¶ Introduction
Welcome to today's episode of Podcast Insider. I'm Todd Cochran, CEO of Blueberry Podcasting. And I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations here at Blueberry Podcasting. Video podcasting has continued to grow in the space. And today, we're providing you with tips for recording your video show and how to properly edit it for publishing.
You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting, all with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in.
¶ Balancing Audio and Visual Editing
You know, Mike, editing a video podcast involves really a balance of both audio and visual elements to create, you know, it's a well, some will say a polished and engaging final product and, you know, the tips to streamlining the process, enhance the quality of video podcasts. We could probably do about
10 hours on this. Yeah. For sure. And I think the one of the takeaways I had many years ago from someone that gave me advice that says they will forgive you for bad video, but they will not forgive you for bad audio.
¶ Prioritizing Audio Quality
No. Sure. And especially if you're doing both, you know, if you're recording a video podcast, it's also gonna go out as audio. Don't forget your audio audience. Yeah. You know, because, you know, they're not seeing what you're talking about on the screen. So you have to describe it. Yeah. You know, make it an audio podcast, and the video is a recording of the audio podcast process, I guess.
You know, I've got a little post it note stuck to my top right of my monitor and actually hit when I travel, I have I take it with me and it says, remember they're listening because I do video too. But it's just one of those reminders that, you know, if you can get to the point where you're showing stuff and then forget that people are just listening and you can de enfranchise them. So you're exactly right.
But when it comes to this editing piece, you know, I'm not really one to do a lot of editing, but the main thing is prioritize and clean the audio first. You know, start by cleaning up the audio track
¶ Audio Editing Tips
And again, you're gonna have to be careful here. You know, you can remove background noise, reduce echo, apply EQ. But as soon as you get into editing video where you wanna cut an ah or or you know, something that is not what you would just immediately get rid of within a pure audio recording. You gotta remember that video is seamless and unless you have found a good transition point and then you have 2 cameras or whatever it may be, you really can't do a clean-cut.
Yeah. You'll see that a lot on on YouTube. You know, a lot of YouTubers will sit in front of the camera and talk and whatever and you'll see jump cuts. And, you know, that That takes a lot of time. It certainly does. You know, audio is so much easier because you don't have to worry about that visual element. So in, you know, video, you have to be mindful that, you know, you're not just cutting out the eye. You're cutting out a chunk of video.
¶ Video Editing Challenges
Yeah. And you have to sync your audio and video. And what I have found is different services will have different offsets. Now I'm winning the and I'm winning the studio in Michigan. There is a 4 millisecond offset. Now, you don't think 4 milliseconds. That's not very much. But 4 milliseconds is enough to see a shift in lip movement and audio. So I have to shift the audio to the right 4 milliseconds to get the sync of the audio and the video to be perfectly correct.
And the I'm hearing a lot of background noise. I think there's a party outside of my building. Anyway, the audio and video syncing is really important because it becomes quite discerning and every software does a little bit different. Actually, the tool I'm using here while I'm in the Philippines is
¶ Syncing Audio and Video
almost perfect. It's like 1 millisecond maybe, but I did run into an issue yesterday where my RodeCaster Duo disconnected during my live event and my MacBook picked up the started picking up the microphone and what ended up happening then was I basically had a raw recording on the RodeCaster Duo that I was able to put into the video that was a video recording. So I was able to clean it up. But otherwise, audio went real bad real quick being on the wrong mic.
Yeah. That and that really stinks because you were live. So Yeah. You're live and it's just, you know, so the live audience got this, you know, the MacBook Pro microphone. But, yeah, that's just, you know, one of those things that will happen if you don't have this like this hardwired system, which I don't. I'm basically, you know, praying that USB C stays connected and sometimes it just acts a fool. But I think this Last week's episode, I mentioned I had a similar problem where the RODECaster
decided to disconnect. So then my, not my Mac microphone, but the, my iPhone microphone connected to my Mac. And that's what the recording was. It was terrible. So having a good master backup of your master audio is always good. So if you have the ability to record too,
¶ Choosing the Right Editing Tools
especially if you're doing video, you're good. But, you know, I think also selecting a great tool. I use Adobe Premiere. Been using it for many years. I used to be a Final Cut Pro user, but when they made some changes, I kind of swapped out. I know some folks like DaVinci Resolve. These are all real powerful editing for video and audio in the Premiere, the Adobe package because I can switch between Adobe edition and Adobe Premiere. So the audio editor in Premiere is audition.
Yeah. And some folks like simpler editing tools like Imovie or use Descript, which does video and audio editing at this time. But again, I think anytime you're editing video, if you want it to be a good product, you have to be real careful because of the, you know, just cutting stuff out will just turn into this nightmare of a video that's, you know, jarring and you know, you can see the, you can just see the jumps anytime you take out a frame. Yep. Yep. For sure.
And you know what? Another thing with these softwares, there's usually a place where you can preset certain options, you know, like your lower thirds, your transitions, anything like that. And, you know, as you're going through the video and editing,
¶ Setting Up Templates and Presets
having this template for your show will speed up the process. But, you know, you have to build that over time, I guess. But, you know, it's it is really handy. And also for outputs. I know, you know, in Premiere, you can set, an output format. And then when you're in there editing, you can apply that when you do the final, you know, the final file. And, you know, that's always a good idea as well. You wanna keep things as consistent as possible. And and some folks even go to the
point of having a multi cam system. In other words, they may use the camera on their laptop and they may use a separate camera or 2 separate cameras. The challenge really with that is, you know, just more resources and more money. And I think that the solution that I found that I really like is like is from I'm currently using Restream to do my to do my live streams and I basically have a countdown counter. I have a main screen with just me in
it. I have a guest. If I have a guest, then I also have the ability to bring in screen captures and that kind of stuff. So that really allows me to change the views and it really isn't like switching an angle, but it is definitely switching the screens for more engagement and allows you to do lots of cool stuff and you can really set up presets and a lot of those
software pieces as well. So you can get that multi cam effect without having really to have multi cameras per se and you can change the zoom level on a guest or the zoom level on you to going from wide to narrow. And it's really easily to do that in a view setting. So really you don't need multiple cameras. Right. And you know, while you're editing, you can emphasize certain things, you know, where you can kind of zoom in on something or back off or whatever, you know.
You know, it all depends on how much time you want to put into it. You know, if you're gonna do video, it's it's always good to be somewhat compelling. I I think, you know, the when people think about editing, I like to have the finished product
¶ Live Streaming and Multi-Cam Setups
as close to being done in from the get go. So, yeah, I'm gonna have lower thirds and speaker names already in the video when we're doing the recording. That's all going to be popped in. So I don't have to add those later because if you have to add lower thirds and speaker names and animated overlays and these types of things, it just takes more time. So using examples, this product they've been using recently,
restream. Io for the online live stuff or even just you can do a pure plain recording without going live. It really kind of works. And but again, if you're using Adobe, go ahead. I was just gonna say as much production as you can do when you do the recording, that's gonna save you a lot of time on the other end of editing. Yeah. And, you know, and when we go to events and we're doing, like, one off interviews, we'll do b roll as well.
But again, when you collect b roll and you are doing adding that to the commentary, Example, doing an interview with someone about a product and then you're talking about the product with a person and then you've got b roll that's focused on the product. That works well and gives you how it add to the relevant conversation. But again, this is dependent upon the type of content you get. If you're just doing an interview with an author, what is the b roll? Or if you're
doing maybe there is none. So there's no opportunity to put b roll unless you find something that maybe is funded to put insert when the, you know, when the person you're talking to maybe you found a YouTube clip or something that you can superimpose. But I think you have to be real real careful with that. But again, adding text overlays, all that's pretty simple within all these platforms. But I think the main thing too is keep transition simple.
You don't have to have these like super some of these transitions can be like whirling dots and you know, you look like you come in from outer space into the image. You know, I think that's cool for kids, but for adults, I think we just want simple clean cuts and fades. Yeah. What's funny to watch is somebody that just got some new software and they're playing with every tool. You'll see, you know, the screen will flip around or you'll see, you know, zooming in
and out. And, you know, like, I remember back in the day when, you know, when everybody first got video cameras, man, the zooms and all this. And now people are much cleaner, you know, because it's the new shiny object when you first get it, but you don't need all that stuff. Right. And, of course, you'll export in the format for the particular platform. If you're going to YouTube or even a podcast, you're gonna wanna
use 16 by 9 ratio. But if you're going to Instagram or TikTok and doing a short, then you have to have these vertical. So again, more editing for different platforms. But I think if you just stick with the basic 16 by 9, then you can from that point, you can grab a short from the 16 by 9 without too much additional challenges with a lot of tools out there. But you don't wanna I think one you don't wanna record a long form podcast in vertical.
That's yeah. It's for the course not. And for the, you know, the short you can get. Yeah, but you can get a clip from 16 by 9. So you just, you know, you just, yeah, you just do the aspect ratio change and and grab the segment. You know, I really need to be honest with you, the most important thing, I think prior to even recording is make sure that your lighting is good. I'm using some very inexpensive ring lights here.
They are not completely color balanced, but what I do is a white balance for them and it looks great. So you don't have to have a 56 100 Kelvin ring light that's real super expensive. You know, you can adjust the lighting and white balancing on most cameras and stuff now. So take advantage of that. Yeah. The light the lighting is very important. I, you know, I don't have great lighting here, but I can get by if I have to get on
video. But again, I'm not the target for this conversation because I don't do a lot of video. Yeah. And, you know, I think because we're in podcasting, we have to be careful too on adding music because the licensing is if you're editing the audio to go both on video and audience can be delivered as a podcast and not as a true video podcast. You have to be real careful on the music that you're using from a licensing standpoint. So I just tend to stay away from all music whatsoever.
Yeah. And anymore, that's probably the best bet. There are, you know, some exceptions. You know, we're like I know in the YouTube creator library, there's some free music in there that you're allowed to use both in audio and video, but be really careful with that stuff. Yeah. Some of the YouTube stuff is not licensed for audio podcasting. It's purely for the YouTube platform. Right. And just watch that stuff done. Yeah. You got to be real, real careful.
I think though, for me, part of my success and really being able to have a good show flow, both audio and video is really having that consistent intro sequence and adding any call to actions in the outro or midway through the content. You know, I think the the intros are important. It gets the
mood set for the show. My intro is pretty long, 2 and a half minutes, but I'm talking about the website, my email, social, you know, So probably shorter is better, but my particular audience has gotten used to the intro I use. And your audience is primarily the audio audience. So, you know Yeah. You don't you can't just put something up on the screen and they'll see it. You know, you gotta say it. So, you know, having a longer intro for that case use case is probably good.
Yeah. And it's you know? And I spell it out clearly. You know? So, you know, my my split on my tech show is 70 30. So 30% watch and you know, that's a that's a good audience. A number. But
yeah, it is. Yeah. You know, the accessibility piece obviously here at Blueberry, if you're using our Blueberry tools and services, we've got the transcripts provided for you, which gives you the ability for someone to listen to the playback and have the transcript follow along or the the closed caption on video. Some of the services out there provide the closed caption
¶ Final Thoughts and Preparing for Export
functions automatically, but if you're doing a true video podcast, you may wanna consider adding closed captions to your actual video content. Right. This can be, again, a huge another editing step. Yeah. It's some platforms, you know, like, if you're also gonna put it on YouTube, YouTube will give you the captions. Apple will give you the captions. And if somebody's watching it on a Chrome browser, Chrome does the captions for it. So you may not have to do it yourself.
But if, you know, if you wanna be everywhere and have that available everywhere, you have to actually do that in the video. You know, there's a whole bunch of additional stuff here you can think about, which, you know, I think we'll just briefly cover is, you know, your branding. Use brand colors and fonts. You know, establish some elements that you
use throughout. Maybe it's a copy from your website and also basic video editing templates that you use again and again, I think are always good things to consider and but again, you can get really wrapped around the flagpole pretty deep if you add these dynamic zooms and crops. I think, you know, for someone that's trying to get a product out quickly, some of this stuff can be a bit overkill, but you can use zooms for emphasis and you can crop for multi platform clips. These are all options.
Again, I don't do any of that because I just don't have time to do any editing like that at at all. Hey. But, you know, there's You know, pop up text and callouts are popular too. Yeah. You know? And a lot of that stuff is cool. And if you have the time to do it, why not? But if, you know, if you wanna get it done quick, you, you know, try to get as much into the recording as possible again.
And, you know, just make sure that, you know, when you put out the final product, just make sure that it's the right size and the right, you know, everything. You know? I don't know. Just to put it. Well, I, you know, I think if you're thinking about the rendering and the export of the content, you know, here's my philosophy on this. I'm primarily a true video podcast. My podcast is available on Apple Podcasts and other podcast apps to support video as
a video podcast. So that's my target audience. YouTube, Vimeo, all the other locations are secondary. Right. So I encode for a mobile desktop audience. So I actually only encode at 720p because I'm trying to take into consideration the folks that are tuning in with their mobile device and how much storage that is gonna require. So as an example, a 1 hour program is about 980 or let's say a gigabit in size.
If I up that to 10 80p and basically have a export that's reasonable, then I'm in the 1.5 gigs media file size. Yeah. Now if I was YouTube only and just putting up for YouTube, I probably would put up about a 9 gigabit file to YouTube. Super high quality, high resolution. I would go for the max there. So it really depends on where your audience is. But you know, if you're going to be on a streaming platform,
doesn't matter which one. You probably want to be a minimum of 1080p, but if you want to have a true video pod cast delivered via RSS, then you have to have these considerations for that particular audience. You have to remember that they're gonna be A lot of, phone plans are now, you know, are unlimited now, but not everybody's phone plan. So, you know, be considerate of
bandwidth as well. You know, if they've got 5 gigs of data for the month and you put a 1.5 gig file in your podcast feed, that's gonna suck up a lot of their bandwidth. Yeah. Unless the unless they've connected via Wi Fi. Right. So, again, I think you need to compress file size a little bit if you're gonna be doing a true video podcast. I've never had anyone complain about the content going up at 7:20 p on YouTube. No. It's great on an iPad, you know, or an iPhone. Yeah. It's fine.
Or Apple TV. It does well. So again, audio first for the as long as you've got great audio, they'll forgive you for a little bit of pixelation in video and again, I'm I'm about saving time. So I do one export only of my video and that's what everyone gets. So I think, you know, if you're thinking about doing the video route, we have to remember that, you know, consider doing a video podcast and play in that realm as well as putting it out on other platforms if you so choose
to go down this route. But again, don't forget as Mike said earlier, don't forget that your audience is primarily listening and don't disenfranchise those audio listeners by not giving them the storytelling and describe what you're talking about when you're showing something on a screen. I think that's the main key here is to remember that
they're listening. Because video podcasters, I've had YouTube stuff playing in the background and the best ones will basically not need you to look at the screen. Right. Yeah. I watch some video podcasts on YouTube or on Apple TV through the Apple Podcasts app. And most of the ones that I watch, I don't have to be staring at the screen the whole time. Yeah. And that's nice. You know, you're sitting in your easy chair and reading something on
your iPad. And, you know, if you hear something, you look up, know, that you want to hear or you want to see. But it's, you know, it's mostly an audio format. I think too, one thing that you have to really consider here is if you're adding video to your show and you are one of these folks that love to really hardcore edit, you're really going to have to edit this product twice. Your output.
You're gonna have to edit your audio file and be able to remove the 's and 's and all the little things that you always edit for normally and ship that and then you're gonna have to edit your video recording in a completely different way. And I think when you think about that, I think many of you will be like, no. I'm not gonna do that. It takes too much time.
My perspective on all of this is the more you're prepared in the beginning to do your show, the better your output will be and the less editing you'll have to do overall audio or video. So the flubs stay in for video and it drives me crazy at times. But guess what? There's really no choice. Yeah. The one video podcast I do, I edit everything in the video, which I don't do a ton of editing, but I do everything in the video, then I extract the audio, send it. I don't
edit the audio. But, you know, if you want your audio product to be better than the video product, then, you know, you wanna edit the audio as well. But make sure the audio is there. Some of these steps we've, Yeah. I think by following some of the steps we've shared here, you can create a professional looking video podcast. And again, let's make it a true video podcast via RSS that are engaging, polished and viewer friendly.
Focus on keeping editing streamlining consistent on each episode so it feels cohesive and visually appealing. If you start to do video, we would love to hear from you. Yeah, we'd love to hear from you. What have you learned? What is the headaches you've run into or the joys? You know, what are the wins and losses that you've done by adding video to your content creation? So, I think that's all we had on this topic, Mike.
Yeah. I believe so. And so go ahead and check out the show notes over at podcastinsider.com. We got a few other tips that we didn't cover in the audio here. So check that out and we'll catch you next week. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information. To subscribe, share, and read our show notes, check out the latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com.
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