect Which is our discussion group is on VO heroes comm when you want to talk about things with your Your your fellow pros in the VO heroes curriculum You'll be able to do it right on the site log in get all of the stuff that you want the workouts the classes the discussion The labs the recordings everything right there on one site clean awesome lovely and I'm very excited about our future now in a couple of weeks We're going to be launching officially with a great package great price lots of great bonuses Standby for that. You'll hear about it on voiceover body shop in the meantime Standby for more VO BS. I'm David H. Lawrence the 17th from VO heroes comm Before time began there was VO BS dot TV watch or else We'll be seeing mr. Lawrence again soon. We should be shouldn't we we should be Just got a lot of them there too. Anyway, so we love getting your questions But first we got to tell you what George and I do perhaps. This is one of the first times you've watched this show Could be or listened or listened to the show and you got to understand that George and I You know, there's a lot of guys that talk about home voiceover studios and what works for them Right, but what about for you every voice every every room is different every voice is different Everything is different every time you you need to set up a home studio It's a unique custom situation that has to work for you and not just your voice But your lifestyle, you know, how you know with what room you're gonna put it in we talked about that a couple weeks ago Why do you pick what room to do it in well? There's really only two guys that really have been doing this longer than anybody else And that's mr. Whitman myself And we don't say it Because we figure well, we're just great at what we do. We love what we do It's our passion. It's uh, it's been a quite a focus I'd have to say for the last 10 plus years. It's a niche in the world of niches But if you really need help learning about how to build a home studio or you want to build a voiceover palace We'll be happy to help Get ahold of us And if you want to talk to George about the stuff that he does because he does it full-time go over to George the dot tech or George the tech comm they both work There's ways to book me on there real time for a Consultation over the phone. I do actually make house calls as well when I'm in your area right now mainly Los Angeles obviously, but I am going to be at the end of next month in Montreal and Toronto and then South, Florida. So I'm gonna be on the road a little bit then Portland and Seattle the week after that So I'm getting around it. So if you're wondering if I'm gonna come to your area. Let me let me know That you're interested and Dan how about yourself? Well, you can find you you can find me over at homevoiceoverstudio.com Where I explain how I do what I do. I love working one-on-one with people me too. Yeah You know where it's you know again. If you're in LA, I love making house calls I actually bring a wrench with me No, I don't really do that.   It's obvious because we we've done it for so many years and we know what what's going to work best We'll save you a ton of time and a ton of bad advice online. Oh God a lot of misdirection and confusion Yeah, that's what we're gonna save you trust us. We're gonna get to the point so check us out and you know, if you go to my website, you can also click on the specimen collection cup if you've already got a studio. Let's hear what it sounds like and We can go from there. So, you know, and you offer that that service as well get a sound check Yes, so let's get into all the fabulous questions from our fabulous audience. All right, let's plow through there's a lot of them So first one's from Rosie Goodman. Yeah, I believe I've worked with Rosie over the years a couple of times Yep, I understand biodynamic DT 770 pro headphones represents a fantastic set of headphones however for those of us on a basic beer budget not champagne budget I'm seeking advice. I'm sure you can suggest a less expensive set for catching those Extra little sounds during the editing process All right. Well right now.  They're there There are good jillions of them. Thanks to the iPod world and iPhone and mobile listening There's a million of headphones out there that not necessarily are designed for studio use But still have some really good sound quality And so I would recommend Starting out doing a little bit of research online if you're looking for sub I don't know $50. There are definitely a lot of options Yeah, I will name a few models that are in the professional realm though All right anything from Audio Technica starting with the ATH M20 and up M20 M30 40 50 All of them and are really good the 20s are not quite as good as the 40s But the 40s are just about as good as the 50s and as you go up from there They just get more fancy materials right higher quality builds, but the sound quality doesn't really change Dramatically as you go up in price. I'm not a big headphone user Yeah, you know I will use earbuds if I want to listen to music at night, right? But I know in the studio I use studio monitors if you're doing a session where you know, you can't have the monitor zone I'll use headphones, but I can hear in just about anything What really is the difference between these models that people would listen for it's like well This sounds good to me, but is that the right sound? Oh, man headphones are There's so much. They're so subjective. They're they're like mics, but nothing like mics like I can put the same Mic up on 20 different people right and get and be okay But if I put that same pair of headphones on 20 different people's heads Seven of them are gonna say they hurt my ears five say they're gonna they're too bright some say they're too dark headphones are super super personalized and The price that you pay for the headphones these days doesn't really Mean a whole heck of a lot as to how you think they're gonna sound I think most important is how they feel right that you can if if you're gonna be editing in headphones You gotta you're gonna be wearing them a lot. Um, so if you're buying headphones for voiceover Acting because you have to wear them for whatever reason. Maybe you're getting a lot of direction Then get something that's a closed ear headphone. Um our friend a booth junkie Uh mike dog audio just did a couple good youtube videos about this about types of headphones and why he does wear them in the booth He actually did one about that. Yeah, um, but yeah, you don't have to spend a lot But you can do a little google little amazon searching a little reviewed reading and things like that and find some good bargains out there But uh audio technica senheiser AKG those three have been making headphones for a very long time None of them make anything that's in the junk category and some under $50 right and what rosie was asking is like It's to hear those little subtle clicks and things that you're gonna hear that with just about any headphone pretty much I mean unless you're using a pair of crystal set headphones You know, you're gonna you're gonna hear those little subtle things Especially if they're sealed over the ear headphones like these are the harlan hogan vio headphones great and they're sealed I mean you hear everything Sometimes to your detriment. I won't get into that. Don't drive one. Actually. We actually just We just did an episode of pro audio suite. Yeah about being picky.   We got more to get through here Absolutely. Um next on the list So something about cloud lifters actually a friend of susan our producer had asked about cloud lifters. What? Um, she he she said that somebody recommended a cloud lifter to solve a problem that was Completely wrong about what this thing does. So right so a cloud lifter The roger cloud that developed cloud microphones Invented this cloud lifter thing. It's been knocked off by many companies. There's many products out there They're all going to be generically called cloud lifters now. Thanks to roger cloud What they do is they just basically boost the level of a dynamic or a ribbon microphone Um, they do it by taking phantom power in and then using a very simple circuit on the inside boost that signal theoretically without creating any additional noise or Uh, any coloration to the sound it just it's a very simple electronic circuit that raises the level um So these things work generally with dynamics and ribbon mics because they don't pass phantom power um So what they do is they take your dynamic mic or ribbon mic that is not very low output Not sensitive and makes it sensitive So now if you add one of these to a studio that has a lot of background noise from computers fans air conditioning What's going to happen? Yeah, all that stuff's going to get a lot louder now because you just added 20 to 25 db Of sensitivity to said microphone. Yeah, it's not a filter. It's an amplifier. It just makes the mic louder Nothing, that's it's all it does So if you get one of these and you're trying to make your studio quieter It's not necessarily going to fix it What it can do is if you're using a really cheap interface with one of these dynamic mics and you have the gain pegged All the way is louder can go and there's a lot of hiss What these can do is get you end up with less hiss Sometimes right so you're able to run your preamp at a much lower amount of gain And sometimes they end up sounding cleaner. So yeah that noise level will drop right They're fun to use. You know, I've got my collection of ribbon mics and ones I've built and stuff Yeah, you've got to have good output on them And you know the cloud lifters which was it was really designed for that for ribbon mics because ribbon mics You know, they went out of they went out of style in the in the 50s and 60s And uh, but they were brought back because they had that nice warm analog sound to them and a lot of guitarists And recording engineers were like, let's bring them back because we can capture them more accurately using digital Uh audio it's much easier to use these mics now with our current gear than it used to be Yeah, because you used to have big preamps and right god No wonder audio sounded like garbage in the 30s. Yeah, it was tough to get sound with the gear we were using um In terms of microphones another option. So if you're looking for a mic that is a condenser mic that's very sensitive But doesn't have that sort of A little bit bright sound to it that most condenser mics have nowadays You want it to be a little smoother? Maybe your voice is a little bit bright Maybe it's a female voice and it has a very bright curve to it There is one microphone that I've recommended a few times and I found somebody mentioning this mic on facebook I named scott f win and that is the i'm sure at ksm 32 um It's a it's a nice mic for Smoothing out what would sometimes sound harsh or sibilant on other microphones Um, so that mic is a little bit different from the norm And the nice thing about is it's not crazy expensive either right? I think it's in the four to five hundred dollar range, which is in the upper range that we usually recommend Yeah, yeah, it's not crazy expensive But if you are looking for a mic when people say I'm looking for a mic for a female voice or something I guess sigh because you know we can put almost any mic on any voice and make it sound good But still this mic will maybe complement some women's voices or just shrill sharp sounding microphone uh voices and male and man or sibilant voices And smooth it out a little bit. So I mean, I'm generally of the opinion And this is just from experience and being a voice actor and like I've used different mics and we've done mic shootouts here and people say oh dance sounds great as this or it sounds better on that one Why is there a varying opinion about because everybody hears differently?  Yeah with maybe slight little different colorations But those are things that can be adjusted in post by producers by little Little tiny tweaks if people are like, all right, we gotta add more bass to the you know It's not like that and I think again people overthink What what these parameters are and that it's not that critical if you're sibilant It may not be the mic. It may not even be the recording. It may be what you're listening to it Oh boy, that happens a lot That happens a lot. Yeah, or or you're talking Into the wrong side of the mic which Which which we get a lot. Why does it sound so uh, why does it hollow and hollow all the bottom turn the mic around? It's a one sided mic. Yeah, we get that one a lot. All right. Carl Gillette, um from v obs dot tv Hello, all I have a tech question. My apologies if this has been covered my current Everything's been covered, but we're happy to re-answer this My current processing chain consists of isotope mouth de-click Some eq which is a high pass filter and a small notch at about 340 hertz It's sort of that nasally range. Um gentle compression and normalizing, but we'll be adding a gate to that Oof talk about the gate. Yeah, what is the best order for processing chain? Or are there always any always always always or never never never rules? Okay, if it depends on who you ask many would say never never never process anything But if you're trying to smooth out the sound that you're giving out for an audition trying to correct for a room issue or something like that Sequencing this is the way I do it. Basically. I recommend if you're going to use a mouth de-clicker do that while you're editing So you're going to edit you're going to de-click then edit because you want to hear the result of the de-clicker While you're editing because the de-clicker will screw stuff up. It will either Remove something it should it should not like a t or a k and you'll have a e a d or a t A t will turn into a d Is that right something like the dialect calls for that it takes a way that you know The sharp attack of words right or it will miss things that you want to remove so you got to do that first Then from there on, you know, sometimes I'll do normalization if I think the audio level needs to be corrected Um, then I'll do a high pass filter compression Now gating Um If you're using gate as a generalized term, okay I don't recommend gating because basically what a gait is is the sound will just disappear when you're not talking Right, it's just like you've turned the mic on off on off Sounds really unnatural and unsmooth and sounds like you chop the audio up By editing if it's set wrong if it's set wrong There's there's there's ways that you can use a gait An expander is really the more of the geekier term But it's yeah what we really want to talk about as an expander what that does is When you're not speaking the level of the background noise drops somewhat right doesn't go Total silence So then I would have that in the chain Then I use eq to shape a little bit a little bit brighter a little darker blah blah blah And then lastly I'll use a limiter Um, and I'm using that mainly just to make the level back up. I'm doing an audiobook I'm using it to slam the meters To get these crazy numbers that audiobook producers want Um, but generally that's the sequence that I personally use them But this is there is no always always never never it's at all in processing ever right It's completely dependent on the situation the voice the room the mic everything else And there's really no one size fits all secret sauce to this. Oh, no. No, I mean, you know, I Do I believe in processing if necessary? Yeah, you know, if somebody sends me some audio and I'm like, well, you know, you could adjust this just a little bit or something Most of these changes most of these processes Are very very minute Changes because if you're you're trying to overemphasize something One someone's gonna notice it and you don't you don't want that Uh, if by chance you're in a noisy place, you know, again, we were talking about If you're throwing out a audition out there and you're on the road and it's not your regular place It's okay to try some of these things As long as they know that you're not in your regular studio And don't try to fool right Yeah, don't don't think about this technology as the way that you're gonna get voice overwork the way you're gonna get voice overwork is taking acting classes and improv classes and Voice acting classes and learning how to be a good voice actor because the technology will take care of itself If you keep to the basic rules that we teach people about, you know, mic technique and acoustics And and setting proper levels, which nobody seems to understand You know, but we we try that's why that's why we're here on voiceover body shop to teach you what these things are about and Don't overthink this stuff and you know because that question I I cringe every time I see a question like that because it's like Like who have you been listening to and like well you can use this this makes me sound great Well, you're not you and you don't hire you right so that's that's been coming up a lot more in conversation with my clients So you don't hire you right so don't be saying that makes me sound great. Oh boy. Who cares? If it doesn't sound great to somebody else as we were saying before about microphones Well, somebody thinks I sound great on that mic and there's this one. No, he sounds better on that Well, that That creates the the answer right there. Yeah Next up Jonathan Orara said what makes the universal audio interfaces so great for vo These are the universal audio Apollo right this comes in arrow. Yeah. Are the virtual prams worth that cost? This kind of dovetails to what we were talking about yeah the You can get a fantastic sounding voiceover with a hundred dollar mic pram like a steinberg ur12 a scarlet 2i solo Yeah, absolutely You can get these really great sounding recordings with these tools So what you're buying when you buy an Apollo or something like that is a lot more complexity in terms of the signal routing Where things can go in and out of the computer from this app back to that app You're also buying processing and you're buying mic preamp emulation um That matters at a certain level I think if you've been doing this a really long time and you're doing a lot of live direct reads Live record remote record reads like source connect and that sort of thing Then you are definitely sometime there's no People buy them because they're really cool And I get they get to hire me to play around with their sound and that's all kind of fun But the people that really need it are the ones doing very fast turnaround stuff. It's almost always affiliates Uh promo and things where they have to be very quick and and it's got to be right on the other end because they're doing it over Yeah, it's being captured on the end and the other end and it's going it things are in a very rapid turnaround That's where processing front end like that recording through the processor into the computer Is really advanced. It's an advantage at that time and it were necessary sometimes Yeah, but I don't know is it or if the upgrade I have no idea. I cannot answer that question I can't answer that question all of this stuff every last piece of gear That we talk about Except for a couple like the herlin hogan voice optimized headphones or the vo1a or one of these None of this stuff was designed for voiceover. It was all designed for producing music The apollo series the the universal audio stuff when we've been to their booth at nam and at NAB and it's like it's amazing what you can do with it If you are a musician or or a producer or a sound designer like a good friend, uncle roy You're not you're in your closet Or you're in a booth and you're you know in your living room or wherever it is that you do this All of this stuff is not relevant to How good can you read copy because all the equipment in the world's not going to help you if you can't read your Way out of a paper bag Which i'd like to see um anyway uh Most of this stuff it's overkill for what you need now again if it's is it cool. Yeah, does it sound better? than another interface That's kind of objective and like you were saying you can get a really good recording You know I use a very simple interface. I hardly use any processing at all if at all When you listen when you talk to the sales reps, you know, they say the new mark two version Oh, yeah, gotta get that one the old one The converters are so much better and all this stuff That maybe matters if you're retracting 75 mics for an orchestra and the detail from all the mics starts to Nothing to the voice over. Oh man. You don't you don't need to worry about that Okay, moving on we've ranted enough. I think about that He also had a question about headset mics that are good enough for voiceover Especially for audiobooks and long form narration dan at one time you were Demoing some headset mics from dpa. Dpa. Yes. Dana. Did she try recording any vo with them? I tried a little bit We used it on the show one night and it sounded great on the show. It's a headset mic uh You had I think it's one of those things that You don't buy it because it'll be good for that You use it because you know how to use it and what to use it for Having it is not the same as the knowledge of how to I mean you you buy a special kind of paintbrush When you're painting you to do a very specific thing. Yeah, uh for audiobooks You know a good one will sound good Uh, but a bad one will sound like that sounds like a headset mic. It can be they can be thin And noisy so not lack lacking a lot of low end richness and very uh, not not clean Right. Unless you're spending I'm saying north of three or four hundred dollars. Yeah, minimum. Yeah, the dpa's were really expensive Eight eight nine hundred dollars. Yeah, but they were really built to do what what that is. Yeah, and uh, yes I mean the short answer is yes. There are headset mics that I could say for sure would be usable for Definitely audiobooks. Yeah, some voiceover work for sure. Um, people are doing, um Where they call it mo cap stuff.  Right just or or the hood they're wearing. Yeah, there'll be a mic right here Um, that is that the sound quality is very good when used correctly, but uh, um, generally they're just The ones that are good enough are still very expensive. So unless you have a really good reason Probably not worth the investment and finally a not question from our good buddy Fred north at rimes with orange He says, uh, you know, I take One week to attend a trips often my income is largely from retainer clients So I can't be off as much as I travel If I know I have a walk-in closet where I'm going I take my porta booth mic and interface if not I pack a suitcase with my pvc frame and moving blankets It works very well for my business and travel happens It works for fred But fred knows how to use it I'm assuming he needs it. Yeah, because he says he has retainer clients. So for him, it's a necessity. Um He will actually he's he will actually bring a suit That's amazing. I haven't seen anybody doing that yet fred. So that's really fascinating to To hear that but for some people they don't want to just they don't want to improvise when they get there They want to have something that They know is going to work. So that's half the fun of doing it though is the challenge of you know, where's the duvet? Shopping for some people that's fun and for other people's it's a nightmare. It's a pure nightmare. Yes. So anyway Well, and on that note, then thanks for that fred. We appreciate that. Um slipping it under the wire Okay, we got time for one more And I love the screen name. So let's make sure this is legit Yeah, which which means the The yeah, okay. Yeah All right, we either means he's a right a proctologist or so we have a proctologist who says hey guys How would you prioritize spending on equipment for a novice? Novice no kidding. Yeah against the following A mic sound treatment headphones and doll in other words, if you're just starting and on a fixed budget Where would you put your money first to last? Well, that's a good question. Yeah, definitely. Okay. Let's let's see acting classes If you've got a let's say you have $3,000. Okay, let's say some of you are starting with $1,000 800 that better go to classes and acting Um sound treatment for sure like acoustics is absolutely way more important than the microphone you're using sound of the room Is yeah far more important. That is definitely where you start with your money. Then you can get your microphone Headphones not so necessary as we've said on the show before And dot well nowadays there are several options that are totally scot-free audacity Oh ocean audio Wave pad there's a couple decent free ones out there.  There's your prioritization of your budget. So Run with that and uh, good luck. Yeah, with your rectal examinations My friend my mom wanted me to be a proctologist says a whole lot about my mom Yeah, you can specialize in this Anyway, um, there we go. That's it. I think that's that's a lot of stuff Oh, he's a riot talking with you about this stuff That's yeah, we did already. Well, we'll be right back and uh, we'll wrap things up right after this Well, hello there I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voiced announcer guy on your new orientation training for snapchat. Were you? This is virgin radio. Well, okay. We're not that innocent. There's genes for wearing and there's genes for working Dickies because I ain't here to look pretty She's a champion of progressive values a leader for california and a voice for america. It's smart It's a phone. It's a smart phone, but it's so much more It's a the files are ready. Don't forget to pick up the eggs. What time is hockey practice? Check out this song It's the end of the road for rig When hope is lost the i8 from bmw Who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish Hey, it's j michael collins Bet you think i'm gonna try and sell you a demo now, uh, I think they speak for themselves But I will give you my email. It's j michael at jmc voiceover dot com Now if dan will stop waxing this mustache for a minute, we'll get back to the show This is the time of the show where we get to talk about one of our wonderful sponsors source elements Those are the creators of source connect That is a software that voice acting pros are being demanded to have in their home studios By the commercial studios of the world How do I know this? Well, I've set up software for everybody on every platform and in every scenario you can imagine And this is the one that people are being requested to get It's a standalone application doesn't run on a google chrome browser So you have a lot more stability involved And this software has been tried and true tested improved the whole nine for well over 10 years now So if you really want to be establishing a business and voiceover that works with the top studios in the world Top agents that kind of thing make sure you have source connect locked and loaded in your studio Absolutely important. Go get a 15 day free trial at source dash elements dot com 15 day free trial You don't need an eye lock little usb dungley thing to get set up with source connect standard right away So go give it a try and tell them we sent you we'll be right back right after this Hey, it's time to talk about our good friend harlan hogan and voice over essentials And tonight voice over essentials announces a promo code to get a discount on their porta booths like this one here Now what with material labor and shipping cost increases? Not to mention tariffs and the straw that broke the camel's back a big hike in storage cost They had to raise prices on the booths by just a little bit Just ten dollars on the porta booth plus and twenty dollars on the porta booth pro But our wonderful v obs viewers can still get either of their booths for their original price for the next two weeks You should go to of course voice over essentials dot com easy to get there at the bottom of our page Just click the picture of harlan there and put either of their booths in their shopping cart and Enter the promo code booths 24 in the promo code field and click the submit promo code button That'll get you ten dollars off the plus and twenty dollars off for the pro Get a porta booth now at the original price at voiceover essentials dot com. Thanks a lot harlan This is the latin lover narrator from jane the virgin anthony mendez and you're enjoying dan and george on the voice of our body shop Alrighty and ella is with us as she is with you all summer her last show of the summer She heads back to seattle on saturday. We're lucky you where it actually rains every now and again Next week on this show we will have a very special guest. I won't mention any names But uh, we'll see it's it's it's a secret it is and uh, but we will reveal that when the time comes Uh, who are our donors of the week? We've got ant land productions. Let me read that one Christy burns michelle blanker Sarah broages, broages. Yeah, philips appear Tray Tray speaks For you for you. Tray speaks for you Read that one Tom pinto and patty gibbons. Those are our donations donors of the week Who says our our education system isn't teaching our kids to read she's doing all right We get her to read once in a while. All right. Uh, hey show us your booths Uh, we've got um tom johnson's booth here. It's right. It's not his booth Is it it's his closet his closet booth? You know, I mean you can see his close working voice actor booth actually looks like you know I'm actually setting up a closet for a client and it's like well.  I'm saving myself all sorts of effort So we got to go get a clothes bar for in there There it is. That's what it looks like and now we know what he wears Uh Let's see what else. Uh, make sure if you want to work with george, you go over to george the tech dot com And dan's available over at home voiceover studio dot com That's we'll get those in there. There we go. All right now. We caught her off guard I don't have a rapid fire already Let's see here. Uh, you want to be in our studio and watch the show live We're here every other monday, uh doing the show live and uh, if you're in the greater los angeles area Join us Because as you can see there's plenty of room Uh, and write to us at the guys at the obs dot tv and uh, if we're we got space for you like we do tonight Uh, come join us and enjoy the vintage microphone and vintage radio collection Yes, which is ever growing the new zenith am fm from 1950 that i found nothing is says mid-century modern The 1950 and it's handsome in the corner and it sounds great I mean i had to get a lube it up a little bit and clean the you know the contacts and suddenly came to life That's i didn't think it was gonna work, but there it is Uh, we need to thank our sponsors, of course, uh harlan hogan's voiceover essentials voiceover extra Source elements vo heroes dot com voice actor websites dot com And j michael colin's demos. All right. It's like radio lab. Good job colin's Collins yep j michael stop All right. Those are our sponsors Yes, and dan and the dan and marcy lendard foundation for the betterment of live web casting and uh, of course Are are in the chat room mike tonight mike marlino did a fabulous job in the chat room But even better than that is his mom Uh, so marlino who is our technical director and she gets it all done and we really appreciate that Uh, well that's gonna do it for us this week. Uh, join us next week Got any questions for us? Send them to us at the guys at v obs dot tv as you can hear we love answering your voice over home studio questions So, uh, if we do we we will do that for you. Uh, that's gonna do it for us this week. I'm dan lendard I'm george wittem I'm elah wittem and this is voiceover body shop or vo bs and remember if it sounds good It is good. Take care guys. Good night everybody. Bye


I swear to God I'm really about to just start sweating these games the hell that's what I'm about to do it for you Just taking my knees and running out of bounds and ending games All right chat you had to win a fight with plenty as Aaron Rodgers here Let's go you had to win a fight verse one member in the chat Who are you picking you had to win a fight one member of the chat your life depending on who are you picking them? When to beat that fight man, he's not a small. He's not a small male.  I don't know y'all. Yo, that's not an easy task Y'all taking it a little bit to y'all taking Maddie a little too lightly to be honest. He'll lean on somebody and like Here go TC talking about fighting women. See that's why you can't ask the chat questions like that Y'all pick an agent. Oh, yeah, they all are actually nasty humans, bro What has happened to my chat?  I like this defense against us. Come on boys. It's like we can do better on Come on tight offset. No, I mean you just trusted that he would get open there. Huh? You just trusted it Well, how do we get no pressure right here, dude? Like hot like dog.  Oh, why? Bro like that three man shouldn't be that bad Man, we just can pound it right now on the run airing down a bro like oh, I gotta sell out to the run more I really do both games just getting absolutely pounded by the run See like why like his three people are killing me the boys are bagged man.  All right Come on man in life right now God ah, I thought I could get such a better pass right there Short side he's gonna run to the purpose on a way faster fighting for my life right now Don't click on it. You get a pic.  Like if you were to look there earlier, they'll pick right there boys We need that we she needs that oh nicely done nicely done nicely done Just can't get down the field low-key like bouncing on zone for the boys, of course like what is my life? I'm playing right now Let's figure it out right now, dude Haynes all right Haynes ain't like dog. What bro get Haynes the bro. Hey, why is Haynes selling my lately dog? I should I don't know bro. I gotta go for the pic. Why would I not go for a pic right there? Dude, I can't lie like when I rush three I might as well not rush three. I guess it is actually brutal Dude Haynes is getting smoked boys Is Haynes slow? Dude, this mother art monk is getting absolutely strapped dude. I absolutely strapped, dude Absolutely strapped, bro. Oh my god. Just don't got a guard deep Sad right now, dude.  There's just not open.  There's just nothing deep nothing. I can go deep Sir ski my sir ski Should go for it. You should go for it. No smart. I gotta find a dot here boys. I really do It's like they're just barely open. There we go. Nice Gotta look for the one that's going to the wider side of the field so that purple zone doesn't come into play He actually guarded the one that had six people on like my running bag Just has to be a better a bigger factor in this passing game He just has to be just stop that dog and they're cooked all these kids are cook that they can't There you go tight in drag Like I'm just the body Bro, like what the is going on with my run defense right now dog. Oh my god Pick pick pick artists. There you go. That's why you put it on your user. Let's go man. Dumbass GG's But then again, it's just not Like don't like dog. I'm telling you like the Cooper cup not getting over there my running back kind of open But he got could have been a pick six to lose the game, dude.  How are you nowhere near this dude, bro? dog, it's just it's just no way that we just all got beat on that I Like joking me, dude.    Oh Man Now we catch a pick bro. Just tackle the run. Please somebody please Like stop running at play like that place. So add thank God knock out.  Oh, thank you, bro. Just stop somebody. Please try to stop the run God Jesus Christ, man double team.   I just got stuck like that's my man Yo, it's really I can't lie. That's why I want this back, bro I want the red zone threat, bro. That's making double everybody. I didn't want to blurt that. I just wasn't ready I should have ran a dollar did you did you do juice?


Thanks, Lily. Yeah, yeah, yeah, camera, that's right. Welcome CSVConf, I'm very excited to be here. We had some great conversations with the Lightning Talks yesterday. And I'd love to continue that here today. I'm going to be talking about frictionless data processing in the wild. And to better understand where we encounter wild data, I need to first explain a little bit about who we are. We are BICO-DEMO, which stands for the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office. And we're part of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, but we're primarily funded by the National Science Foundation. Scientists, primarily NSF scientists, submit data to us and we provide data access to the public. And here is where we first encounter the wild data. When it moves from its native habitat from the scientist to us. The keen eyeed among you may already notice some things about these data, such as merge cells and date ranges in a cell, multiple data tables that should be combined as one table, some special proprietary codes that aren't necessarily clear. So we work really closely with the scientists who collect and submit the data to us to get it into a format that is conducive to reusing the data, interoperable formats. So there's a lot of reasons that we receive the data the way we do. We ask that it all be fully processed and quality assessed and controlled. That doesn't always happen, or at least to the extent that we need. So again, that's a really close conversation and working with the scientists to get into good shape. Scientists are really focused on the collection and analysis of their data and publishing, but they don't always think about everything that needs to happen to it to make it reusable. So that's where we help them with those pain points. So we have interoperable formats and we present the metadata in a way that's easily understood on a dataset landing page along with the data access. And we also provide some other formats of the metadata like ISO, JSON, XML. So why do we process data? And it's to be fair. It's some principles that we really think are very important to make sure the data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. I'm introducing this slide early because I'm gonna touch on all these principles during my presentation because they're really the driving factors behind why we do a lot of what we do. So when we're processing, what do we need to do to be fair? So a lot of it comes down to making sure the data have certain things in them, such as spatial temporal context. So when we get the data, we make sure that it can correctly be placed in space and time and has the context of where it fits in on a global scale. And we also have a lot of the things we do during data processing are to correct quality issues such as inconsistent formatting, like various date time formats within a column, corrupt data characters, data gaps, invalid species names, and sometimes there's just typos. And again, big emphasis on reformatting for usability and also making sure it's not in a proprietary format so anyone can have access and use the data. So back to the frictionless part. What is frictionless data? And that's an initiative out of Open Knowledge Foundation. Open Knowledge people raise your hands. There's a few of them in the crowd. So yeah, round of applause. So if you need any targeted specific questions, you should talk to them. But it's a collection of software and specifications that allow publication, transport, and consumption of data. And there's big emphasis on being platform agnostic for interoperability and also big emphasis on reducing the time to research. So time from data to insight. There's a lot of different components to frictionless data. I'm just gonna be talking about one specific component that has to do with data processing called data package pipelines. And why were we so attracted to data package pipelines? For a few reasons. One is that allowed us the ability to standardize data processing steps. When we do operations like joins, modify the values in a column, change columns, add, remove, any number of things. But it's a way to track those changes in a more structured way. And actually the provenance is generated automatically as we build these pipelines. On the right you see an example of the pipeline spec.yaml and that's the actual encoding of the processing pipeline. So there's different steps, processing steps that are within a processing workflow pipeline. And again, this is extremely attractive to us because it also allows very easy reproducibility. You can run the pipelines as often as you want. It includes provenance information to be able to fully reproduce and go from the input to output and you can build on pipelines and modify it as you need to. And one other key thing was day package pipelines allowed us the flexibility to add some custom processors to do specific tasks that we needed to do in our data management office. And we did that writing custom processors in Python. So we made a web application that is a user interface on top of the pipelines. So it's a React app that communicates with a server running a Python Flask app which actually executes the pipelines that are built and returns the data. So you'll see here on the left is an example of a workflow that's a pipeline with the individual processing steps and called out is just one of the steps and the configuration is shown for find and replace. And at the bottom you see this is how actually that step looks in the pipeline specification YAML file. So why did we feel the need to make this user interface and write our own custom processors and build upon data package pipelines? One of the reasons is we wanted to give our data managers a more immersive experience. So when you're constructing the pipelines it's not an isolation that you actually are able to visualize the pipeline as you're constructing it and see how the changes you're making affect the final output. And also to calculate statistics that's very important for us for looking at some different quality control metrics as we're making sure we don't mess anything up when we're processing the data. A key area of why we wanted to make the user interface was to reduce the time it took to process the data sets. So we wanted to avoid handwriting either the pipeline specs and running them on command line or doing custom scripts in Python using the pipelines. So because we've written custom processors we're able to integrate those easier into provenance capture in the steps and it reduces day set processing time because we don't have to hand write them every time. Also reducing time due to syntax errors just little mistakes that can happen to anyone but when you have a user interface you can avoid those and then reducing repetitive tasks. So another key area of why we are building this tool is because we wanted to improve our provenance capture by adding custom metadata and you'll see later on that we have a way of capturing both statistics and specific processing notes along with each step. We wanted to remove one barrier that was programming ability so we wanted to open up the data package pipeline creation to users that didn't necessarily have, weren't Python whizzes or had as much facility with the command line. And then the last key area of why we wanted to build on data package pipelines was as I mentioned to include custom processors. So you'll see in this pipeline here on the left there are many steps, some of them like find and replace are right out of the box data package pipelines processors but we also in our tool added a lot of the custom processors to do specific things such as convert date time formats and deal with different time zone issues that occur which is a lot of the time and in things like converting to decimal degrees and just things we just do commonly. So we have our custom processors that we have in our pocket for reuse. This is an example of building a pipeline. So here I'm starting with just a load step and I'm looking at a data table. This data set, this is a good example of the level of communication we have with the scientists and how that helps our final end product. So this data set came with date and time, time zone. That was a question. So we found out that it is a local time and what UTC offset it was. So we were able to at the end of this pipeline also add a date time in ISO 8601 in UTC time. So here I'm adding a second step called round fields. You see there's the difference. And again, the visualization just helps us ensure that we're doing the right thing and everything is working properly. So this is an example of how we configure that step and the time saving just benefits of user interface in general where you can select multiple fields and apply a rounding to multiple fields at once, those kind of things. And then I have a lot of different steps here that we had to do to get this data in shape. But at the end of the pipeline, so here we have our date, time stamp in UTC. We preserve the date and time local in this case because the scientists, that's how they like to analyze their data. And again, we want to reduce the time to research so they don't have to back calculate their local time. Again, if that's how they like to do it, but we do want to still be able to place this in global space and time for reusability. So we compromise by having both in this case. And you'll see there's also lat-lawn here now that was in the metadata for this submission. It wasn't actually in the data, but for reuse again, we added that as columns. This is another example of configuration of a pipeline. So you'll see this is to set data types. The user selects a resource, quote-unquote, which is a tabular data set. And the set types processor guesses the type and infers it. And then the user has the ability to either override that type or supply formats as needed. And again, on the left bottom, you'll see this is actually how it's encoded in the pipeline specification. And that's a huge time saver if you don't have to write that out and we just click some buttons and override the inferred types. So back to full pipeline at the end when it's run. And you can actually run it at any individual step to see the state at that step. But at the end, you get the ability to download the output, three different critical output files. So pipeline spec.yaml, which I've mentioned is the encoding of the pipeline. Data package.json is the full description of the data itself, including all the types we've specified, the source and all their provenance information. And finally, the CTD, which stands for conductivity, temperature and depth in this case, CSV file, which is the result of the whole pipeline. So there's the yaml, the description of the data, the data package.json, and the actual data file itself. And back going back to FAIR, which is our driver for all of this. Really, the pipelines is helping us with all the different components of FAIR, the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reproducibility. But specifically, I wanted to highlight the pipelines in helping us with reproducibility. Again, as I mentioned, you can rerun the pipelines and all the provenance is tracked with that. An interoperability highlighting the data package.json, which provides the description of the data. And a key component that's gonna help us with the findability and interoperability are our statistics calculations. So we have a package that we've integrated into our web application that allows us to calculate basic statistics and also some other specific things like list of unique values and things like that and actually add that into the data package.json. And we hope to be able to use that in data discoverability. So capturing date, time ranges and spatial bounding boxes and things like that. So this is on the left of the screenshot of our current data set landing page. And already, as I mentioned, we produce metadata in various formats that are consumable. But if we plan to integrate these frictionless tools and outputs to better support the fair principles, specifically the reproducibility and interoperability. So where are we going with all this? We plan to release an open source community version of our web application. The user interface we have now is a prototype and we're developing it. And we plan to also release our custom processors and statistics calculator. We want to be able to integrate the pipelines with data. So the users can access it from our data management landing pages and they can either run the pipelines on their own or build upon existing pipelines we've created. Another component of the frictionless universe that is very attractive to us that we plan to explore further is validation of the data and QAQC using a component of frictionless called good tables. And we have been working very closely with open knowledge people and providing feedback on how the tools are working for us and areas we think that it can be enhanced to better serve the needs of science. So we've had a good communication on GitHub and conference calls and it's good to see people in faces in person after talking with them digitally. But yeah, so we're actually have already started doing pull requests back to the package pipelines that have been merged. So that's a success for us. And yeah, it's all to better support good science. So that's our primary objective. And of course I'm gonna end with a message. The practicality of the scientists is to see it's not always the first thing they think of, but hopefully we can educate scientists through this process so the next time they go collect data they'll think about that next time. Thank you.


So I'll be talking about how to garble RAM programs in the parallel RAM model, and this is done in a fully black box way, depending only on warming functions. So this is a joint work with Raphael Strafsky, I'm Steve, and what I'll be doing is I'll just be, you know, first motivating the problem, and then giving you some reviews and definitions and what we achieve. I'll go into the main construction, then give you a flavor of the proof, and finally conclude. So just to motivate, and I think we've seen some of this already in the previous two talks, well, what about computing on encrypted data? Right, if Alice here is a client and she wants to compute some data, some store some data on some server that Bob holds, you know, she wants the server to compute some function f of x, but she doesn't want necessarily the server to learn what her input is, what her function is, what her data is, and this is done on, you know, perhaps a really big, big server, right? So this server can have lots of cores, can execute lots of things in parallel, multi-threaded programs, this is looking at things in the parallel RAM model. Okay, so what can we do? Right, and so sort of the overall motivation is to do secure RAM computation, namely that, you know, the secure RAM computation allows you to have persistent memory, you know, you can store things, you can retrieve things, it stays there. There is a potentially exponential gap, for example, you've got to do binary search, it's a lot quicker than if you wanted to do, using just a big circuit on everything, it could be input dependent running time, and furthermore, it's also a natural model for programs. Okay, so the first sort of generic compiler was suggested by Astropsy and Shub, and there has been a long line of work on secure RAM computation. Interactive secure RAM computation was, for example, first implemented in this work by Gordon et al, and, you know, there's been a long line of work of secure RAM computation in the interactive model, right? But what about the non-interactive model? Well, so in this work, we're gonna look at this in the non-interactive model, and also make it parallelizable, and it makes only use of a black box, use of some underlying warming functions and PRF, and well, the reason why black box is attractive, I mean, in addition to black box is the new black, is that if you wanted to implement this using, let's say AES, you can leverage hardware AES, or other hardware techniques that makes only a black box you don't need to actually have the underlying code. Okay, so that's the sort of overall subject of my talk, and it's gonna be, there's the RAM program, it's black box, it's parallel, and we're going to garble it. Okay, so just to give you a couple of quick reviews, and you've seen this in the previous you talked, so I'll just go over this real quick. Garbled circuits is a method of taking a circuit, garbling it into some garbled format, C prime, you can take an input, you can garble that into some garbled input X prime, and then you can have this evaluation algorithm, right? And the evaluation algorithm, the correctness property says that if you evaluate the garbled circuit on the garbled input, you should get the same as you would get on the clear circuit, and privacy states that you should learn nothing else beyond this. Okay, what about oblivious RAM, right? I mean, this is the OT and ORAM session, so I should talk to you a little bit about oblivious RAM and why it's important in this context, right? Oblivious RAM helps you hide the access pattern of the program, and so if you actually wanted to make sure that the server doesn't actually learn anything about your computation, right? You wanna hide the fact that, for example, your program is perhaps taking this secret if branch as opposed to this else branch, right? Because this might be dependent on some secret data, right? So oblivious RAM was introduced by Goldreich and Ostrowski, and there's been many, many subsequent works in various different models, and basically what it offers you is given a RAM program P, you can compile it into a functionally equivalent program P prime that has oblivious access pattern. And because we're looking at parallel garbled RAM, what about parallel oblivious RAM? So in the parallel RAM model, there's been a couple of works, so at TCC last year, Boyle Chang and Pass and Chen Lin and Tesaro talked about introducing parallel oblivious RAM, and then later last year at Azure Crypt, documents led at all further introduced, you know, looking at parallel RAM and the network RAM model and some outcome coming work by Kartik and John also sort of looks at improving the efficiency of parallel oblivious RAM. So, you know, given that there is such nice research on parallel oblivious RAM, let's see how to do it non-interactively, right? So in the garbled RAM world, right? So just the plain RAM model, not necessarily parallel, this was introduced in a work with Rafi at Yerker 2013. There's been a lot of subsequent works on this area, both in the realm where you're only assuming minimal assumptions, you know, from domain functions or PRFs, and also interesting, you know, relations to compactness, reusability and IO. And last year at TCC, Boyle Chang and Pass also introduced the notion of parallel garbled RAM, and they managed to achieve this using IBE, and this was done where you actually have to have the code of IBE running inside your circuits. So, what we're gonna try to do in this talk is we're gonna show how to get parallel garbled RAM using only, you know, black box use of any PRF. Okay, so, you know, what is parallel garbled RAM? What can you do with it? Well, this is what it looks like. It looks very similar to garbled circuits, except now you have some parallel RAM program P. You have some input I. You have some data that you wanna also garbled D. And there are algorithms that can help you garble all of these. And again, you want this correctness property where the garbled evaluation matches the plain evaluation, and you also wanna have this security property which says that you can actually simulate, okay? And I'm gonna actually give you the weaker definition as well, which is that the simulator not only does it know the security parameter, the size of the database, and the running times of the programs, but it also has the, I mean, and of course the outputs of the programs, but it also has the memory access, right? So for full security, you don't wanna give it the memory access, but just to make things similar for this talk, let's pretend that the simulator can actually have access to memory access, and then in the full construction, we actually deny this from the simulator. But the simulator should, in terms of security, be able to generate a simulated garbled database, garbled programs, garbled inputs that's indistinguishable from the real one. Okay, so now that I've given you the definition, let me go ahead and state our main theorem, which is that assuming the existence of one way function, there exists a fully black box, so it's black box both in the construction and in the proof. Construction of a M processor garbled PRAM scheme for arbitrary M processor PRAM program. So if you have a parallel program that uses M processors, you can have a garbled version of it that also uses M processors. And with polylog overhead in the size of the database, size of the input, running time, the number of processors, and we get this sort of a multiplicative overhead in the size of the database, you also increase the size of the input and the running time. Well, and unfortunately, it's not exactly compact in the garbled program size, the garbled program size is actually gonna be proportional to the running time. I mean, we would love to have a solution which is actually proportional to the size of the program as opposed to the running time of the program, but this is what we get in our construction. And later on, I'll talk about the open problem of how do we actually get this succinctly. Okay, so now let me go ahead and jump into the main construction. Okay, so the main construction overview is let's start with an arbitrary PRM program and let's show how to garble it, right? What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually apply some sort of oblivious parallel RAM compiler to it first that provides uniform access pattern. And I put a uniform star there because we don't actually need it to be actually, actually uniform, but as long as the access pattern can be bounded using turnoff bounds, it's all okay. So you do this compiler and you get a uniform access oblivious PRM program. And then what do you do next? Well, then we do this garbled tree strategy and I'll talk to you about what this is in just a bit. And using this garbled tree strategy, we can get a parallel garbled RAM, right? So this is where a lot of the magic is hiding and so that's what I'll be focused on for the rest of the talk. Okay, so as a starting point, let's actually start with this sort of garbled tree idea and this was used in a couple of previous papers and actually this has been quite useful. So both in the previous talk and also in Nico's talk yesterday, you saw the usefulness of having like a tree of garbled circuits and then you evaluate down one of these paths, right? And it also has a lot of interesting and unexpected connections. Let's say for example to IBE. Okay, so let's review what this garbled tree construction really looks like and I'll give you the flavor of it that was introduced in this GLL work. Okay, so in this work, you had basically in order to do garbled RAM, this is not garbled parallel RAM, this is just garbled RAM, you have a bunch of garbled CPU steps and you also have garbled memory but it's organized in this tree fashion, right? It's organized in this tree fashion where each node contains a whole bunch of garbled circuits and these garbled circuits can talk to each other, right? So basically each circuit in a node can speak the language of other circuits in this node as well as a couple of the child circuits, right? So if you were to do this just one time, right? If you only wanted to garbled one CPU step, right? You would just have a tree and there would be one circuit for each node and you would just go down one path and then that would be the end of it, right? But if you have multiple CPU steps, you would need, A, you need some way to link these different multiple CPU steps together and B, you wanna make sure that, well, because you don't know a priori which path you're gonna take, you're gonna have to stuff enough of these circuits into each node so that you don't ever run out, right? So this is called the overflow problem, right? And so basically if you wanna look at the combinatorics of this, you wanna basically connect the ife parent to more or less be able to speak to about half of I, right? Because if you've already consumed I circuits here, you expect half the time you go left and half the time you go right, right? Because if you have uniform access pattern, half the time you go left, half the time you go right. So you expect to need to speak to about your roughly I over truth child, but because when you throw balls into bins, it doesn't always land exactly like this way. You need to have a little buffer of delta to make sure that you don't run out. Okay, so that's sort of the overall sort of combinatorial construction of this couple tree and let's sort of see how we actually go down a path, right? And so the circuit logic is actually really, really simple. If I have some location that I wanna read like from here, well what I do is I say, all right, well this says, all right, I wanna read this location, right? So it just has the key for the root and then the memory location is encoded inside as part of the input to the garbled circuit and all this garbled circuit does is just says, all right, well do I need to go left or do I need to go right? So I just look at the ith bit of the input, right? So the root looks at the first bit of the input, right? And if it's zero, it go left and if it's one, I go right and so on and so forth. So the logic of these circuits are actually quite simple. You just figure out do I need to go left or right, pack up the keys I need to pack up and pass down to the next circuit. Okay, so that's an overview of the garbled RAM scheme of GLO, what about paralyzing this, right? One thing we can do is just let's just make all the circuits like wider, right? If we, instead of reading one memory location, we wanna read M memory location within one step, let's make everything just wider, right? So here's M CPU circuits and they wanna read M locations within one single step. So just widen the circuits and carefully use turnoff bound to size it off and that idea more or less works and I'll go into the sort of detail of like, where the subtly comes in and why doesn't this exactly work? Okay, so each CPU has a uniformly round location that you might wanna read. These locations might still have collisions but existing works actually show how you can actually guarantee M unique locations reading when you're doing this read. Okay, so here are the details of doing this in parallel. The root circuit will have sort of inputs for M keys, right? So M is the number of parallel CPUs you have and it's gonna route basically where each of these keys go, right? And you'd expect half of them to go left and you expect half of them to go right and that's great, right? I mean, so, well, let's first do like the stupidest thing possible, right? Which is just widen every single circuit by a factor of M, right? That certainly will guarantee that you'll have enough circuit space to hold all the keys but I mean, that's not great, right? Because this will actually increase the overall memory size to M times N when we actually want like a poly log dependency, right? So this is too much. Okay, so how about we widen each circuit by the expected number of keys that will pass by, right? Because if you're doing this reading left and right, half of them will go left, half of them will go right and that more or less works. I mean, that more or less gets you what you want except there is the subtle interference with the circuit consumption rate of the underlying GLL scheme. So the issue here is that when the number of parallel processors is comparable to log N, to poly log N, you're gonna be consuming a lot of these lower circuits and in the original GLL construction, it wasn't exactly prepared to actually handle all of these sort of parallel consumptions. Okay, so we need to actually be a little bit careful here and actually use techniques from occupancy and these concentration bounds to actually designate a special level where we actually switch the strategy, right? So we can't use this exact strategy where we just, all right, the first circuit is of size M, these are size M over two, these are M over four and so on, that's straight up, if you just do it like that, that doesn't exactly work out in terms of the analysis, but if you actually introduce this special level, then things will work out. Okay, so let's see how we do this sort of carefully. Okay, choosing a level. So what kind of level do I want? And basically I want a level such that within a single parallel step that when you're doing these accesses, no more than B access paths will go through a single node at that level, right? So let's say it's this level, right? What's the probability that more than capital B of these access paths will go through exactly this node, right? That's some probability, I can bound this probability and I want that probability to be negligible. And obviously if I choose my level to be like the lowest level then of course, right? I mean, it's gonna be zero because at the lowest level, there's only gonna be one at most one, right? But I don't want to choose a lowest level. I actually wanna choose a level that's still high enough that there are still less than M nodes where M is the number of parallel processors. And by doing the sort of splitting, the higher levels and the lower levels, this exactly handles the subtle issue where M is small versus M is large compared to this log N factor. Okay, so now that we have this level, what do we do? Right, near the leaves, so I can tell you what happens near the leaves. Well, near the leaves, we're just gonna basically instantiate one copy of GLO per subtree. And what about above the level B? Well, above the level B, we're gonna do that strategy that we were talking about earlier, right? Where the root has M, you know, size M keys and then the next level has M over two keys and so on and so forth, right? So basically you expect, you know, M over two the I keys to appear there.  Basically, you just add in these additional factors and this can guarantee that the probability that you're gonna have too many CPUs trying to read down one path to be also negligible, right? So these are the techniques that we're gonna use to avoid this overflow problem. Okay, so putting it all together, how do we perform one of these parallel reads? Near the top, you activate all paths in parallel down to the calculated level, right?  And this goes all the way until this calculated level. And then below this level, you're gonna actually run sequentially in parallel, right?  So let's say for example, I wanna read these four locations, right? These two are within this subtree. These two are within this subtree. And so I'm just gonna do these sequentially in the sense that within each subtree, it's sequential, right? So first I'm gonna read this one and first I'm gonna read this one. But because there are less than M subtrees, I can do each subtree in parallel. Okay, so this is my first parallel sequential read and the second one is gonna be this other one, right? So this other one is gonna read these other two locations. Again, it's in parallel across the subtrees but within each subtree it's sequential. Okay, so if you do that, then we can actually get all the keys and still not run to the overflow problem and everything's great. Okay, so let's take a look at how this actually sort of works out and I'll give you a flavor of the proof sketch. Okay, so building the simulator. The simulator for the full security gets only the output, the running time of any arbitrary RAM program. And the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna just feed it through the oblivious parallel RAM simulator, right? And that's gonna give us a simulated memory access output and running time. And now that we have a simulated memory access, we can actually feed this into the unprotected memory access simulator. And that's exactly what we're gonna do. So we're gonna actually perform, if you actually can sort of go into the details and look into the paper, we're gonna perform a sequence of hybrids similar to GLO where we replace the garbled circuits on the tree with simulated ones. Okay, so you walk through the sequence of hybrids and you get the simulated garbled tree, you get a simulated memory and now everything's simulated and it's indistinguishable from the real sort of garbled program and database. Okay, well, the key technical point here is what about the overflow problem, right? And this is sort of the main combinatorial challenge that we had to deal with in this paper. And sort of how do we choose the bounding level B and how do we analyze what's the actual overhead, right? Because we still want low overhead, but at the same time we need to choose this level B. And spoiler alert, we choose B to be roughly log the number of processors over C, some constant. Okay, so let me just give you a sketch of what the combinatorics will look like. So why is the overhead polylog, right? Because we promised polylog overhead, so let's see what it is. On the top half, right, you activate all paths in parallel down to level B. And if you let WI represent the circuit size, you get this equation and this equation basically comes out of estimating what these WIs are. The WIs, they're basically M keys times this factor followed by this additive key buffer factor, right? And if you bound that, you get this bound where this is either the two times B times epsilon times this factor. And if you choose B correctly and if you choose epsilon correctly, you can actually take this and show that this is in fact good. And then what about the ones below this level? Again, right, because each subtree is being activated in parallel, well, what is this, right? I mean, it's just two to the B plus one times capital B, which is the number of actual paths you need to evaluate times the cost of GLO. But because we chose this level B such that the number of nodes in that level is less than M, you can just assign one processor to do one of these parallel executions. Okay, great. So why won't the paths overflow the circuits? Well, I mean, I sort of gave you a flavor of that during the talk, but if you want to look at the details, just check out the paper. And with that, I'll conclude. So what are the open problems here, right? One great open problem is, how do you get succinctness in the terms of program length, right? So there are a long line of works on succinctness and reusability and IO, and these are from stronger assumptions. Can we get this from weaker assumptions? That's one question. And like I said, this is one of the things you can get from stronger assumptions, but what are some other things you can get from stronger assumptions, right? So if you assume the computational Diffie-Helmholtz assumption, and you combine the garbled tree idea, you can get IB like we saw in Nico's talk yesterday. And what about other distributed models of RAM computation, right? PRAM is not the only one. There's many other models. What about those? Okay, and just to wrap up, in the talk you saw a way to garbled RAM programs in a black box parallel way, and this allows for non-interactive secure RAM computation in parallel. All right, thanks.