Tips : Editing Your Podcast

After you've transferred your video to your computer, you need to tidy up the rough edges of your video production and turn your podcast into a masterpiece. Well, we can hope, can't we? You should edit with an eye on three things: content, quality, and convenience.

First and foremost, you want your podcast to have good content from start to finish. If you are interviewing a guest for your podcast, you probably had a long list of questions to ask. When you're reviewing your footage, try to keep your distance from the material, and only keep what works best. Of course, some guests may be fantastic, and you'll want to keep every syllable they utter. Often, however, you'll find that a few questions just didn't go anywhere or didn't reveal anything new (see the "Ask the Right Questions" side bar). If so, edit it out. With a few nimble edits, the pacing of a show can change dramatically, turning a mediocre show into a great show.

Keep edits short and sharp
When you're editing, most edit platforms offer a number of transition options for you to choose from. In general, anything other than a quick cross fade (also known as a dissolve) should be avoided, for a couple of key reasons. First, if you watch closely, crazy transitions are almost never used on television or in film. Over-the-top transitions detract from the story line and call way too much attention to themselves. For this reason, they're a dead giveaway that an amateur is at the controls. Second, there's a technological reason why you shouldn't use complicated transitions. They are incredibly difficult to encode. If you're encoding for a broadband audience, the bit rates you use simply aren't capable of encoding that much motion efficiently. You'll either end up with a transition that looks like mud, or you'll be forced to encode your podcast at a higher bit rate, which means a larger file, a longer download for your audience, and a bigger bandwidth bill at the end of the month.

Cutaways
Cutaways are small pieces of film that you can use when editing video, often used to cover up an edit. Editing video can be tricky because people can see when and where you edit your video. You can't just cut out the middle of an interview without some clever editing, or people will notice that there's something missing. This is where cutaways can really help.

Imagine an interview on a conference floor, where someone rudely interrupts your guest while she's answering a question. Unless the interruption was by someone important (or it was really funny), you probably want to edit it out of the podcast. If you just cut it out, there will be a sudden jump in the video (known as a "jump cut" in the industry). You have to disguise your cut using a cutaway.

Here's how it works: When the interruption occurs, cut to some b-roll, like a shot of you nodding in agreement or a shot of the conference room floor. Let the audio of your guest's response continue to play underneath the b-roll. Then, you can cut from the b-roll with the guest audio underneath it to an appropriate location after the interruption occurred. The jump cut will be hidden by the b-roll, and your secret will be safe. This editing approach is illustrated in Figure 1.


Figure 1: Use cutaways to disguise your edits.

Tip Provided you have plenty of cutaway material, it's often easiest to edit your story together by editing to your audio and then covering any awkward transitions with cutaway or B-roll material.