Podcast Post-Processing / Editing
Once I had finished the recording stage of my podcast production I took the speech clip in protools and cut sections using the selector and separate tools to remove some dead noise and a couple of stumbled lines, using the crossfade to blend the cut points together. As audio processing of the speech clip was not permitted for this assignment, the rest of the editing was focused on the two accompanying tracks which consist of the backing audio and opening / outro jingles. For the backing track I found some royalty free audio off Uppbeat.com, Cushty by Richard Smithson, this was to keep a nice subtle flow throughout the podcast as I personally find dry speech audio to be somewhat awkward for the listener and with the use of backing music in podcasts being something I found utilised by other podcast creators whilst listening to references.
For the jingles I used ableton’s software instrument Operator with the Silver Keys preset as I felt this was a lighter sound in contrast to the backing music that I had picked and created a nice noticeable que for distinguishing the opening and end of the podcast, to account for the theoretical idea that if this was in a playlist with other podcast episodes the jingles are to separate out and I found these sounds did that to my liking. For these samples I created I then enhanced them slightly in the protools mixer, adding some reverb with a 100% room size, slight delay and 100% spread to create a wide stereo effect to the track for it to then transition cleanly specially into the stereo backing track which the vocals then sit distinctly onto of.
When it came finally to levelling the tracks, I found the vocals needed a slight boost of 3.6db, and then sat the backing at a much lower level of -36db from what it was, this sat it nicely in the back of the mix so that the vocals took the main focus but the audio was still clear and could give a nice subconscious effect for the listener focusing on the vocals. This was then bordered with the jingles levelled between the backing and the vocals at -16.3db.
To finalise the production I then bounced the audio tracks together at 48 KHz sample rate at 24bits per sample, being the standard audio file properties for a podcast, this was to a wav file format which maintains a lossless quality, this again being the standard for recordings which may next be uploaded online as with such data transfers if the audio file was lossy (mp3) then quality would be lost, and being a podcast quality of both vocals and backing should be of course high.
