Podcast Post-Production Hacks: From DAWs to Descript (with Steve Stewart)

Welcome, Steve Stewart. Thanks for coming on. And thank you for spelling your name right

>> Sarah St. John: Welcome, Steve Stewart. Thanks for coming on.

>> Steve Stewart: Thanks for having me on, Sarah. And thank you for spelling your name right. That's how we spelled our daughter's name, with an a.

>> Sarah St. John: Well, you can thank my mom for that one, I guess, or my parents.

>> Steve Stewart: Thank you, mom.

>> Sarah St. John: And I also just noticed we both have, our initials are both ss.

>> Lance: Awesome. Yes.

>> Steve Stewart: Yes. Yes, it is.

Sarah: What tools do you use for podcast post production

>> Sarah St. John: So, we're here to talk about podcast post production. I like the alliteration of that. Kind of like our last or our names. So, So what platform? I don't know. That's not the right word. What? Daw, I guess.

>> Steve Stewart: Dawg.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. Do you use for your post production?

>> Steve Stewart: I still to this day, my main DAw digital audio workstation. My main Daw is audacity. I was using audacity since, I want to say since almost the day it came out, although I know it wasn't the day it came out. I was taking vinyl records and I had them ported into the sound card on my computer, and I was recording them so I could burn them to cd because I was a mobile dj for decades, and it was just easier to carry cds with, you know, 100 songs than it was to carry crates of records. So when the possibility showed up to do that, I was like, oh, this is great. So I used this program called Audacity to record it and burned it with, I don't know what it was. Maybe it was itunes at the time. And then when I started podcasting myself, I was like, well, I already know this software. I can record and edit with it. It's already free. It's on my computer. There's no reason to switch. And then when I started editing for other people, it's like, well, I already know this and I've already got it on my computer. And it just became a, ah, you know, a career from then.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, that's, that's what I started using, and I think. So I used descript now, which I'm not sure how you feel about that, but, Oh, okay.

>> Steve Stewart: An hour ago.

>> Sarah St. John: Okay. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like a lot of professional podcast editors maybe look down on it, but I could be wrong. wait, wait.

>> Steve Stewart: We were just talking about audacity. You're saying they're looking down on descript? Hold on. Back the car up, because descript is the one that's brand new, fresh, and does really, really is redefining video and audio post production. Audacity still looks like it did 20 years ago. Yeah, I can understand why people poop on audacity yeah, but it's just like any other tool. Once you get to know it and you get to, you know, you become proficient with it, how do you give it up?

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, it, looks like we have someone in here. Let me. I'll add him to the stage and see if he wants to. Come on. Hey, Lance, how are you?

>> Lance: I'm good, Sarah. How are you doing? Good.

>> Sarah St. John: Did you want to be on the screen, or did you just want to watch? It's up to you.

>> Lance: I can hang in and do whatever. I'm, self absorbed, so I love a camera on me.

>> Sarah St. John: Well, your name also has alliteration.

>> Lance: Yeah, look at that. Wow.

>> Steve Stewart: La Fort St. John.

>> Lance: Yeah, we're like. We're like the three musketeers or something. This is crazy.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, we were talking about which daw. and Steve uses audacity, and I use descript.

>> Lance: Yeah.

>> Sarah St. John: Like digital audio workstation. Like, to edit. What do you use?

>> Steve Stewart: Pro tools?

>> Lance: You know, I've done. I've done almost zero posts. I have an editor I am working on with a project who's like a full time editor. and he's almost gone too far. He's making a masterpiece. We did about five recordings that one client of just interviews of their staff, and now he's putting it together with music, and, it's like a short film now. So I'm trying to rein him in because he's gone off the deep end. He's been building his Academy Award performance.

>> Steve Stewart: Audio or video?

>> Lance: everything, all the above, like, even the drones down the hallway of the studio and then around the building. And now he's splicing in drone footage, and I'm like, dude, stop.

>> Steve Stewart: Just stop, stop, stop.

>> Lance: So, But, no, I've been sadly, kind of just using podcasts primarily as a door opener to have business development conversations. And I work with a couple different coaches, and one of them literally told me he did 24 episodes once and never published any of them, because in the middle of the 24 episodes, he landed a big project, and it was just a means to an end for him. I just need to land business. So I'm doing the podcast as a lost leader to have conversations. So I've been doing that. and I've heard two sort of schools of thought. Either produce the heck out of the thing, put some beautiful intro and outro and music, and, you know, really go the full nine yards. And other coaches have said nobody really cares about that. They're really after the content. So, you know, there's the spectrum of do nothing, and the other one is do everything. So I don't know yet. I just started podcasting a few months ago. What I'm really enjoying is my friends now find great delight in downloading it to their phone in their car when I. When they have to drive me somewhere. If I get in, I'll be like, oh, they've got a podcast playing.

When I listen to podcasts, I love when there's a great intro

And I'm immediately pulled in. And then I realize it's something I did, like, three months ago. And they're, you know, they basically sort of watch how long it takes me to realize it's me talking. So that's just kind of their little humor lately, their gag. but sorry, I didn't mean to hijack the topic or anything. I'm quite curious about, you know, should I be doing more post production on this? Should I be making this more entertaining? Because I, when I listen to podcasts, I love when there's a really beautiful, intro music playing, and, you know, a great narrator introducing the topic, or, you know, just even, hey, here's what we do every week with this. Yada, yada, yada, yada. It sets the stage for me, and I appreciate it. Like a really good radio show where they would introduce the host. And so I'm torn a little bit, because depending on what you're doing with the podcast, if you're there to entertain people and you get a loyal audience, I think they would expect that. I think there's a value to introducing it in a way that's very professional rather than just, hey, here we go with our guest this week.

Steve and Sarah weigh in on whether podcasting needs some dressing up

And, so, but I'm curious, Steve and Sarah, what you think of that? You know, give me your opinions, because I'm collecting opinions.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, well, Steve. Well, he's the expert on this topic, so we'll go with Steve for this.

>> Steve Stewart: I like what you were saying earlier, that the guy was doing a show and never released it, but became, he got what he wanted out of doing the show by having the conversations. That's proof right there that there's power in podcasting because it makes those connections, those relationships. You also said, you know, people stay for the. Or do they come for the content? I forget what the other part was. The answer, though, is, yes, they come for the content. But is the content really good by its own, or does it need some dressing? And sometimes dressing up just makes it even better.

Most podcasts are interview based, if not co host and conversation based

And since you're doing video, we can use a lot of video, examples, because they're visual, and we're doing storytelling here in the recording. So if anybody here who's watching, or if you guys are familiar with Mark Rubber, he's the guy who does the YouTube videos with the squirrel obstacle courses.

>> Lance: He's fantastic.

>> Steve Stewart: Hours and hours and hours and hours of footage. And he cools it down to like 19 minutes, and he's narrating it. And yes, the footage is fantastic, the lighting is great, and he does all the funny stuff in between to keep your attention. Now, if you were to sit there and just watch the video straight through without doing any kind of post production, you couldn't do it because it would take forever because he's got multiple cameras on the same subject. Here's a different angle of the squirrel. You know, whatever. there's no way. So you've got to do post production just to get the story in line that you want. Now, in most of the situations when we're doing interview podcasts, most, can I say most. I think most podcasts are interview based, if not co host and conversation based. We're going through a conversation, we're going through a storyline. We're going through a topic that doesn't take a whole lot of that type of fancy post production. There's not a whole lot of extra tape that's left in the floor. Tape is the old fashioned word of recording. So I think Lance knows, but Sarah doesn't what tape is, so there's all kinds of stuff.

>> Sarah St. John: I've heard it. I've heard the.

>> Steve Stewart: Yeah, it was an actual, it was an analog medium that was recorded magnetically on this piece of film.

>> Lance: Steve, my business is entertainment. I've been in the film industry for about 30 years. So, I used to edit my own movies long ago.

>> Steve Stewart: There you go. You got the razor blade cuts on your fingers to prove it.

>> Lance: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All sorts of stories, but, yep, I take your point. It is.

It's really about the audience and what are they coming for

It's really about the audience and what are they coming for and the audience, you know, a friend of mine a million years ago told me, said, it's like you're trying to woo coffee drinkers in and trying to say all coffee drinkers drink their coffee the same way. And he said, we all know that the lie. So m he said, you know, someone wants cream, someone wants milk, someone wants it black, someone. And he said, no matter what audience you're going to attract, there's going to be diversity in there as to what they've come for. Some of them do really appreciate the polish and professionalism and the music and the post production and other ones might have come for the guest, specifically a certain speaker, has drawn them in, and everything else is a sideshow. They're really looking for the meat of the salient points, the takeaways. What's this conversation about today? And that's what I've come for. I could care less about the host or the music or that, if someone's a celebrity and has their own following, sometimes I've invited people in who are lawyers and they're covering a specific type of law. Knowing that somebody in my group, we've done a bunch of AI lawyers recently and tried to talk about how AI is impacting certain industries. and those seem to get a lot of hits, a lot of followers, a lot of, reviews and downloads when we do something like that. but other times we've brought in a creative director who's a writer, producer, editor on movies or kids show, and I don't think the same folks are listening. I think they might listen for the first five or six minutes and go, no, not for me, I'm out. And we've watched that on the metrics on one of the platforms. It shows like theres a drop off point in eleven minutes for a huge chunk of a community, and then theres another group that stick right to the end. And my joke is always, my moms there till the end. Shes, she and everyone else in the retirement home are being forced to listen to the. I dont know, I have no idea. But it is interesting to watch the drop off of when youve got a group of people following you. Do they stay to the end or do they kind of, is there an average? Because if there is an average, I want to start aiming like all my podcasts need to be eleven or twelve minutes, maybe instead of these 35, 40 minutes, which normally they're about 30 to 40 minutes.

>> Steve Stewart: Well, that just proves that editing is going to help because I think shorter shows will perform better than if they were longer because you're taking out a lot of the stuff that doesn't have to be there now. You don't want to edit it too much. Because I was in a meeting with a mastermind group the other week, and people in there were asking questions because I was the guest and somebody said they cut out all the breaths. Now that gets to be really annoying. It's almost like the jump cuts on YouTube when they're just too many for too long. You could do overproduction, but if it's done properly and it's actually easier to leave things in than to take them out, then it becomes a better experience, a listening experience. And primarily with podcasts, we're talking about audio. There is video, but we're talking about audio primarily for people who consume podcasts.

>> Lance: Yeah.

>> Steve Stewart: Because they're usually, they're usually long form content compared to video, which is usually short form and needs to be shorter.

>> Sarah St. John: So when, when you're talking about, like you had mentioned the breadth thing, that that's too much. So what should we be looking for in terms of what we should cut and what we should leave in? I mean, you know, like, with descript, you can remove filler words with the click of a button. And so how, I guess the question is how much editing is too much editing?

>> Steve Stewart: Well, that's, that's hard to measure or hard to describe. How much editing is too much editing? I don't, I don't know if I can tell you what that is. I think you would just know it because it just wouldn't sound right to you. It wouldn't sound natural. But then again, some people would think it sounds more natural than other people think. It's completely out of line. It's going to be somebody's personal taste as well, which is why we have people who, I mean, country music is huge. There's people who hate country music. It's why we had disco music. And then there was a bunch of people hated disco music. Everybody had their own opinions and preferences. So there could be those differences there that dictate the answer to the question. But there's just what I would consider non acceptable. Post production is a bad edit, meaning breaths are getting cut in half, or words are getting cut off too soon, or just a, thing is cut too soon. You got to have that little bit of time, excuse me, that little bit of the time for the listener to absorb what was just said before you started on the next topic. All of a sudden, so bad edits has got to go. You can't have a bad edit. I would much rather leave a flub. Somebody's talking and they mess up like I am doing. I'd rather leave that in there than to make a bad edit. Because it's natural for people to mess up. It's natural for people to stumble and say things twice like I just did. It's natural. And people can accept that. The human brain absorbs all that. And I can prove it to you as well. The human brain is very perceptive, because if you're in some of. Sarah, you've been to conferences, Lance, I imagine you've been in conferences, or you've been to weddings or big parties, and you're in this loud room, people all around you, but you're in a little circle of three or four people having a conversation. How can you understand what they're saying right in front of you with all that other sensory overlord coming at your head from all directions? Because the brain can then filter out the garbage, the crap noise.

>> Lance: Steve, as I've gotten older, my ears are doing it for me. I, can only hear certain frequencies in a busy room now. It's great.

>> Steve Stewart: What's that?

>> Lance: Can or anything.

>> Steve Stewart: So the brain can do all that. So there's. It's okay to have, No, I'm not gonna say that it's okay to have non perfect audio. It's not good to have bad edits.

>> Lance: Sure.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. Because I've noticed that, like, a lot of times, if you're listening to a podcast, you might not even notice the ums and the likes and the breasts and all that. But if it gets cut out too much to where it doesn't even sound natural, you're more likely to notice that, actually.

>> Steve Stewart: Yeah. And we take the pendulum swing on the editing, the ums and Oz out too much. We can talk about that, too, because people do say, People do say, like, you know, kind of like, they like to say, like, you know.

>> Lance: Right.

>> Steve Stewart: Like. So some of that should be left in. And usually it's the stuff that you can't get out cleanly. You. You know, when you've got the low hanging fruit, it's just a, light sitting there in the middle of nowhere, easy to cut out. But if it's run together with other words and you can't get out, leave it in. That's fine, because it's natural. I have, So in the script, and this is one of the reasons why people do this. Like, the script is you do the filler word removal, and you do remove all.

Sometimes the word like is used as a descriptive word, and it needs to stay

It takes them all out. Sometimes the word like is used as a descriptive word, and it needs to stay in there or, write. One of my. I got clients that just write. They always like to end the sentences with the word right. And people we know talk with the word right. Right. So I like to remove those. But sometimes the right word is to leave the word right right there. Leave it right there because the word right belongs right there. But if I took them all out, that would. That sentence would make no sense at all.

A PR firm used AI to build articles for one of their clients

>> Lance: Steve and Sarah, I was, listening to a webinar yesterday, and it was all about AI. And specifically that sort of thing where, it was, I think, a PR firm, and they were, using AI tools to build article for one of their clients. And I guess they hadn't proofread them, but they built a number of keywords and went out on the Internet, had the tools go out and gather topics, around these keywords. And they built a catalog of articles like blog posts that they were going to start launching every few weeks to generate likes, clicks, some sort of following, and so on. And the first one was an article about the guest speaker that was giving the webinar yesterday. And she said, I'd never been consulted, they never called me, but they wrote an article all about me and all about my husband and how he supports me in my business. And she's, like a data analyst at a large tech firm. And I don't know what she had, but she had some marker and somebody sent this article, hey, did, your husband write an article about you? And she said, no. What? And she read the article, and then she called the CEO and she said, I'm just very curious how all this has transpired. And he said, can you explain? And she said, your company has written an article about me, as if my husband wrote the article, my husband's never met you. And it was, again, one of these things where they automated the whole thing. The CEO had to do a million apologies and then go get his marketing team and everyone else and go, what the hell's going? And also, what's the next article look like? And the next article was more about her as well. They were about to launch a series of things. No one had read it. They just let it rip and thought, well, we'll just publish these. And to your point about it, editing in and out the right things, it had just basically built a whole media campaign from an AI engine without any human beings interacting with it. So they were like, okay, this is a huge lesson learned. We could have got sued for this. Luckily, the guest speaker just sort of, she laughed. She thought that was hilarious. Her husband thinks it's hilarious. Allegedly. He's writing articles. but again, it's one of those things. And to your other point, I do find if I'm listening to a podcast and there's some ums and so on, there's an authenticity to it, there's a relatability to it, right? And I think that's the value of podcasts, is that we're not looking for an overly polished thing. We're looking for. You know, I always think of stern on his radio show, people tune in because it's raw, it's honest. It's, you know, slings, arrows, whatever, bumps and bruises. They don't seem to cut out an awful lot of stuff. And, you know, in my own podcasts I've done, there's one or two where I stumbled, where I had a guest and I had a list of questions, and we went down a rabbit hole, and I thought, oh, I'm struggling. And when I listen to it back, I can hear it in my voice. I can hear myself doing, you know, you can kind of help hear yourself mentally being human. Yeah. Doing the gymnastics, trying to keep it honest, and trying to keep the thing flowing. And so there's, like, two or three where I'd like. Yeah, those needed editing, those needed post production, because it would have come off a lot better with a lot of that no dancing, on your feet kind of thing clipped out. No, one needed to hear me struggling. She don't leave it. Nobody else did either, you know.

>> Steve Stewart: Right. Because it didn't add to the context or the content. M it was just, it was just there and sitting there. And there's nothing worse than not getting to the point. And I've got some people that I edit, or they've. They've had guests before who just kind of never really sort of ever, you know, get there. It took, like, a minute to get to the, to the point. To me, that's really annoying to somebody else. It might just be natural, and they're just listening for enjoyment. Ah. And it does have something to do, too, with the. For the type of show that you're listening to. So if you've got a hanging out with the bros type of show, that's going to be much more relaxed, and it's just in the background, and you're just enjoying the experience. Whereas a lot of my clients, I primarily work with people in the personal finance genre, people who write and create content around the topic of money, in whatever form that is. So we've got, we're teaching, we're explaining, we're, you know, people are learning from content, and it's not just sitting back and, hey, let's listen to somebody talk about Roth Iras all day. Oh, that sounds like fun. I don't think you're going to hear that from too many people, except money mergers like me. So it's got to be that experience, too. as far as how much of that naturalness do we keep in? Because you don't want to cut out the talent and the talent might just be somebody's really fun to listen to, even if they do have some stumbles. Who's the guy? Bob Newhart.

>> Lance: Right.

>> Steve Stewart: Drove me crazy. Cause everything was a stumble in his what? But that was his thing, and he didn't used to do that. Did you ever watch his old stuff, Lance?

>> Lance: Yeah, he was very polished.

>> Sarah St. John: No, no.

>> Lance: Yeah, he's a great example because, yeah, the stutter and the stammer and these long silences are all part of his shtick. Right? And it's hilarious. I saw him live a few years back, and it was amazing because I think he was 84 at the time. And his fans are so crazy. They start yelling out things like do the telephone thing. And he's like, I'm getting to a calm down. you know, he had to kind of hold them back because he had so much content. But, yeah, he's. He's brilliant. The other one I was thinking was Robin Williams. You know, almost the complete opposite. Where you couldn't reign him in.

>> Steve Stewart: No, he would just never. Nonstop. He couldn't break in at all. He just.

>> Lance: Exactly. So many interviews where you can see the person interviewing just going, I'm done. I. There's. I can't.

Robin Williams made jokes on the fly; you can't edit that

This is like a force of nature. It's a tornado. You know, I'm going to be able to speak three times the next 20 minutes. And Robin Williams was making shit up on the fly, like, just, you know, because his brain was wired that way. And, Yeah, yeah.

>> Steve Stewart: So if you were to edit either Bob Newhart, who became this stammering comedic guy, or Robin Williams, who I don't think I ever heard him say, you know, it's just, he just. And it worked. You. You can't edit that type of thing very much because it's just, it's the thing.

Steve and Sarah share their favorite tools for post production

So where are we at, Sarah, on this post production topic? I don't know where we keep getting off track and talking about old people stuff.

>> Lance: I'm. I'm curious, Steve and Sarah, if there's any sort of top picks, like tools you both enjoy using, you know that if anyone is watching this, what are some of the top three, four, five things that you think this is a great tool. This is a great tool. I highly enjoy using this one for XYZ. I, think that would be sort of really good information because for someone like myself, I'm on the outside looking in at post production, and there's a million tool. I'm not sure where I would even start.

>> Sarah St. John: Oh, yeah, go ahead.

>> Steve Stewart: Well, Sarah, you're using the one I was just going to start with and then I'll take over from there if you want.

>> Sarah St. John: Well, I was going to say descript. Is that the one you, you're. Yeah. are you familiar with descript lands?

>> Lance: No, no, I heard you mention it earlier so I'm, you know, a little bit curious. I will google the heck out of it later.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, yeah.

>> Steve Stewart: Sarah has an affiliate link for you.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, I should put an affiliate link, below this when I put it in the community. But yeah, it's ah, like you can drag in your audio, video, whatever, it creates the transcript, but you can also edit the audio or video by editing the transcript, which for me is actually, I feel like easier than editing with like waveforms and stuff.

>> Steve Stewart: although you can do that too. It's just not, it's not in the exact same way as any other dawn. oh.

>> Sarah St. John: Oh yeah. With a little, what do they call that, timeline or something down at the bottom. Yeah, yeah, I guess you could do it that way. Yeah. and there's other things that they, they're always releasing a new feature. Like they have something about like if you're recording a video, because you can also record directly in there as well. But if you upload or record a video, actually I think you have to record in it for this to work. I'm not sure, but it corrects your eyes. Like if you're looking down it'll actually make it look like you're, I haven't tested it yet, but the post will.

>> Steve Stewart: Work in post as well.

>> Sarah St. John: Oh, okay.

>> Steve Stewart: As long as you're not moving around too much. It's supposed to work as well.

>> Sarah St. John: Oh wow.

>> Steve Stewart: In post.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. and then filler word removal with a click of a button. which again like we talked about, you could get in trouble with, depending. And then what else? There's like an overdub feature where, which I haven't used that because I think so I'm on the like the, whatever the $15 a month plan is. I think overdub and whatnot is like the next plan. But anyway, like where you can record a section or you record different stuff with your voice and then you can add, like instead of having to go in and actually record your voice to add it to an existing recording, you can just type it in, I guess, and then it, yeah, so just all kinds of crazy features.

An AI in the background learns people's voice and then recreates it

so for production, if we're just talking about that, that's the main tool I use and then they have studio sound as well.

>> Steve Stewart: That's what I was going to bring up if you didn't.

>> Sarah St. John: Okay.

>> Steve Stewart: It's basically the, the AI in the background learns people's voice. And I'd say it also matches their cadence and stuff like that. And it can. So I've done this before because I, wasn't going to use the script for this before, but then I had a client say, hey, have you tried this yet? Because I got this recording that's coming up that's really bad. I'm like, fine. Client says I should use this for his recording because his guests didn't show up with a good microphone, which most people don't have microphones. And if you're a guest for one time, why would you buy a mic? So I get that. So I ran this thing through descript and just applied studio son. That's all. I didn't, I didn't do any text based editing. I didn't do anything else but studio sound. The way I see it working, and I'm pretty sure this is how it works, it regenerated everything. It recreated the voice without the crap. So all the room tone and the noise in the background, and you can change the severity of the effect. So you can leave a little bit in there just so it makes it sound a little more human. Plus, if you go too hard, then sometimes the consonants aren't very, distinct. And they, you know, the s's get taken away so you can back it down a little bit, which is really amazing. So it kind of rebuilds the voice and it doesn't sound like it was rebuilt. It sounds like the person just without a, a lot of the background reverb. And. Well, the reverb's a little harder to get out, but it does do a pretty good job in that. but then, you know, just the room noise and absence of a mic and they're talking to their webcam. It's pretty amazing, pretty magical. And there's a lot of tools out there now that do that.

>> Sarah St. John: How did, So you think instead of just removing background noise, it's actually recreating the entire thing? so how did you, I guess, either figure that out or easy.

>> Steve Stewart: Overdub was first. So if I knew that overdub. Overdub is where you read it, like Sarah was saying, you basically read a script into the script. It records it, it gets to learn it, and then you can type things, you can copy paste a text document into it, and it'll create your voice from that text and overdub was there before studio sound. So if it can create voice from nothing other than, you know, figuring out your voice and making it sound like you, why couldn't it take somebody else who's, you know, 30 minutes interview guest? Why couldn't it do that? And I was at Pod fest 20 222-021-2022 what? 2022. And I was talking to somebody who used to work for a telecom company and you're saying, you know, the voice that you heard on the phone, that's not their actual voice. It's not like a pipe going from one line, it's not tin cans on a string. It is basically you're using your phone and it digitally gets put into the cloud somewhere and then it gets recreated on the other end. Well if that technology existed for phones before descript was run, why couldn't descript amplify that impact with doing overdub and then studio sound recreating the voice?

>> Sarah St. John: Oh wow.

>> Lance: Steve, I was, I was going to say I would imagine too it's harder to decipher where the edits are if it's all redone, you know what I mean? Rather than it just trying to come in and fix the glitch or, or when you're typing in some new content. if the whole thing's in the same audio file and it's got its sort of framework, and it recreates the whole script, I would again think the machine learning side or whatever it is, like it's easier to plug in more words because they've already approximated the voids. Whereas if it was we're going to play your real voice and just do a couple edit, the edits would be harder to hide.

>> Steve Stewart: Following.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, I'm not following because basically if.

>> Steve Stewart: You think about studio sound, it's really, it's like a really good plugin, that does all that work for you. But I believe the way that it's working is it's basically, it's taking this map, here's what was already said and then it's just regenerating it in the exact same length of time. And you know, the tone every seems to match and everything because it's, it's learned it. That's, I'm, I'm almost positive that's the truth. I, I heard something else from somebody at description that kind of confirmed that. I just can't remember who it was and what was said but I'm thinking that's how AI works.

>> Sarah St. John: And why not?

>> Steve Stewart: I mean we've got this eleven labs or whatever it is, it can just like, just like overdub just send it your text and it creates a voice and it creates a voice out of whatever it's got and it's not your voice and somebody else. It's creating audio that we perceive as human voice.

>> Sarah St. John: So I guess, I guess it's easier for the software to just recreate it all than to actually literally remove background noise out of an existing, or not just background noise, but like whatever.

>> Steve Stewart: Yeah, I mean, maybe I could be proven wrong.

>> Sarah St. John: I mean, Adobe audition, interesting.

>> Steve Stewart: Adobe has Adobe podcasts with enhance and that does the, basically the same thing. I've got an app on my computer, I've got a Mac only app called Hush. Does not as good a job as either of the two that we just mentioned, but does basically the same thing. It's making the audio sound better without me having to worry about EQ. It doesn't have to worry about the refurb, it doesn't have to worry about all this stuff.

Audition is the number one daw of professional podcast

>> Sarah St. John: And what other tools? so we've really just talked about the script. What other tools? Yeah, right.

>> Steve Stewart: If we're talking about if, let's start with if you are starting out or you really want to try something new. The first one I would say is to learn to script because it is a different animal and it can do so many things. the problem with that, it is very Internet reliant, so you're not editing stuff on the plane, unless you've already got it loaded up and stuff like that, and you can do that. But if you really want to work on audio, then audition in the podcasting space. Audition is the number one daw of professional podcast by a factor of three to one. Every year we do our survey, we do an annual survey, ask people, hey, we're giving, you know, if somebody gave you 60 minutes of audio and you're supposed to cut out the mras and you're supposed to you know, noise, volume leveling, and put it into an episode format, mv three, what would you charge? And along that we also ask some things like, you know, what do you use? And audition is always number one. Runner ups are usually close together as audacity and reaper Pro Tools last year somehow jumped up quite a bit. But I find that pro Tools isn't the one people start with, it's the one people bring with them into the podcasting space from working in a studio, working at a radio station. They learned it from somewhere else. Because you don't jump into pro tools fresh, like, oh, I heard pro Tools is great. Well, it is great, but it's like level and you only need this for podcasting. and then there's, ah, Hindenburg, which is fantastic. And there's some cool, neat stuff that, that's doing as well. so those are the audio ones. Now, as far as video, I see video as being three main editing programs. Number, one is premiere, because Adobe owns premiere and premier and audition work together very well. Number two, a lot of people like DaVinci Resolve, and this is a company where you get the software for free and it can do some of those 3d effects and things like that. number three then would be, final cut pro. Final cut Pro is really good. And that's a Mac only. And it works really well with the Mac, obviously. And then I can say fourth is the script, because the script does video as well.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. And then what about like for like creating clips? Like I've used, repurpose, minvo, wizard, chop, cast. Like there's a whole bunch.

>> Steve Stewart: Opus.

>> Sarah St. John: Oh, I see. I haven't used that one yet.

>> Steve Stewart: Well, if you've done Minvo, it's very close to Opus and Opus is better. I've, I've actually was using Minvo, earlier today, and the interface is glitchy, but that's going to get better over time.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, well, they had an appsumo deal.

>> Steve Stewart: So one time, $69, something like that.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. Yeah, I'm always up on my appsumo deals.

>> Lance: Yeah.

>> Steve Stewart: The problem with that is you've got to spend the time in there. I love AI. Just being able to generate a dozen or more clips from a 30 minutes to 60 minutes interview. Pick it for me. I don't have to sit there and think about it. I'm editing. I don't want to worry about the content so much unless I'm doing the content editing, I'm doing the cleanups. but if I've got AI picking the clips, that's great. I've got a dozen to pick from. It'd be easier just to see twelve 1 minute clips than to spend an hour trying to figure out which one to pull or maybe which two. But the problem is it doesn't always clip the right spot. So you got to change. Oh, I want it to start a sentence or too soon, or cut it off too soon. or why is the text right here in front of my face? You know, I gotta move it. it's just, it's gonna get better over time.

>> Sarah St. John: That's definitely an issue with men vo. You have to change the location of the font.

>> Steve Stewart: Yes, but clips is, I mean, we've talked about audiograms for a decade and I don't think audiograms ever really helped much. But clips are video and video, short video works better than long video in a lot of situations, especially on social. So I like clips. It's just there's not a whole lot of post production happening there. Really. You're taking your recording and putting it in there. So why don't we edit the recording first and then put it in there?

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, yeah.

>> Steve Stewart: In fact, I'll tell you a hack that I, it's not a hack. What I do with the, with the video clients I have is I will edit the conversation first. I don't put any lower thirds, I don't put anything in there that doesn't belong there. So the clips that we make are clean, it's just their faces. And if we put, then you got the text showing up. Well, if we got the text showing up over a subscribe button that's flashing the corner, that's really distracting. So I render out a version of that first, let that run, and then when that's done, then I put in the names and the things like that. Now if you're using an AI tool for post production that's creating some of your elements in their meaning, throwing in b roll, things like that, then my process isn't going to work too well for your process. My process is going to actually take you more time because now you're doing the work twice. If you're putting b roll in, you're probably thinking about it while you're editing the content. And what I'm doing is I'm cleaning up the video, getting rid of the crap, the crutches, repeats, accidents, pregnant pauses, as much as I can without making a bunch of jump cuts so that I've got that nice clean video for then. Me too. Oh, and camera switching, don't forget camera switching for video. Gotta have camera switching, otherwise it's just three talking heads like we're doing right now. so anyway, yeah, not having those other elements in there works for me in my process, but it makes it two rendered videos which, you know, can take a long time. But I'm not doing b roll and fun stuff like that.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, I don't do the multiple camera, camera switching and all that.

>> Steve Stewart: Well, hey, descript does it for you. All you do is set the command. And like you don't know about this.

>> Sarah St. John: I don't know about it.

>> Steve Stewart: Oh, my gosh. Okay, so it's, Active speaker is the command, is the feature. And as long as you have two separate recordings, one for you, one for your guest, or multiple guests, you bring it into your sequence and then you say active speaker, and it switches cameras for you. And because it's non destructive, you can make changes in your final edit.

Steve: I'm not editing every second of the video. I'm doing the camera switching

That's very cool somehow. Interesting. But what's interesting is I've got a client who doesn't want that.

>> Steve Stewart: I had everything. I'm like, at first when we started, I was like, I wasn't, I was. They were getting a special package where I wasn't going to do all the extra work that takes to make a video really great. They just wanted a presence on YouTube. So I was like, okay, we'll make the major edits means if there's a mistake and you call something out, then we'll take that out, and there's going to be maybe a jump cut there or whatever. But other than that, I'm not editing every second of the video. I'll edit every second of the audio. But that's different. I then started using descript and I said, hey, guys, I'm upgrading what you're getting. I'm doing the camera switching. And they said, you know what, Steve? We actually don't like that. And the reason why is these two people have a great relationship, and it's just kind of cool. They react to each other, and that needs to be there. and since I'm not doing that with every second, jumping to the other person that they've been talking, you got him talking for a minute straight. You need to see her for a second or two to remember that she's there and she's reacting. That wasn't happening. So they said, we just want side by side. Like, sure, easy enough. And it works for that one. It works for that show.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. Let's see.

When we talk about post production, number one thing we got to do is volume levels

is there anything else that maybe we haven't touched on yet that you would like to, Steve.

>> Steve Stewart: In post production? Yeah, there's all kinds of things. I mean, I could think of a lot of different. Okay. When we talk about post production, number one thing we got to do is get the volume levels right. And I'm not talking about luffs, I'm not talking about loudness factors. I'm talking about just get everybody about the same volume and have it loud enough that it matches just about every other podcast that's out there. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be close, just, and obviously between all speakers on that show, noise reduction, it's a tricky thing because sometimes we can try noise reduction and it takes out too much noise, and then it just gets really quiet and jumps back and forth and it gets to be distracting when you have this hiss in the background and then all, then you don't hear anything like that. It's just, that gets me really. You're probably hearing room tone from the other two. I shouldn't have done that. But if it was just me speaking and the other two were muted and I hit my mute button, you would hear silence and then you would hear me back, and it's just like, closer.

>> Sarah St. John: Should we mute us ourselves so that. Oh, okay.

>> Steve Stewart: I think everybody gets the picture.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, you get.

>> Steve Stewart: Yeah. there should be a three because everything's great in threes. Volume leveling, noise reduction. and just good edits. No bad edits.

>> Steve Stewart: That's the thing. No bad edits. I've, I've listened to too many podcasts that were produced in a professional fashion, or at least they're presented that way. I could think of one that I like, and the host is fantastic. But it sounds like they're getting some kind of an intern doing the editing because their cuts are. You could hear the clip, you can hear it in the, in the audio, and it's like, dude, on audacity, I can hit at zero crossings and make that match perfectly. And you will never hear a bump. You'll never hear it unless it's just cut in the wrong spot. Why can't everybody do that? Everybody should be able to do simple stuff like that. And I know it's, you know, if it's a beginner, it's an intern. Who cares? But there, it's a university. I mean, tell me, tell me they don't have money. At least they're presenting themselves as if they've got it all together. And it just, it drove me nuts trying to listen to this excellent, excellent show. And the editing just, it distracted me, and that can't happen.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: I think AI tools can help, but it still needs humans

Lance, do you have any particular questions?

>> Lance: No, I think I have to find the time and make the time to dig in on some of those. I think I've tried them cap cuts and Nvidia, I think it's called, you know, again, to do this, as Steve was just mentioning, find the spot. And I'm sure it's AI tool, just kind of goes, this looks like a chapter or a paragraph. Chop, chop, chop. You know, we put in. I think we put in a 30 minutes podcast, and it created ten edits. And to your point, Steve, I would get in and go, I need. You just cut the wrong sentence. You cut it two sentences too early. So, you know, you can't just crank it out and think it's going to hit it right. You've got to go back. And it still needs humans, right. Machines haven't taken over completely, but, some of the editors I know that I've mentioned these tools to, they go, you got to be kidding me. Like, no, I'm not kidding you. Try it out.

>> Steve Stewart: Just.

>> Lance: And some of them are free to, you know, or they have a data plan where you can use so many megs per month, and then it's paid after that. So usually you can pump in one or two videos, and that's your free allotment for the month. But they're pretty cool. And I do find, specifically on Instagram, a lot of these small clips with text.

>> Lance: I find it strange sometimes because I'm trying to listen to the audio, but the text is so bold, it's distracting. And so there's a spot where, if done properly, it's fantastic and it works. I end up just reading the subscript, basically for the subtitles. and also, you know, depending on the age of your audience, like our tv, I watch the subtitles on a movie all the time now because there are parts of a movie script I can't. My ears can't hear anymore. I'm almost 60 ish, and. And things just drop off certain frequencies I can't hear. And so if I'm watching Netflix, I put, you know, subtitles on because I want them to be able to understand. so, no, I think it's amazing that there's, you know, we're still early days on a lot of these tools. They're all going to get better, and all these AI engines are getting smarter. And so, and I was just working with an editor who just graduated from a film, program. And even he, you know, he's growing up with all this stuff, but he said it's flabbergasting, the things that you have to read about almost every week to try and just stay on top of it all. and we did a recording recently where we brought three cameras in. I was doing a bunch of interviews. And so, to your point, Steve, that thing about cutting to the active speaker, good Lord, that would have saved us hours because he was manually cutting. And the audio works great because he knows what he's doing. But we debated as to when to cut and it was all done by hand and a tool would have.

>> Steve Stewart: Like the old days.

>> Lance: Yeah, yeah, but, and it was, it was funny because we had three really high end cameras going, and I brought an extra boom mic and he said, thank God you did, because one of the cameras, the mic on it was terrible. So he said, I'm using, thank God. He said we got three recordings, so I'm using the audio from the other cameras because they were just better. but stuff like that we hadn't even thought of. We saw like, we've got three great cameras, it'll all be good. And in the end was not good. And also one of them caught like some of our lights occasionally in the field of view. We're like, oh, you know, we could just check that ahead of time. But we had tons of footage. We had like an over an hour of footage. We're chopping down to eleven minutes.

>> Steve Stewart: So Ingo, all that post production right there, all that footage going to waste, it's 3 hours. If it's 1 hour recording three cameras, it's 3 hours. You made eleven minutes out of it?

>> Lance: Oh, absolutely. And I was quite surprised after, you know, we did a two day shoot, we interviewed four people and you know, we kept, I felt we could make a short film out of this. No one would watch it, but maybe it was just sort of amazing to see how much footage we had. And now this poor editor has got to chop it down to ten or eleven minutes. And even one of the client chimed in, I saw the last edit and said, hey, one of the guys has been completely cut out of the whole production and you spent 45 minutes talking to him. He's gone now. He might not find that very entertaining. You might want to put a bit of him back in. anyways, it's, it's fun, it's, I really enjoy it and I think that the fact of, you know, and I think we talked about it earlier, the humanity of the whole thing, it's like if you over polish it, I think part of the beauty is of it being a little bit more personalized and human and not being overly polished again, depending on the audience. Right. If you really are pushing out to a, I've seen that you've seen really professional level podcasts that are highly produced, with you know, celebrity guests on them, and you really are kind of watching a stern show or something like that. You're watching a different animal with a different target and potentially hundreds of thousands of people watching.

>> Steve Stewart: So, yeah, so thank you, Lance. On for a video session?

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, exactly. Well, awesome.

>> Steve Stewart: Well, I us pull up in front of our house.

>> Lance: That's me. Yeah. Well, you know, edit that out. We'll get one. Yeah.

>> Sarah St. John: Rx post that or fix that in post or whatever they say.

>> Steve Stewart: Yeah.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. Well, awesome.

Using keyboard shortcuts can speed up your editing workflow significantly

Well, I think we're, I don't know if you'll have something in the next five minutes, so I should probably go ahead and wrap this up.

>> Steve Stewart: But if I can leave you with thought, one more tip, just to make sure that everybody thinks about this. It's not possible in every editing program, but there's two things you want to do when you're editing. You want to get better and you want to get faster. Usually you can only work on one of those at a time, just learning, like doing things to make that the focus. When I first started editing for other people, I had to get better. And that's where then I was paying more attention to the background noise and, cutting out more omeras and things like that. But I also had to get faster, because those first three years where I was doing this full time, I did not make as much. Well, the first two years, I didn't make as much as the salary job that I had just left. But the third year, it just exploded, and I finally got the business side of it together. I had all the clients, and I was still spending the same amount of time. I was just being more profitable. And one of the reasons why it's getting faster and one of the ways that I got faster wasn't just getting to learn the software more or just becoming faster. One of the, the ways that I changed that was keyboard shortcuts. in audacity, you can create your own keyboard shortcuts. You can change them to whatever you want. So my left hand, which I always want to have on the keyboard, so my right hand never has to leave a mouse. Most of my keyboard shortcuts are in the left hand. So I don't have to look at my keyboard. I don't take my eyes off the screen. I don't have to move my right hand off my mouse. I can keep it right there the whole time, because a is amplify, s is silence. D is delete, f is fade. you know, I got all these keys on my left hand for keyboard shortcuts, and I can program it that way. Now, you can't do that with all the programs like the script. I would love to be able to program the letter m for mute. You know, just, boom. I can, I can still reset with my left hand because otherwise I got to take my mouse up and over to the right and hit the mute button so I can mute. errant. you know, it's just sitting out there and it didn't catch it. So keyboard shortcuts are superb ways of speeding up your workflow, because after just a month or two, you're going to find out that you're a lot more, a, lot quicker. And then another. Sorry, I'll keep going.

>> Sarah St. John: Oh, no.

>> Steve Stewart: Another thing that will help speed up the process is multiple monitors. I used to have three, and it was the, I would have my main editing going on in the big screen right in front of me, over to the right. I would have my notes or whatever conversation that my client had with me about do this, do that, so I could look over there as my notes, but then I'd go right back to editing. And then on the left hand side, I could also have something like my slack window or something, or even just a music player. So when I'm done editing, I can just hit music, play, and that would play while I'm doing my uploading or generating show notes or whatever. Multiple monitors, I swear, will help speed up the workflow. So if you got the desk space for it and you got the budget for which a 21 inch monitor, easily $100.32 inch monitors probably get for $200 or for $150, makes a lot of difference.

>> Lance: Steve? I worked in a video game studio years ago, and every single person at their desk, minimum two monitors, usually three. And it was new to me. I walked in, I said, what is this? And they showed two studies that have been done, like, at MIT or something, 40% more productivity.

>> Steve Stewart: 40%. Okay.

>> Lance: With just the second monitor. So they said the third one's just gratis, like, bonus time, right? but, yeah, I've got, like, I've got four.

>> Steve Stewart: Oh, man.

>> Lance: I've got a few other things above, and I've got a teleprompter, I've got a whole podcast studio now. But I went on Amazon, and, and there's all these little arms that you can get that bolt onto your desk. And so, and they're, you know, they move around, but they give you the ability to change the height so that everything's eye level. And, and I, anyways, and I've got a standing desk that goes up and down on a motor, so. And, but to your point, it's just, you're more comfortable you're more productive. And if the day is I need to stand, I can stand because my back is sore or I can sit and get more done. But you really have to build a, I find a little bit of a Zen space for your studio, a place where you want to be. You enjoy being, you know, and if you like to light a candle or have wheel music playing, whatever you got to do to get in that productive headspace, do it right. Get a routine. And, because sometimes I find I've got ADHD, there's too much stuff going on. And you're like, what do I start first? And I've got a to do list that's three days long and I've only got an hour. Like, where do I start? And so sometimes the thing is, turn everything off, look at your to do list and go, okay, I'm just going to pick one thing for the next hour. That's all. I'm just going to do that because otherwise I find the technology, you know, your phone's going and it's too much stuff. We're, we're saturated and bombarded with too.

>> Steve Stewart: Many blips and bleeps and stuff.

>> Lance: So.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, well, awesome. Well, I appreciate y'all's time and input today. And, I'll post this video probably tomorrow in the community. And if people want to learn more about y'all. I know Steve. It's what? Steve Stewart or. No, it's Steve Stewart. Me.

>> Steve Stewart: Right? That's correct. Me.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. And then what about you, Lance?

>> Lance: I run a company called La Fort Talent Group. We're primarily a management consulting group. I'm all over LinkedIn. Easy to find me there. and our podcast is called Talent thrives here. And it's all about talent or managing talent, like managing people in the workplace. So that can have an HR or recruiting or. It's quite often business leaders talking about challenges in their careers.

All right, well, awesome. Really a pleasure to jump on the call and chat with everybody

>> Sarah St. John: All right, well, awesome. Well, I appreciate it. And I will link those, below this video.

>> Lance: Thanks very much, everybody. Really a pleasure to jump on the call and chat with everybody and listen. Thank you.