I guess as disclaimers on radio commercials get longer and longer they have to be read faster and faster. Are advertisers required to hire announcers that can actually talk that fast, or can they have somebody read it at normal speed and then speed it up via the wonderful world of computers? My guess is they have to find a person to actually speak it that fast because otherwise the speed could be manipulated beyond comprehension but still be legal, kind of like how they fold and scroll credits so you can’t even read them, but they’re there. Or if they can speed it up with a computer, is there a words-per-second velocity that can’t be violated?
I have done this for several videos i made, just for comedic value.
We always recorded at normal speed, to make sure everything is said correctly. Then we sped it up and lowered the gain so the voice still sounds normal.
Guess i cant speak for actual professionals who do this though.
Radio advertising is sold in specific amounts of time (:15 - :60 seconds, usually). So the ad has to fit that limitation. From here (in VA, but I assume most states have a similar reg):
But of course “understandable speed and volume level” is not defined. A lot can be done in production to make the vocal fit the time sold. Most ads have breaths/pauses taken out in production, and yes you absolutely can speed up the vocal with software, yet manipulate it so it sounds human/normal.
Coincidentally I just heard a commercial last night with a disclaimer that had clearly been sped up - the words were audibly clipped as if someone had edited out the tenths of a second of dead air between each word. It struck me because I’d never heard one where the manipulation was as obvious.
The human ear is easily capable of understanding speech played faster than most people can speak. I had blind friends in college who taped lectures, and to study, would play them back at 2x or faster (though with the pitch normalized so it didn’t sound like Professor Minnie Mouse.) It sounded very much like the commercial I heard. Putting a WPM limit seems a little restrictive.
I sat in on a recording session for Geico ads a few years back. Every couple of takes, the director would ask the talent to shave a very precise amount off the time, and the next take would come in within a tenth of a second of the target.
Granted, they weren’t doing the speed-talk disclaimers, but it just illustrates the control voice-over artists have.
I always thought that it was more an issue of having to include all the ‘special features’ of whatever product they were selling (services, cars, whatever) and had to cram all the disclaimers in at the end to fit within the 15 or 30 second spot they had purchased.
Well the credits aren’t so much put there for legal reasons as for career reasons for the credited parties. If anyone wants to fact-check your resume in the biz, they can just IMDB the projects anyway.
I’ve seen TV ads where the “fine print” is a page of dense small writing flashed for about one second. I wonder how that would stand up legally. Even if you recorded and froze the frame I doubt if normal TV quality is good enough to read it all.
On a related note, I have always wondered if you could dilute those disclaimers with jokes (“Professional CGI shark on a closed playground”) so people wouldn’t care about the real ones “Might cause blindness and nasal bleeding”.
Well, it’s likely that they also practiced ahead of time, before they got to the studio, so they know how to fit what the client expects to be a thirty-second read into thirty seconds. (As one announcer told me, “Thirty seconds does not mean 29, 28, or 31. It means 30, period.”) Typically, the talent will get the copy well ahead of time so he or she has time to practice. But you’re partly right. I did some announcing some years ago, and you do have to be able to speed up to shave off a second or two if you’re asked. Similarly, you have to be able to slow down at times too.
As for the OP, my experience is that practiced announcers can speak amazingly fast, and clearly too. There were a few times I had to speak at a rate that I simply wouldn’t ever use unless there was a lot to cram into the available time. Although the technology in the studio was state-of-the-art, the engineer didn’t use it to speed up anything; I just spoke quickly. To be fair, though, I never had to speak as quickly as the announcer does on some of the ads I’ve heard.
Tom Adams, too.