Podcasting from the heart—with editing
Two of my good friends—C.C. Chapman and Mitch Joel—have, on their most recent podcasts, extolled the virtues of podcasting without editing. “Live to the hard drive” is the phrase I hear most often in reference to this podcasting style; a lot of shows I listen to are recorded this way, including (of course) C.C.‘s “Managing the Gray” and Mitch’s “Six Pixels of Separation.” It’s no surprise that Mitch and C.C. were co-presenting a session at Podcamp Montreal (coming up September 20-21) titled, “Podcasting from the Heart: The Value of Recording a Show with No Editing and No Second Takes.”
C.C. refers to it as “passionate podcasting—hit record and go, and when you’re done, you’re done.” Mitch suggests that the processes of producing a more polished show would prevent him from conveying “the spirit in which I want to communicate to you.”
Don’t get me wrong. C.C.‘s and Mitch’s shows are among the few that I won’t miss, along with “Marketing Over Coffee,” another live-to-the-hard-drive show in which the ambience of the location adds a tasty dimension to Christopher S. Penn and John Wall‘s conversations. (Update: John Wall has noted in a post to his Ronin Marketeer blog that “Marketing Over Coffee” is, in fact, edited—a testament to how good editing can make a show sound natural and unedited!.) But I don’t agree that a show that is edited after recording is any less passionate, any less from the heart, than one that isn’t.
The primary reason I do post-production on “For Immediate Release,” the podcast I’ve been recording with Neville Hobson since early January 2005, is simple: There are two of us separated by a continent and an ocean. We can’t see each other, we’re working from a playlist, and we stumble over each other’s words, we miss cues, we make mistakes. Sure, we could just let it fly, but the mistakes would make the show longer and distract from the content.
Nevertheless, we’re just as passionate about our topics. Our delivery is most definitely from the heart. (In fact, following a recent tirade of mine, listener Sherilynne Starkie left a comment to the show’s blog noting, “Shel’s right worked up about this one, eh?”)
Another reason for post-production: I want to make the show as easy on listeners’ ears as possible. As a podcast listener (I currently subscribe to 26 shows), I routinely find myself yanking the buds out of my ears when a new segment is a billion or so decibels louder than the last. I unsubscribe from shows with good content when background noise or some other flaw is so bad that it mitigates the pleasure of listening.
For the record, here’s how FIR is recorded and edited:
Neville and I record over Skype using a process called a “mix-minus.” (A couple years ago, I recorded a YouTube video that provides detail on how to configure a mix-minus setup.) One of the key advantages of the mix minus is that each of our voices is recorded to a separate track.
The file is recorded to a digital recorder onto a flash card. I keep a notepad by the rig to note the timecodes of mistakes. Often, when we screw up, we have a bit of a chat about what to do next, more bits our listeners just don’t need.
I record to the uncompressed WAV format, advice I got at a New Media Expo from Doug Kaye. If you record to MP3 and edit the MP3 file, then save it, you’ve just compressed a compressed file. Each time you save, you degrade the audio. So I do all my work in WAV, saving the compression to MP3 for the very last stage.
Once the recording is done, I transfer the WAV file to my laptop and open it in Adobe Audition. (I used Audacity for the first couple years of the show, but as podcasting became more of a hobby, I graduated to a commercial product with more bells and whistles.)
At the beginning of our session, I let the recorder run for about 20 seconds while neither of us says a word. I use this clip as a noise profile, which lets me run a noise reduction utility on the entire recording. As a result, the hiss in the background—from air conditioning, heating, or whatever, is eliminated.
Next, I use my notes to delete the extraneous discussions and mistakes. If I’m trying to get a show that ran particularly long down to an hour or so, I also delete some bits and bobs, or even entire news items that will become FIR Cuts, segments that didn’t make the final cut but that we make available as separate files.
With the editing done, I save each track as a new, mono file. On each of these files is just one of our voices, so there are long gaps during which you can’t hear anybody talking. These gaps are mostly dead silent, thanks to the noise reduction routine, but that process leaves artifacts whenever it encounters a sound that’s louder than the hiss captured in the noise profile (such as an inadvertent bumping of the microphone). These artifacts mostly sound like clicks and pops, so I highlight each of these gaps and use Audition’s amplification tool to reduce the sound to zero.
(Incidentally, I’ve never taken an audio engineering class; I learned to use Audition by trial and error. I suspect there are easier ways to do this—some of you might even be rolling your eyes, wondering why I do it this way. If there’s a more efficient process that produces these results, tell me!)
Now that the treatment of each track is finished, I move the them to the multitrack view, which combines the two tracks. I save this as a WAV file, naming it with the episode number and the word “voices,” like this: fir377-voices. I use Levelator, a free tool from The Conversations Network, to bring all voices to the same optimum level.
I load the output file from Levelator back into Audition, and add the music from the intro, the segment intros for news and comments, and the podsafe song we play at the end of the show; Levelator is for voices, and doesn’t do so well with music.
I export that file to MP3, add the ID3 tags, and upload the file to LibSyn, where our audio files are hosted.
The entire process takes about two hours. The longest stretches are the noise reduction and Levelating processes, during which I do other work on my other computer, so the actual amount of time I spend physically manipulating the audio file is about an hour.
The result is a show that is passionate and from the heart, but sounds good.
It’s a choice. It’s not the right choice, or the only choice, but it’s the one we’ve opted to use, and I don’t believe for a minute that it diminishes the value of the show.
If we read the entire show from a script, on the other hand…how passionate or from the heart would that be?
One day, I want to come to your blog and leave stupider.
You’ve written about your rig, before, but what’s your current one?
Posted by Allan Jenkins on 09/06 at 10:51 AMShel, great post—as a former audio “engineer” for public radio, producer of radio dramas, and college audio recording teacher, I have been harping on this issue for podcasters for a while.
I agree that “recording from the heart” - for content- is the best way, and certainly the most efficient, for many podcasters to get their content out on a timely basis.
However, I feel that some technical aspects are non-negotiable requirements. Like you, I dislike the extreme change in levels we hear when some podcasters change audio sources (a listener comment, for example). In my mind this renders many podcasts unlistenable. that’s just one example, but probably the most commonly violated one (but also like you, I still love Six Pixels of Separation
).The method I like best is close to the BBC recording method. I have been lucky enough to sit in on the recording of a BBC radio play, and to produce radio plays in the states with BBC directors at the helm. The core of the lean production technique is to record as much as you can live, but just as importantly to fix (or even augment) it in the mix.
*By the way, that’s the audio engineer’s credo—or brushoff to whining artists—“We’ll fix it in the mix.”*
The way you produce FIR is close to that BBC spirit, and when I was involved with Topaz Partners’ PRobecast (http://www.techprgems.com) I took a similar approach.
The from the heart content is produced with the listener in mind. but if we can’t listen to it, it’s all for naught.
Posted by Doug Haslam on 09/06 at 11:33 AMHear, hear. Not everyone can create a listenable show in one take. Post-production can be a real service to your audience, without making you any less genuine.
Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch") on 09/06 at 11:56 AMFunny you should ask, Allan. I’m working up a look at the right for the FIR site that should be done in a day or two. I’ll cross-post it here.
Posted by Shel Holtz on 09/06 at 07:08 PMI’m also a fan of the edited Podcast, for all of the technical reasons you’ve listed, but also for another reason.
Editing in all its forms produces a more polished finished product. When you are new to this Podcasting format—as I clearly am on the MB Radio Roundtable—it’s reassuring to know that there will be some cleaning up of the sound. Just because I am an amateur doesn’t mean I want to sound amateurish!
Posted by Jen Zingsheim on 09/08 at 09:28 AMI’m in agreement with you, Shel. In a presentation I gave on podcasting a few months back, I gave this example (entirely fictional, as far as I know):
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I’m a podcaster and bump into someone I’ve been wanting to interview at a conference—for the sake of this story, let’s say it’s Heidi Miller, one of the “voices” of the For Immediate Release podcast.
Well, I’m sure to take advantage of my fortuitous meeting with Heidi, and whip out my portable recorder and have a great conversation with her. But when I get back home and listen to the interview, the audio quality is horrible. We were in the middle of a big crowd, and you can barely make out our voices over all the background noise. I also didn’t set the pickup pattern correctly, either, so my levels are much louder than Heidi’s. In trying to compensate for the crowd, I’m also shouting and am overmodulated for most of the interview.
But you know what? This is a conversation with HEIDI MILLER, podcaster extraordinaire from “Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter,” and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this opportunity go to waste!
Now, I’m also not much of an audio editor, either, and I also don’t have much time to publish my next episode (I realease my podcast every Wednesday morning, and it’s already Tuesday night).
Plus, hey, this is podcasting, right? Being polished isn’t all that important, and isn’t content king?
So, I go ahead and publish the podcast as is. I make sure to apologize before I play the interview, too, saying I hope the listeners don’t mind that the quality isn’t as good as I would have liked. I simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share my podcast with HEIDI MILLER!
And there you go: podcasting will passion!
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As far as I’m concerned: the above scenario is inexcusable if you have an audience that you actually care about.
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1) If the raw audio file is terrible, try and improve it using some of the tactics Shel mentions above
2) If that editing/levelling/compression doesn’t help much, then don’t play the interview. Send your regrets to your guest, and explain that playing the interview wouldn’t do justice to him or her (not to mention giving an ear ache to the listeners).Editing and good sound quality—or at least decent sound quality—are important. If you can get the latter without doing the former—and there are some podcasters who can—then you’re the exception to the rule.
OK, rant over. And I really do like Heidi Miller!
Posted by Bryan Person, LiveWorld on 09/09 at 06:45 PMI’m with you Shel that an edited podcast can be as passionate as an unedited one. As you said, it is all about the hosts and their interaction and passion that shines through no matter what your recording set up and process is.
The key is that anyone wanting to do a podcast has to figure out what works for THEM and then do that. I know that I hate post production and thus why the concept of doing a live podcast has worked for me, but it isn’t right for everyone for sure.
Today I’m going to be doing an interview for Managing the Gray and I know I’m going to have to do some clean up of it after the fact because that is the nature of the beast.
Keep doing what you’re doing!!
Posted by C.C. Chapman on 09/10 at 01:07 AMHey Shel,
This is weird because I left a lengthy post here that gave me an “in moderation” note, but I see it never got posted.
My thoughts:
1.FIR is the best marketing - communications out there. Period. I’m your #1 fan. Never miss an episode.
2. Different strokes for different folks. I do it my way because it’s the best I can with my limited audio skills and time.
3. If I insinuated that Podcasting from the heart is more passionate than an edited show, then I’m sorry. I don’t think like that. That’s just stupid.
The point of our presentation at PodCamp Montreal is to show “how” we record - shownotes, etc…
If I had the time/passion to edit… I would.
Posted by Mitch Joel - Twist Image on 09/10 at 08:00 AMShel
Great post/resource. I am a listener to all three shows, so I know exactly what you mean. However I enjoy each for different reasons, and you know, I have never been distracted by the no-editing format. I always marvel at Mitch’s style, the way he segues, and gets back on topic seamlessly. On FIR, your sound levels are always great, so I now see why. Mitch is right, passionate podcasting isn’t dependent on the technology.
Posted by Angelo Fernando on 09/10 at 10:20 AMThanks for nothing
Posted by Joseph Jaffe on 09/25 at 05:33 AM
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