This old dog is having to learn new tricks. Remember when your parents asked you how to send an SMS? Or when they needed you to teach them how fill out a form online, or access their Google drive? Yup, that’s me now.
I literally just tried recording a video in Tik Tok. I embarked on this life changing event when I saw a question somewhere – someone asked how one does a voiceover on Tik Tok. So, I set up my account and recorded a silly video which is best never seen by anyone, not even me ever again or I might feel sick.
You have the option to either speak while recording the video if you’re talking to camera (presenting, pretty much) or stay silent and just focus on the actions. Similarly, if you’re doing say, a cooking video where you’re featuring ingredients and then demonstrating cooking steps, you don’t need to say anything while recording the video.
Once you’ve recorded your video, down at the bottom right of the screen you tap on the little pink tick icon. You’ll then see a vertical menu bar on the far right of the screen. Scroll almost all the way down and you’ll see an icon that says ‘Audio Editing’. Click that and you can start recording on-the-fly while watching the video.
The only thing about doing the VO in the Tik Tok app is that you can’t do little edits in between so you should more or less know what you want to say – best to have some pointers. I’d prefer to watch and sort of do a running commentary instead of reading a script so that the voiceover syncs with the actions. If you must have a script, it should be in point form so you can refer to it quickly during the voiceover recording, while watching the videos. You can then choose to either have the voiceover run over the original audio recorded with the video (nice if you have typical kitchen sounds or the rustling of a paper bag if you’re doing an unboxing), or check the ‘replace original sound with recording’ bullet way down at the bottom to completely eliminate the original audio.
You can then add background music and adjust its level as well as that of the voiceover (by clicking the ‘volume’ icon way down at the bottom of the vertical menu bar at the far right) so they sound good together and one doesn’t drown the other out.
You could connect a USB mic if you’d like (you’ll need an adaptor – micro USB to USB for Android or lighting to USB-3 camera adaptor for iPhone) or one of those lapel mics so the voiceover is of better quality. Phone mics are notoriously poor in quality but if that’s all you’ve got, just make sure you’re not speaking too close into the mic or you could get some distortions.
It’s quite simple if you ask me. If this old dog can figure it out, anyone can.
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