Jeff Evans
Craig's approach sounds great but still involves clips being split.  And the moment you split clips you really have to check how things sound over the boundaries.  Longhand, in real time.  There is still no quick way.  You will have to reconsolidate the file too.

 
True, but I'm assuming the need to cut out the space between words. If all you want to do is reduce breaths, you can just drag across the breath, set up a keyboard shortcut to call up the gain DSP process, and hit okay...done. You can get away with this in SONAR because the gain DSP setting will persist. I think this is pretty similar to what you do with an audio editor. 

Jeff Evans
John I know they don't want this but I have found from experience that dropping breaths down by 10 dB works really well. (no clip splitting required hence no fades required either. You could drop them down by 30 db as well) Once some compression is added to tighten up and level out the VO the breaths don't come up in volume at all but they are barely there but still keep the VO natural sounding.
 

 
That's what I intend to sell them on, if I can.
 

Jeff EvansAnd there is NO quick or automatic way to do it either.  You have to edit the VO all the way through manually to get the perfect result. 

Agree, though I've experimented a bit, and if I was allowed to reduce breath sounds rather than completely cut them, I can get quite a lot to work automatically, with a combination of gating and Izotope Breath Control, and just manually fix the instances that don't work. With the hard gate, you end up with so many that don't work, you don't save any time. But with a gentler ducking on breath sounds, I've been getting a pretty good yield.

I keep thinking about that 30hr session coming up!! That's a "lot" of editing. Depending on how much each individual makes a breath sound, you are still talking about a lot of time just listening to make sure.

My perfectionism would kick in and.i would spend hundreds of hours on this!! I'd loose money for sure.

Well....
 
It has to be listened to, as part of the job is spotting errors, it turns out (I didn't realise this initially).
 
However, you can scroll through the wave and easily identify breaths visually, so the initial removal step can be quite quick. I've found that on a half hour wave, I might miss two or three breaths, and might delete two or three things that look like breaths but aren't. So I've got that part down fairly quick and error-free now.
 
Second step is just playing the thing back and tweaking any timing issues that appear, and making a note of any differences with the text.
 
I think I can get it down to being 2.5 to 3 times as many work hours as the length of the original material. Not knowing anyone else who does this, though, I've no idea whether that's good or bad.

John T
I think I can get it down to being 2.5 to 3 times as many work hours as the length of the original material. Not knowing anyone else who does this, though, I've no idea whether that's good or bad.

That seems pretty good if you're listening to and editing everything on a breath-by-breath basis.

I feel a little intimidated giving advice to the big hitters in this thread but whenever I record VOs I have the talent about a foot away from the mic which seems to cut back breath noise tremendously (and then I later eq as needed).
That said, admittedly in my case I almost invariably add a music bed which masks the breath even more.
I'm certainly not suggesting a music bed but wondering if your talent is less than a foot (30 cm) from the mic.
If so would the breath noise be acceptable to your client if it's not "in your face".
And all that said, I would imagine you've already considered my suggestion but didn't see it mentioned in this thread. 

g_randybrown
I feel a little intimidated giving advice to the big hitters in this thread

You should never feel that way. "Heavy hitters" get where they are by learning from others, and often that knowledge is of the "why didn't I think of that?" variety.

Anderton

g_randybrown
I feel a little intimidated giving advice to the big hitters in this thread

You should never feel that way. "Heavy hitters" get where they are by learning from others, and often that knowledge is of the "why didn't I think of that?" variety.

Thanks "Babe", that means a lot to me especially coming from you!

It seems that John has zero control over the actual tracking itself so is left to contend with what he is given.

In that situation it is pretty much a given to have to listen to the entire VO almost twice, once for detection and the other to verify corrections. Another advantage to an editor (depending on which one) is the ability to adjust playback speed more easily. The average person can hear three times faster than they can speak, so the wave file can be left visually the same just played back quicker.

It seems that John has zero control over the actual tracking itself so is left to contend with what he is given.
 
Oh... I somehow missed that