Editing and Mixing on Macs and PCs
Daniel Steinberg from O’Reilly Media presented on Editing and Mixing on Macs and PCs at the Podcast Academy.
What’s important is the gear and the ear, with the ear being more important in the long run. With a great ear, you can produce much higher quality results.
SoundTrack Pro is Daniel’s tool of choice for editing. One of the issues is that marks are time based so if you cut out a section the whole audio moves over to collapse the file. The hack to deal with this is to start by editing at the end of the file and work your way back to the beginning.
Daniel focuses on the podcaster who is between professional time shifted radio and the guy with the mic. The guy who does a Skype interview and wants to turn it into a podcast in 20 minutes is the ideal audience.
Daniel suggests that to deal with a wandering speaker you should make cuts that leave the personality intact. If you make cuts, make sure the speaker will still recognize themselves. Make sure you don’t change the speakers meaning.
Daniel makes the point that silence is frequently more pronounced when there is a the smallest of sounds in the background. This can be an important point when dealing with ummms. You need to make judgments as too which ummms are harmless to remove and which add value. Some ummms make the speaker seem much more natural. Breaths also can be edited in similar ways. Taking out some of the breaths is ok, but if you take them all out your audience won’t breathe either.
Tightening up can also be accomplished by expanding the audio wave form and finding the pauses that add nothing to the audio.
Three things to make sure you do
- know why your cutting
- make copies
- listen after you edit
One way to make your podcast sound more natural is to edit on the fly. As you listen, hit the mark button when you find yourself wandering off or it seems to make sense to cut, then come back and do your editing.
There are also lots of great tools like intelligent compression and noise removal built into today’s editing tools.
Soundtrack Pro is only available on the Mac. For the wintel users out there, try Sony Soundforge, Cubase SE or Adobe Audition.
