Looking for a few good audio production assistants...
The problem we have is finding the time to do the post-production on the recordings to turn them into podcasts. We could, of course, just slap a generic intro and outro on a recording and throw it out there in the feed... but I think you all know that we don't want to waste your time! For instance, including the Q&A portion of a panel session where you can't hear the audience questions is pretty useless. Or including the part of the interview where announcements came over an intercom and you can't hear the interviewee is rather silly. So we want to take the time to go through a recording and see how we can "tighten it up". Remove breaks or big gaps of silence... speakers setting up laptops... interruptions to interviews etc. We don't remove every "um" or pause... we do want it to feel natural, after all, but we try to edit out the big gaps, errors, interruptions, etc.
The challenge of course is that to do this you have to listen all the way through a podcast, editing along the way. Sometimes you don't have to make many edits at all. Sometimes there a bunch of things to edit out. But it takes time... if the panel is 45 minutes you've got to have at least that much time (and probably double if you do much editing and keep stopping/starting). Unfortunately time is something neither Jonathan nor I are finding a whole lot of these days. I now have a queue of probably 10 or 12 recordings we've made over the past 6 months that are just sitting there waiting for me to get the cycles to turn them into Special Editions. Some are 20-minute interviews. Some are 45-minute or hour-long panels from conferences.
So therefore our request in show #24:
we're looking for a few good production assistants!What we'd love to do is to find a couple of people who would be willing to work this way:
- I get to you the WAV file of the recording as well as the intro/outro.
- You edit the file in whatever audio tool you prefer: Audacity, Garage Band, SoundForge, whatever... (I use Audacity)
- When you are done, you export to a MP3 and get the MP3 to me.
- I do a final check, set the ID3 tags, etc. and upload the MP3 file, create the show notes, etc.
The good news about most of the recordings we make is that they are not overly time-sensitive. We want them up as soon as we can, but if it takes some time to do the post-production as you fit it in around other work, that's generally perfectly fine.
Obviously if you have experience with audio editing that's great. If it's something you've been interested to try your hand with, we're open to having you give it a try. (Please do realize that I'm a control-freak and audio quality stickler, so it's a new thing for me to even *consider* letting other people work on our files... but I've reached the point where I think it's more important to get the content *out*! So I'm willing to try it out... :-)
We can't offer you any money or anything like that (this is a labor of passion, not profit!) but we're certainly glad to give credit in show notes, Blue Box website, etc. You'll also be helping the greater community of security professionals interested in VoIP by getting more content out there in a more rapid manner. (i.e. faster than if we're waiting for me!) You may also gain skills in audio production (if you don't already have them) that may assist you in other endeavors.
Anyway, if you are interested, drop us an email with the subject line "Production assistance" and with a little bit of background about yourself. Sometime in the next week or two (probably after March 20th) we'll start seeing what we can do if there are people interested.
Thanks - and thanks for your patience, too.
Dan & Jonathan
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