We are looking into building a series of training videos for TestRail to reduce the number of 1-on-1 demos we give and to allow more customers to benefit from such training demos/videos. We plan to produce the videos ourselves and write the scripts. However, we would prefer to have a good voice over actor for the videos, as this usually makes the result much more professional.
Has anyone on this board tried this before and can you recommend a voice over actor or service?
I’ve recently used http://voicebunny.com/ for voice-over services. I was satisfied with the results.
I have personally used http://www.castingcallpro.com in the past and it was very good. You can post a job and then people send you their showreels to listen to. You get a lot of trained actors etc.
A client I used to do some work for used http://www.fiverr.com a lot for this. I am guessing the quality will vary a lot though with the price being so low, but then low risk too.
I have used fiverr, and the quality was great. Stick to the top performers, the ones with many good reviews. Even on fiverr, the good ones aren’t cheap. Most will only do a 30 second voiceover for $5. And if you want to align voice with video, you can expect to pay lot more. Around $30-40 for a minutes video.
That’s great, thanks a lot for the feedback. I think we will try VoiceBunny first and I will make sure to share our experience when we tried them.
I have used oDesk to create an explainer video and they got me the voice talent through there, which worked great (US based). Fiverr has some nice choices too, particularly the top providers.
We used Fiverr to create our voicemail greeting, which turned out great. Too bad most of our customers will never hear it because almost all just prefer email. 
Okay, it definitely took longer to complete this as expected (doesn’t it always?), but we finally got the professional voice over done for our training videos and you can hear the result here:
http://www.gurock.com/testrail/videos/introduction-projects/
We had to restart the voice over project twice and change actors/platforms as we weren’t happy with the initial results.
In general we found that VoiceBunny didn’t work well for us for longer projects (the training videos have a combined word count of ~10k). The problem is that the platform doesn’t provide any ways to exchange feedback between actors and clients once you’ve selected an actor for a project.
VoiceBunny’s workflow expects the voice actor to complete the full project first before clients can provide any feedback, which is ridiculous if the project takes a full day in the studio to complete. It would make much more sense if clients could provide feedback after some initial recordings to e.g. get the tone or pronunciation of certain parts right.
We also found that there were quite a few unprofessional actors on the platform who cannot get the basic audio quality right (e.g. multiple recordings sound completely different).
In the end we tried voices.com and it worked much better for us. The experience was much more professional and we also found the voice over actors to be better on average (based on the audition submissions we’ve received). With the final voice over actor we were able to complete the project within a couple of days with just a few rounds of smaller revisions.