Episode 7 Joan and the Savvy Podcaster Editing Part 1

Series 2 of The Arc of Joan takes a non-fiction detour. I am "playing" a dry witted narrator for an audio tour guide into creating podcast fiction in this 10 part series. This series gives independent producers a step by step guide and a few important hacks to help develop and create their own audio drama series. Episode 7 gives the first part of editing the show which is software set up, Actors sides, music and stitching.

Below you will find the transcript to this podcast. There will be a test afterward. Jay Kay. This tour is a basic overview of the steps involved with creating an Audio Drama Series, whether it be a comedy or drama or horror show. It is not an opus or the be all and end all of how to create an Audio Drama. But, hopefully it will help give someone a general idea of what they are getting into before they start creating and producing.

This podcast was created on Audacity software, using the helpful resources from freesound.org and freemusicarchive.org and John Bartmann did the music from JohnBartmann.com

 

 

Hey Y'all. Welcome back to: Joan and the savvy podcaster. Episode: 7 Editing Part 1, Loading and Stitching. My name is Saylor Billings and I created the Audio Sitcom, The Arc of Joan. But this next 10-part series is dedicated to creating and producing Audio Drama Podcasts without breaking the bank. The blog associated with this podcast is located at: https://thearcofjoan.blogspot.com/
In this episode I’m going to talk about the first part of editing together the podcast.

I mentioned the tutorials available online associated with learning the tech’s of how to use Audio editing software in previous episodes. But sometimes, when you’re starting out, you don’t know enough to ask the right questions or search for knowledge. So instead of giving you step by step instructions or how to load files into software I want to give you a better overview of how these programs work and what to watch out for. Just as a reminder, I use the Audacity Editing Software and we are using as a reference example a 12 part series, 30 minute episode that is recorded remotely.
First off, the WAV files that you will be editing with are larger than the MP3 files, much larger, like 10 times that of MP3 which can cause computers to crash and which is why I run my Audacity off of my giant external hard-drive. Wav files are uncompressed and MP3’s are compressed. So if you haven’t done it already you’ll want to direct the program to your external hard drive and store your libraries and directories in the external hard drive so you don’t use up all of your computer’s memory while editing. You do all this in the preferences before you start loading things onto the editing software. In Audacity the preferences are under the “Audacity” drop down menu and you’ll see lots of choices. Under the Quality drop down menu is the bit and kHz, choose what bests suits you but I’ve always used 16 bits and 44.1 kHz, those are also Apple iTunes default setting. At least it was while I’m recording this but you never know, things change really fast.

Once you’ve got the software set up, you’re ready to start loading and editing. Just kidding. This is the hard part. Where the rubber meets the road. Any mistakes you’ve made in the pre-production is going to be amplified ten-fold in this next part. You do have to be exacting in the stitching and the editing but not so much as you close yourself off to happy accidents. This is where that second script, the editing script and the spread sheet you made comes in handy. In the editing portion you are going to edit in .WAV (if you are using Audacity) which gives it a left and right signal and then before you upload to the host web-site you’ll convert that to an MP3. If the actor’s send you a MP3 file, that’s fine, just convert it to wav while you edit. You can use the Audacity for that or iTunes, really any sound editing software should be able to do this.
There are 3 thing you need to do after you receive the actors files. Save, Listen, Edit.
When the actors send you their files with all their *sides in them (*sides are the portion of the script with that actors lines on them) I immediately download them onto the external hard drive and the thumb drive then I load them into the audio editing software that’s on the computer and just listen to them all the way through. The first listen is for any anomalies to the track. Hissing, mic pop’s, background noise, reverb, level’s etc. My goal is to fix these little problems and get everyone on the same level as if they are in the same room and to do that I might run them through the noise reduction or mess with the EQ’s to isolate them further. Remember that 5 second sample you asked the actors to record at the beginning of their sides recording, now is when you’ll use that. When you open the Noise Reduction filter in Audacity it will ask you to choose a few seconds to get a noise profile. That is the 5 second sample the filter program is asking for in Audacity. Just a real quick EQ overview here. Every once in a while, someone will accidently bump their mic and not know it but it sounds like a giant thump(!) to you. In whatever editing software you’re using you want to highlight that thump, and just the thump, open the EQ board, on the left of the board should be the low end of frequencies about like 60 to 80-ish you want to lower that down till the thump is muted. Also, on the other end, the high frequencies you can dip any weird wind whistle that pops up. Some actors need to be juiced. Think of it like those old time movie lens gauzes that gave actors that ethereal look. In the EQ Person 1 might need EQ 200 and 400 gently moved until it sounds right.
Generally, I wait till I’ve gotten and listened to everyone’s sides and whoever had the “flattest” or “deadest” room tone I match everyone’s to that. If the scene is taking place outside, or in a “party” scene that doesn’t matter as much. Every room has it’s own tone; carpeting, tile, wood, high ceilings, ceiling fans, low ceilings, windows, all of this makes the room tone. Once you match everyone together you’ll have your baseline for everything else you edit into the mix.

You can do this part in two different ways. First you can load the actors sides files into the editing program and level them all out so that they have the same room tone. Then load them into a separate project, the main Episode # project.  Or you can simply load them into the main Episode project and do it there. I load them all into the main Episode project even though it would probably be easier to do it the first way.
As a side note when I’m setting up the tracks in Audacity, I always load in on the first few tracks the show music, the intro, and the next track is the cross fade to the room tone, I add the character voices and sound effects tracks. But do what makes sense for you and helps keep you organized.

I do a second listen so I can hear the actor’s reacting to one another. Let’s use a 3 person scene as an example. The set-up is: two people are in a room talking seriously about a recent crime. The third person walk’s in: “Hey y’all”. The other two respond, “Hey.” The actors have given you 3 takes each.  The first actor “Hey! Ya’ll.” “Hey ya’ll” or “Hey, ya’ll” So the other actor’s also give you 3 takes, “Hey!” “Hey” and “Hey?” I immediately know I’m not going to use the take that has the “Hey?” in it because it wouldn’t make sense so I delete it. However, make double sure you don’t want that take. I probably won’t use that “Hey! Ya’ll” take either but I’m going to hang onto it for right now because it’s interesting because I didn’t write that character as a suspect for the crime but the way they said that line make’s them kind of dodgy and the other actor’s don’t react to it making it “sound” like they suspect her. So, you see, in a way, you are kind of rewriting the script with the actor’s reacting to one another. And here’s a trick, use someone as the anchor in a scene: If you have an actor who is just a ringer, every side they give you is just dead on what the scene needed, someone who could react to a wall and give a great performance, then take everyone’s reaction line’s to match their lines. And/Or if you have someone who’s just off the wall, on the floor funny with each line reading, make sure every reaction line hit’s a different “note”. That’s another reason to ask for 3 readings per side. “Did you like THAT?” “Did YOU like that?” “Did you LIKE that?”  Now that I’ve got everyone on a baseline and I’ve listened to everyone’s sides, I have a pretty good idea of how I want to proceed with the story.

This is also where I build the room tones, atmosphere’s, and ambiance. The room tones, we’ve discussed. The atmosphere is less tangible. So, I have a room tone that I’m laying under the vocal tracks but if there is a light hearted moment in the dialogue I will lift the ceiling and give it breathing room. That means in the mixing after I’m done stitching it together I will add a little reverb to the vocal track. If there is a scene meant to be scary I will lower it and deaden the other sounds making the listeners ears perk up to even the slightest sound. Or I will add a low droning hum just before something happens. Ambiance is the mood I want to set and I use the scene change music to indicate. If, at the end of one scene, I have a character saying that they are going to drive somewhere and the next scene is at that place I will have the scene change music be a bit longer, just by a couple of beats. But if I have to start ramping up the pace of what is happening I will shorten the scene change music to just a couple of beats.
So I take the music I want to use for the show and I cut that up and save it in beats. Ambling scene change, scene change, and quick scene change. I’ve gone thru all the scene’s in and set the baseline room tones. 

Then I start slicing and dicing everyone’s lines. I’m not lining them up yet I’m just taking each person’s sides and cutting out the portion I want to use and as I go along cutting, I move the track further to the right. This takes forever but you’ll get really fast at it.
I start in page increments to build each scene. Let’s say on page 1 I have 3 people talking. I take those line reading sections and line them up so I can make sure they react and give me a picture of what is happening. And I continue doing that for each page of the whole scene.  And remember the extra page in the script you made? The one with the list of everyone’s sounds, “Katie’s doorbell, Laura’s room tone, etc.” those files that you’ve already cleaned up and are ready to load into the program? Pull it out, this is where you need it. I also start to load into the tracks the sound effects. There are two ways to do this. You can load all the Katie’s Doorbell SFX into one track or for each time you use it you can make another track. I know in Audible this happens, I’m not sure about other programs; just beware that if you use the same track with 7 separate Katie’s doorbell effects when you load each of them in it will alter the track. So you load the first one in at 5 minutes, 2.0000 seconds and the next one happens at minute 7.400 it will alter the 5.2000 to however long that effect lasts like it will alter it to 5.5000 seconds. It’s a pain but I use the same track because it’s less of a pain than making sure I have 7 separate tracks all with the same technical everything else. (That’s just me, you do you.) Now do that for every page, scene by scene, till your dead. I mean done. After your first episode, you will have learned everything you need to learn and the rest is gravy. But it’s a steep learning curve.

That’s it for now. Next weeks episode will go through the elusive Podcast Mastering.
And if you haven’t been told yet, I hope you have a great rest of your day!

getting into before they start creating and producing.

This podcast was created on Audacity software, using the helpful resources from freesound.org and freemusicarchive.org and John Bartmann did the music from JohnBartmann.com

 

 

Hey Y'all. Welcome back to: Joan and the savvy podcaster. Episode: 7 Editing Part 1, Loading and Stitching. My name is Saylor Billings and I created the Audio Sitcom, The Arc of Joan. But this next 10-part series is dedicated to creating and producing Audio Drama Podcasts without breaking the bank. The blog associated with this podcast is located at: https://thearcofjoan.blogspot.com/
In this episode I’m going to talk about the first part of editing together the podcast.

I mentioned the tutorials available online associated with learning the tech’s of how to use Audio editing software in previous episodes. But sometimes, when you’re starting out, you don’t know enough to ask the right questions or search for knowledge. So instead of giving you step by step instructions or how to load files into software I want to give you a better overview of how these programs work and what to watch out for. Just as a reminder, I use the Audacity Editing Software and we are using as a reference example a 12 part series, 30 minute episode that is recorded remotely.
First off, the WAV files that you will be editing with are larger than the MP3 files, much larger, like 10 times that of MP3 which can cause computers to crash and which is why I run my Audacity off of my giant external hard-drive. Wav files are uncompressed and MP3’s are compressed. So if you haven’t done it already you’ll want to direct the program to your external hard drive and store your libraries and directories in the external hard drive so you don’t use up all of your computer’s memory while editing. You do all this in the preferences before you start loading things onto the editing software. In Audacity the preferences are under the “Audacity” drop down menu and you’ll see lots of choices. Under the Quality drop down menu is the bit and kHz, choose what bests suits you but I’ve always used 16 bits and 44.1 kHz, those are also Apple iTunes default setting. At least it was while I’m recording this but you never know, things change really fast.

Once you’ve got the software set up, you’re ready to start loading and editing. Just kidding. This is the hard part. Where the rubber meets the road. Any mistakes you’ve made in the pre-production is going to be amplified ten-fold in this next part. You do have to be exacting in the stitching and the editing but not so much as you close yourself off to happy accidents. This is where that second script, the editing script and the spread sheet you made comes in handy. In the editing portion you are going to edit in .WAV (if you are using Audacity) which gives it a left and right signal and then before you upload to the host web-site you’ll convert that to an MP3. If the actor’s send you a MP3 file, that’s fine, just convert it to wav while you edit. You can use the Audacity for that or iTunes, really any sound editing software should be able to do this.
There are 3 thing you need to do after you receive the actors files. Save, Listen, Edit.
When the actors send you their files with all their *sides in them (*sides are the portion of the script with that actors lines on them) I immediately download them onto the external hard drive and the thumb drive then I load them into the audio editing software that’s on the computer and just listen to them all the way through. The first listen is for any anomalies to the track. Hissing, mic pop’s, background noise, reverb, level’s etc. My goal is to fix these little problems and get everyone on the same level as if they are in the same room and to do that I might run them through the noise reduction or mess with the EQ’s to isolate them further. Remember that 5 second sample you asked the actors to record at the beginning of their sides recording, now is when you’ll use that. When you open the Noise Reduction filter in Audacity it will ask you to choose a few seconds to get a noise profile. That is the 5 second sample the filter program is asking for in Audacity. Just a real quick EQ overview here. Every once in a while, someone will accidently bump their mic and not know it but it sounds like a giant thump(!) to you. In whatever editing software you’re using you want to highlight that thump, and just the thump, open the EQ board, on the left of the board should be the low end of frequencies about like 60 to 80-ish you want to lower that down till the thump is muted. Also, on the other end, the high frequencies you can dip any weird wind whistle that pops up. Some actors need to be juiced. Think of it like those old time movie lens gauzes that gave actors that ethereal look. In the EQ Person 1 might need EQ 200 and 400 gently moved until it sounds right.
Generally, I wait till I’ve gotten and listened to everyone’s sides and whoever had the “flattest” or “deadest” room tone I match everyone’s to that. If the scene is taking place outside, or in a “party” scene that doesn’t matter as much. Every room has it’s own tone; carpeting, tile, wood, high ceilings, ceiling fans, low ceilings, windows, all of this makes the room tone. Once you match everyone together you’ll have your baseline for everything else you edit into the mix.

You can do this part in two different ways. First you can load the actors sides files into the editing program and level them all out so that they have the same room tone. Then load them into a separate project, the main Episode # project.  Or you can simply load them into the main Episode project and do it there. I load them all into the main Episode project even though it would probably be easier to do it the first way.
As a side note when I’m setting up the tracks in Audacity, I always load in on the first few tracks the show music, the intro, and the next track is the cross fade to the room tone, I add the character voices and sound effects tracks. But do what makes sense for you and helps keep you organized.

I do a second listen so I can hear the actor’s reacting to one another. Let’s use a 3 person scene as an example. The set-up is: two people are in a room talking seriously about a recent crime. The third person walk’s in: “Hey y’all”. The other two respond, “Hey.” The actors have given you 3 takes each.  The first actor “Hey! Ya’ll.” “Hey ya’ll” or “Hey, ya’ll” So the other actor’s also give you 3 takes, “Hey!” “Hey” and “Hey?” I immediately know I’m not going to use the take that has the “Hey?” in it because it wouldn’t make sense so I delete it. However, make double sure you don’t want that take. I probably won’t use that “Hey! Ya’ll” take either but I’m going to hang onto it for right now because it’s interesting because I didn’t write that character as a suspect for the crime but the way they said that line make’s them kind of dodgy and the other actor’s don’t react to it making it “sound” like they suspect her. So, you see, in a way, you are kind of rewriting the script with the actor’s reacting to one another. And here’s a trick, use someone as the anchor in a scene: If you have an actor who is just a ringer, every side they give you is just dead on what the scene needed, someone who could react to a wall and give a great performance, then take everyone’s reaction line’s to match their lines. And/Or if you have someone who’s just off the wall, on the floor funny with each line reading, make sure every reaction line hit’s a different “note”. That’s another reason to ask for 3 readings per side. “Did you like THAT?” “Did YOU like that?” “Did you LIKE that?”  Now that I’ve got everyone on a baseline and I’ve listened to everyone’s sides, I have a pretty good idea of how I want to proceed with the story.

This is also where I build the room tones, atmosphere’s, and ambiance. The room tones, we’ve discussed. The atmosphere is less tangible. So, I have a room tone that I’m laying under the vocal tracks but if there is a light hearted moment in the dialogue I will lift the ceiling and give it breathing room. That means in the mixing after I’m done stitching it together I will add a little reverb to the vocal track. If there is a scene meant to be scary I will lower it and deaden the other sounds making the listeners ears perk up to even the slightest sound. Or I will add a low droning hum just before something happens. Ambiance is the mood I want to set and I use the scene change music to indicate. If, at the end of one scene, I have a character saying that they are going to drive somewhere and the next scene is at that place I will have the scene change music be a bit longer, just by a couple of beats. But if I have to start ramping up the pace of what is happening I will shorten the scene change music to just a couple of beats.
So I take the music I want to use for the show and I cut that up and save it in beats. Ambling scene change, scene change, and quick scene change. I’ve gone thru all the scene’s in and set the baseline room tones. 

Then I start slicing and dicing everyone’s lines. I’m not lining them up yet I’m just taking each person’s sides and cutting out the portion I want to use and as I go along cutting, I move the track further to the right. This takes forever but you’ll get really fast at it.
I start in page increments to build each scene. Let’s say on page 1 I have 3 people talking. I take those line reading sections and line them up so I can make sure they react and give me a picture of what is happening. And I continue doing that for each page of the whole scene.  And remember the extra page in the script you made? The one with the list of everyone’s sounds, “Katie’s doorbell, Laura’s room tone, etc.” those files that you’ve already cleaned up and are ready to load into the program? Pull it out, this is where you need it. I also start to load into the tracks the sound effects. There are two ways to do this. You can load all the Katie’s Doorbell SFX into one track or for each time you use it you can make another track. I know in Audible this happens, I’m not sure about other programs; just beware that if you use the same track with 7 separate Katie’s doorbell effects when you load each of them in it will alter the track. So you load the first one in at 5 minutes, 2.0000 seconds and the next one happens at minute 7.400 it will alter the 5.2000 to however long that effect lasts like it will alter it to 5.5000 seconds. It’s a pain but I use the same track because it’s less of a pain than making sure I have 7 separate tracks all with the same technical everything else. (That’s just me, you do you.) Now do that for every page, scene by scene, till your dead. I mean done. After your first episode, you will have learned everything you need to learn and the rest is gravy. But it’s a steep learning curve.

That’s it for now. Next weeks episode will go through the elusive Podcast Mastering.
And if you haven’t been told yet, I hope you have a great rest of your day!