Editing (Podcast)

Chances are good that no matter how good you get at producing your podcast, you're still going to want to do some editing. You'll want to remove the countdown from the beginning of your recording, for one thing. And you may have plenty of other reasons to edit. Many podcasters do a quick "top and tail" edit, where they make sure the beginning and end of their podcast sounds right. This is the minimum you should do.

You can completely change the feel of a program by editing the flow of the material. You can make your guests sound better (or worse) with editing. As mentioned in the preceding section, you can also edit the program to include any pick-ups you did. Editing is a very powerful tool in your production arsenal. The following few sections are intended to give you an idea of how editing can be used to improve your podcast.

Editing for convenience
We covered the concept of pick-ups, where you record the intro and outro for the podcast after the actual interview, or perhaps re-record yourself asking questions to your guests, or even cover a topic that you forgot to cover in the body of the program. These pick-ups must be placed into the body of the podcast, where they belong. It's a simple copy-and-paste operation that saves you the hassle of having to do the entire show over again.

Editing for flow
Unless you (and your guests) have a significant amount of broadcast experience, chances are good that sections of your podcast may drag a little. Perhaps the answer to a question got a little longwinded, or it took you three or four attempts to frame a question the way you wanted to ask it. While a certain amount of this keeps the podcast sounding natural, too much of it can make your podcast sound unprofessional and frustrate your audience. If you find a natural place to edit, try taking out some of the extraneous material. For example, consider the following:

"I've been wondering, because you've been doing this for so many years, and, well, we've known each other for what, ten years now? Anyhow, as an observer of Internet trends and how they adapt, where do you see podcasting in five years' time?"

This could probably be cut to, "I've been wondering, where do you see podcasting in five years' time?" or even "Where do you see podcasting in five years' time?" Some of the removed content may have added color, but you really have to ask yourself whether the information is necessary, and whether your audience will be interested in it. In general, less is more, and it's best to edit when things start to wander off course.

Editing for content
Another thing to ask yourself is whether everything you recorded is necessary. You may have asked a few questions that really didn't go anywhere or didn't really yield any significant insights. Remember that your audience is tuning in for a reason, and if you're not staying on topic, you run the risk of losing them. Another thing to consider is how the topics covered in the podcast are related.

For example, you may start off talking about topic A and then realize that folks need to know about topic B to understand topic A. So you talk about topic B for awhile and then go back to topic A. You may consider moving the discussion of topic B before topic A. Of course, this depends on whether the edits are even possible and whether they feel natural. Editing is incredibly powerful, but it can be a double-edged sword. If an edit is noticeable, you're doing more damage than good. You can't always edit things the way you want.

Tip Another reason to do pick-ups is to cover edits. If you need to remove a large section of content, you can hide the edit by asking a question that seemingly joins the two edited sections.

Editing for quality
Most people, particularly if they don't have lots of broadcast experience, tend to insert lots of "ums" and "ahs" in their conversation, often without even realizing it. In fact, you may be surprised to discover your own verbal "tics" the first time you listen to your podcast recording. This is where editing can be incredibly effective, and it can make you and your guests sound much better. Edit out the offending tics, and presto, you'll sound like a professional.

Tip You may want to edit out breaths taken in the middle of sentences. Breath noise can be particularly problematic if you're using compression, because breaths sound louder. The simple solution is to remove the offending breaths. However, sometimes when you remove breath noise, the resulting sentence doesn't quite "flow" right. The solution is to add a small amount of silence where the breath was, so the sentence doesn't sound rushed.

Editing how-to's
Editing is a really simple operation on most audio editing platforms. All you really have to do is highlight the section you want to work on, and then either delete it or copy it so you can paste it somewhere else in your program. One thing that is really important, particularly if you're going to be doing extensive editing, is to save a "raw" version of the original interview. That way, if you somehow mess up the edited version, you always can go back to the original and start from scratch.

In fact, if you're going to be doing lots of editing, you may want to save intermediate versions. For example, the first thing you may do is tidy up the start and end, and remove all the ums and ahs to clean up the podcast. You should save this version, with something in the file name to indicate what stage of the edit you're at. After you've saved this version, you can then do further editing, removing or rearranging sections of your program. Save this as a third and final master of your program. If you decide that you don't like some of the edits, you won't have to start from scratch.