Having now been in the podcasting space for most of four years, I at one point looked into how "voiceover" work was done with traditional studios. To get the highest audio quality, the traditional route has been to use actual ISDN lines here in North America. This seemed to me an area that could be ideal for VoIP to disrupt... and it appears that in at least one case it's done exactly that.
News out of the Sundance Film Festival is this:
PARK CITY, Utah - Philip Seymour Hoffman literally phoned in his voice performance for tonight's opener at the Sundance Film Festival, the animated feature "Mary and Max.""The cost of flying any big-name actor to Australia would be extreme," explained director Adam Elliot, who is making his feature debut after his Oscar-winning animated short "Harvie Krumpet."
"We didn't have a lot of money, and it's not like we could have flown him in on economy. So we piped him in for two sessions, in New York and London, with high-quality sound that makes him sound like he was in the studio with us in Australia. I was quite surprised at how good the technology is."
And at the end we learn what the technology was:
"It sounds weird, but I've never met him in the flesh," says Elliot. "We could see him on Skype when he was recording his part all by himself. He was so professional."
Pretty cool to see...
P.S. And yes, there are probably many other examples of this out there, but this is the first one that I've personally learned of.
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