Day 14: Editing Episodes

Today we discuss everything you need to edit your podcast episodes including the editing software, whether you should edit yourself or outsource, recommended things to edit in your audio, and reflecting on your editing process.

Steps for Skill Mastery:

1. Practice editing the sound quality
2. Practice editing the script
3. Reflect on your practice episode

Step 1: Edit Your Episode Sound Quality

Today we will be editing our sample episodes we recorded yesterday so we can familiarize ourselves with the editing process.

Some things you will want to consider editing are:

• Background white noise
• Silencing unwanted things like dogs barking, phones, coughs, sneezes, cups hitting tables, etc.
• Match loudness of you and your guests audio
• Cutting Out unwanted portions of audio such as long pauses, non-relevant talking, or excessive ums and yeahs

Now as a word of warning, editing can be a very time intensive process the more pristine you try to make it. If you are trying to edit everything, you could be editing for a very long time. Your job is not to make it perfect, but instead make it 80% good enough for the world to hear and you are proud of it. This can be accomplished through the few tools I will go over today. The remaining 20% of “mistakes” just make you human and save you a lot of time by not trying to get every single one.

For this editing process I will show how to edit the audio quality in the recording software you chose (Adobe Audition, Audacity, or Garageband) and then moving into Descript in order to edit your script.

Let's get to it

Adobe Audition

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Audacity

In depth playlist from Buzzspout

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Garage Band

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Activity: Edit the Sound Quality

Using your editing software of you choice, practice editing one of the practice episodes you recorded previously.

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Now let's move to editing your podcast script.

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Step 2: Edit Your Podcast Script

After you have edited your audio quality and saved your audio, you will move it into Descript. This will allow you to edit the script and spoken word of your audio like a word document making editing much faster.

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Activity: Edit Your Episode Script

Import your previously edited audio file into Descript and edit the script of the episode, removing unwanted parts, moving parts around, or adding in new parts as necessary.

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Once you have done this, you episode is ready for adding intros, outros, and music. However we will cover that later when we make real episodes for your podcast.

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Step 3: Reflect on Your Editing

After editing your practice episodes, take some time to reflect on how you did.

Activity: Reflection

Answer the following questions:

1. What did I learn about myself after listening and editing my audio? (Ex. Saying “umm” to often)
2. What things did I like about my practice episode? (Ex. My personality, energy, excitement)
3. What do I still need practice on? (Could be in recording, editing, speaking, etc)

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Practice and reflection will help you on your journey to becoming a pro podcaster.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.