Directing a remote ADR or voiceover session over Zoom

Remote voice sessions work. We run them regularly — a director in one city, talent in another, us in the studio in Florence — and the results go to air. But they work because of a specific setup, not by opening Zoom and pressing record.

The thing to understand first: Zoom is designed to destroy audio. Everything that makes it good for meetings — noise suppression, automatic gain, aggressive compression, packet-loss concealment — is actively hostile to a voice recording. Zoom is the talkback, never the recorder.

The two-stream principle

Every remote session we run separates two things that a meeting app deliberately merges:

• The direction stream — Zoom. Low quality is fine. It carries the conversation, the playback of reference, the "one more, warmer this time."
• The audio stream — recorded locally, at the talent's end, at full quality, and delivered afterwards.

This is usually called a double-ender. The talent records into their own DAW or recorder while the session runs over Zoom. We direct against the laggy, compressed Zoom feed; we edit against the clean local files. Nobody ever tries to make one stream do both jobs.

If a project genuinely cannot do a double-ender — talent with no recording setup, a very short pickup — then Source-Connect, Cleanfeed or a similar purpose-built link is the fallback, not Zoom's own recording.

Configuring Zoom so direction is usable

Even as a talkback, default Zoom settings make direction harder than it needs to be. In Settings → Audio → Advanced, for everyone on the call:

• Original Sound for Musicians: ON. This is the master switch. It disables the processing chain below and must be enabled per-meeting too — check the toggle is lit in the top-left of the meeting window, not just in settings.
• Echo cancellation: Off (or Auto if the room is difficult).
• Background noise suppression: Off. Left on, it will mistake a soft consonant or a held breath for noise and gate it — which is precisely the detail a director is listening for.
• High-fidelity music mode: ON where bandwidth allows.
• Automatically adjust microphone volume: OFF. Auto-gain will ride the performance and hide level problems you need to hear.

Have the talent use headphones, always. Without them, their monitor path feeds back into their mic and the echo canceller starts chewing on the performance.

What we send talent before the session

A short checklist, in advance, prevents almost every problem we have ever hit:

1. Wired internet if possible. Wi-Fi is acceptable; a phone hotspot is a last resort.
2. Record locally at 48 kHz / 24-bit, mono, one file per take or one continuous roll — agreed in advance.
3. Peaks around -12 dBFS, no limiting, no compression, no noise reduction on the recording. We would rather have the raw file.
4. 30 seconds of room tone at the top of the session. This is not optional — it is what makes edits invisible later.
5. Two devices where possible: Zoom on a laptop or phone, recording on the interface. Keeps the talkback from touching the record path.
6. Phones on airplane mode, notifications off, fridge and air conditioning off for the duration.
7. A clap or a slate at the start of each roll if we will need to sync against picture.

Running the ADR session itself

For ADR specifically, the talent needs picture and beeps, and Zoom's screen share is not good enough to perform against — the frame rate and the audio delay will not line up.

The approach that works: send the talent the cue video with beeps baked in ahead of the session, so it plays back locally on their machine. They perform against their own local playback, in sync, and Zoom carries only our voices. We then sync the returned files against our own picture, using the slate.

Keep cues short. Give the line number, the beep count, and one adjustment at a time — remote latency makes talking over a performance far more disruptive than it is in the room. Expect half a second or more of round-trip delay and build your directing rhythm around it: let the take finish, then speak.

After the session

Collect the local files before anyone hangs up. A session that ends with "I'll send them over later" is a session where something arrives in the wrong format, at the wrong sample rate, or not at all. We check one file on the call — sample rate, level, room tone present — and only then close the meeting.

We direct remote ADR and voiceover sessions for clients across Europe and provide the editing, cleanup and mastering on the way out. If you have a session coming up, write to info@soundniccolo.com and tell us the format and the deadline.