How we podcast
(Updated 9th June 2010)
I thought it might be useful to let everybody know how we go about making the podcast. Over the last year and a half I have been trying to reduce the effort needed as much as possible, and I believe that the more effort you need to put into the sooner people burn out. We prepare two shows per week, one news and one that alternates between what we're playing and a topic. This means that the shows that need a lot of preparation (topics) are only every other week and they have more time to be prepared.
The show preperation starts on Sunday night and continues on until Sunday afternoon with news gathering. This is easy as it's just starring news items in Google Reader that may or may not be interesting in the show. No effort is spent yet determining how accurate the stories are as there's still time before we record for other people to do that work for us, and I don't try and work out what's important and what isn't yet either as something new will probably crop up before we record anyway. Friday night is an important time for news as important things tend to break on a Friday it seems. This could be a coincidence, positive reinforcement on my side or people trying to hide news over the weekend.
On Sunday I take a look at the stories I’ve accumulated over the week and make some judgement calls about what is important and what isn’t. I’ll chase up anything I think is dodgy or hasn’t been reported much by anybody else and end up with a bunch of links open in Firefox as tabs. I add that tab group to my bookmarks and call the folder the date for that show. I then use the organise bookmarks feature to change the order of the news so that I’m happy with a running order. At this stage not all items listed may make it on the show, and I’ll usually have more items than I’ll need. During all of this notes are written in a notebook so that I know what I must cover with each item. Because a normal notebook would be too low tech I use a Livescribe Pulse pen. I also keep a notebook next to my computer and console to record notes as I play for the what we’re playing shows.
Come Sunday afternoon we’re ready to record. Tim drives over sometime in the afternoon and generally puts up with watching me play games until we really can’t put off recording something.
Since time and effort are so important the biggest thing we do is record as live. When we do a whole show that needs no edits then that saves a lot of extra work snipping pauses, erms and asides out of the audio. This saves me about two hours post-processing time over when we started, and it also means that the recording of the show itself takes up not much longer than we talk and more time can be spent with playing games.
Our actual recording equipment in the studio is a pair of microphones and a Zoom R66 recorder. We started off using USB microphones and recording directly onto a mac, but there were too many occasions where we lost audio due to application crashes or the USB mics being reduced to just recording static. Previously we were using a Zoom H4n, which as a small dedicated recorder also has the advantage of being able to be used in the field with a built in mic as well as two proper connectors on the bottom for studio work. This is the taser you'll hear mentioned when we're talking about going places. The move to the R66 was to support more than two microphones, which we only really need when we have a third person or are doing something silly like Dalek voices. The files created used to be us on either side (left and right) of a stereo wav or mp3 file (The h4n) but with the R66 we have moved to having a separate mono WAV file for each microphone. This doesn't create much of an issue in reality when it comes to editing the show. Because we’re just sitting at a desk there is bleed through of both of our voices onto each others channels through being picked up by the microphones and any synchronisation issues would be very apparent by adding an echo to the podcast, but the editing software does a great job at stopping this from happening. We use two condenser microphones with pop shields, but to be honest the microphone type doesn't matter as long as it sounds good. A lot of cheap headset mics sound awful, but a £20 dynamic mic will sound better than them. A nice condenser will sound really good though, and you can spend hundreds on them if you go nuts. Don't do that just for a podcast.
Currently we use two AKG perfection 150 microphones, which are also used for various other pieces of recording I do. It's not really the same as the microphones you see everybody else use but they work well enough for our needs.
You may even already own a microphone and not realise you can use it. The ones that come with rockband (and I assume Guitar Hero World Tour) are USB and work on your PC no problem. In fact the Rock Band one I have is just a rebranded Logitech one.
The R66 also does a good job with my electric guitar when I want to record it or use it with headphones, but I promise never to use that in a podcast.
Zoom H4n
Zoom R16There is nothing wrong with recording directly into your recording software at all, with our current setup we could do it fine now without trouble. There's also nothing wrong with using Skype to record the audio, it works very well for that. You really don't need external hardware unless you want a bit more flexibility.
We record two pieces for each show. The first is the pre-music introduction and this generally does actually take a few takes. This isn’t actually a bad thing as it means that we end up getting into the mindset to record while doing this and, if you’re interested, the record number of times it’s taken Tim to get the name of the show right, what the date or show number is and what virginworlds.com is called is six.
We next record the main show segment, which starts with me remembering that I’ve not thought of a nice way to start yet and just saying the same old thing. We then just natter through the next hour through what we’re talking about and are done. If it’s a news show then I work my way through the tabs open in firefox (it’s important to have them opened ahead of time, which is why saving them as a folder in your bookmarks is handy as you can open them all at once, and I use my hand written notes to help remember what I’m saying. As we cover each story I use an add-in for Firefox called Zotero to add each page into a folder in that, which also has the current date in it. Zotero is a research tool that generates bibliographies and I use this to generate the show notes. When we’ve run out of things to say or news items to cover we stop recording and get back to playing games. If anything does come up during the show that really does need fixing like a pause or the doorbell going off I make a note in the notebook of the time according to the recorder so I can address it in the edit.
Later on I will edit a show using Logic on the Mac. There is nothing special about Logic and any audio editing application will do. I have created a template for the podcast that contains the theme music with automation set up to fade the music down over time from the end of the main part. We have a three track setup with the music on track three and I drop the two wav files from the Zoom recorder (mounted as a disk drive over USB) into track one and two. I then move the outro music from where I left it on the template (about an hour in) to the real end of the show so that we have a gradual fade up to the end of the show. This sounds better than just stopping.
My logic template has a compressor configured for all tracks. Track 1 and is a standard setup to make the volumes a bit more useful and smooth out times when heads may not be as near to the mic as they should be, or voices are raised. A compressor has nothing to do with file size, but in fact works on the volume to effectively smooth over the differences and make it all as loud as it should be.
Track three has another compressor, which is configured via something called a side chain to be a dipper. This means that when there is sound on track one or two (us speaking) it reduces the sound of the music. By doing this I should technically never have to worry about dipping audio down manually while we speak, which is one of the mistakes everybody will make from time to time.
If we recorded everything correctly then at this stage I know that everything is fine content wise. I will then check various parts of the recording to make sure the sound is OK, and use the waveform on the track view to guide me. If needs be I can use automation to push the compressor higher for individual sections, but I don’t need to do that very often. If other music is needed to be added I will drop that onto track two to take advantage of the compressor and check that it does indeed dip down a suitable amount. This part takes less than half an hour nowadays, and can take as short a time as 10 minutes. I no longer listen to the whole show to make sure I didn’t miss anything as I’m making notes as we go. Before that was the most time consuming part of the process as a one hour show would take two or more hours to edit.
When I’m happy with the show I hit bounce in Logic and it goes off to create a mono MP3 file. We're just two people talking so I don't feel stereo is worth the extra file size and annoys some people when using headphones, but if you really want to do stereo yourself just make sure that you're not putting people fully on one side or the other. Mixing it so that you can hear everybody a bit on one side will at least enable people who are deaf in one ear or really annoyed by it to still listen on headphones. At this point I lose interest and turn the Xbox on. When I remember that the bounce should be finished I open the resulting MP3 into iTunes and check the start, end and make a note of the runtime. I then use iTunes to add album artwork and edit the ID3 tags. I then drag the file to the desktop, rename it and start my FTP client to upload the file to libsyn. Then I go back to playing games.
When I remember that the upload would have finished a while back I then head over to Libsyn and post the show. If it’s a what we’re playing show I just need to remember what we talked about, and I’ll have made notes about that. If it’s a news show then I select all the news items in Zotero and drag them into a text editor. This gives me the html for a list of items using a custom citation style that I created. This is then copy and pasted into the notes and published. I then ping feedburner to force it to update my feed. A similar thing is then done with the vanhemlock.com post about the show and everybody can then have a listen to what we’ve been saying.
Common Mistakes I Think That People Make
Listening to other podcasts there are a few things that I consider mistakes that I notice people making. I've made them all before, so don't worry if you do.
Over compressing the audio
This time compression means making the file smaller. If you start to hear a slightly borg like noise around your voice when you talk then you're probably making your MP3 file too small. Up the bitrate a bit and try again, I always prefer a slightly larger file that sounds great to one that doesn't.
Dead Air
If you are recording on your own then I'm afraid you will have to edit out dead air. If you have a co-host then you both should be aware of dead air and be prepared to jump in and fill.
The music is too loud
Many times music will be too loud to hear people speaking. Use a ducker to automate this and you will be a lot happier. I've yet to personally decide what the optimal levels are for this.
Taking too long to edit
If your show takes too long to edit you WILL end up with a situation where you don't have the time to get it out. More than a couple of shows have died because the episodes were taking too long to edit and then weeks were passing between recording and posting. After a while of this the shows nearly all die.
Running out of things to talk about
This is a tough one. If you have a single game show and that game has very little happening in it then the motivation for making a show can be small, especially if you don't have anybody to banter with on the show. This is possibly the hardest thing about doing a single person show to my mind.
Bad headset Microphone
Some headset microphones sound REALLY bad. If you have one record it and see how it sounds. It might be good enough, I've certainly had ones that are but I've also had ones that are awful. There's a real art to microphone selection and the big secret is that it's not all down to how much they cost or what type they are, don't buy into the hype of needing expensive ones to sound OK.
Bad microphone usage
When you talk and breathe you blow air at your microphone. This is bad if you can hear it. You also get something called pop when you say sounds like words with hard Ps in them. This is where pop filters and proper microphone placement come in. A recording studio will always have somebody monitoring what is being recorded to listen for problems, and I do this for us when we record by wearing headphones. One of the real benefits of my using dedicated equipment is that I get realtime monitoring of the audio and so I get to hear this without any delay. If I had delay then I'd be hearing what I said nearly a second ago in my headphones and believe me, it's hard to concentrate with that happening. If you don't have this luxury then simply learning what causes the problems, using a pop shield and having the correct microphone placement will go a long way here.
Background Music
Background music, also called a bedding track, is something that people either love or hate depending on where you are from and (I suspect) how old you are as we never really seemed to have them in the UK for TV shows when I was growing up, but now they're everywhere. I've tried it on our show and didn't like it, but I do run the theme under some of when we talk so we sort of have it. If you do want it then it is vitally important that it's subtle and doesn't draw your attention away from the content. I've already mentioned it being too loud, but another thing to think about is the repetition of it. If you're looping a 3 minute track then I want to kill you before the end of the episode. If you have a bedding track then you need to think about it. Something ambient is good, I'm sure your game has a suitable track to use if you're a game specific show. Look at some of the Eve podcasts for some good examples of the types of tracks to use. No high energy tracks from the action parts of games or films please.
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