How I Edit: Pre-Processing the Audio
Posted 11 years, 25 weeks ago.
The best way to get clean audio is to do everything you can to improve the basic recording: don’t record in a room where echo is present, close the doors so you don’t get noise from outside, and ensure that you use something other than the mic built into your monitor or laptop.
But even then, there is noise that can make it onto the recording. For a long time I used a Macbook Pro that had begun showing it’s age by revving up the fans as it tried to stay cool during a recording. Depending on the weather, you might have noise from an air conditioner. You might even just have low-end equipment which presents some noise in the background.
All of this will make editing difficult, and in some cases can be distracting or annoying, so you’ll want to get rid of it.
How I Edit
Posted 11 years, 25 weeks ago.
Up until about Tuesday this past week, I had an episode ready to launch as Topical’s first (or its first legitimate episode, anyway). This changed pretty soon after the Apple event that occurred on the 9th, as Rusty had some feels to get out.
This lead to recording an episode, and as I was otherwise occupied for the remainder of the week, handing over the editing reins to Russell. He had never edited audio before, but I gave him the best start I could and left him to it. The result? A Friday where we each took turns making improvements to his original edit and prepping it as quickly as we could so we could get it out there on-time, or as close to as was possible.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to somewhat document my editing process in a series of blog posts. These are mainly for his sake, but also because there are a lot of potential podcasters out there who would like to know how this process takes place. While I am by no means an expert in audio editing, I pride myself in the quality I put out, and maybe this will help others improve theirs.
I’ll be writing and publishing these over the next few weeks and linking to them from here. I hope you enjoy the read, and maybe learn something. If you think I’m doing something wrong, please let me know; I’m always up for learning a better way of handling this stuff. God knows I could do it better.
