Originally Posted by
szfong
If your in the US, during promotional periods of newly released films in various late night shows, you'd hear the "true" voices of the actors/actresses during interviews... They sound REALLY different from the voices on film. They are able to manipulate some star's voice to sound very pleasant & young, like how they sounded when they first started acting. Drugs, alcohol, and smoking probably didn't help their vocal chords. Making the voice sound natural during re-dubbing is really difficult. They devote alot of studio time for such tasks during film production.
Also, actors w/ heavy foreign accents are much less apparent on American film as well. If you look at the ending credits, you'll notice they hire many people to do the audio manipulation/touch-ups work.
However, doing this sort of thing on a long 40+ episode series is way too expensive & time consuming to bear, but newer audio manipulation techniques allows a custom filter to be used throughout an entire series for a particular actor. These skills are actually in great demand if your looking for a good paying job in Hollywood.
Some of the "newest" techniques are so called "real-time" audio morphing equipment. They can manipulate your voice into someone else's voice in real-time. eg turning a man's voice into a women's voice or adding/removing an accent, etc...