Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!

Software Mentioned in the Episode

Recording

• Zoom

• Stream Yard

• Riverside

Audio and Video Editing

• Apple Logic Pro

• Apple Final Cut Pro

• Descript

Websites

• OpenAI - ChatGPT

• BuzzSprout

• Canva

• Squarespace

Hardware Mentioned in the Episode

Video Capture

• Apple iPhone

• Logitech Brio (webcam)

• Apple AirPods

Lighting

• Neewer LED

Computers

• Apple MacBook Pro

• Apple Studio

Microphones

• Rode Vlogger Kit

• Shure SMV7
  

Ep 28 - Behind the Scenes - Part 1: Microphones, Recording, and Audio Editing Podcast and Video Transcript

[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]

Welcome to the Behind-the-Scenes Tour!

Dave Dougherty: Hey, what's going on? So, just finished recording a new episode of Enterprising Minds, and figured I would give you a behind the scenes tour, because that's actually one of the things that people ask us. How in the world are you doing? This podcast on top of your day job, on top of family, on top of all this stuff.

So you know, if you're interested in starting your own podcast, this is the way The way I do it . And it's sort of, it's a nice kind of summary of all the things that we've talked about in 2023 episodes about AI and optimizing processes with ai.

Diving Into the Studio Setup

Dave Dougherty: So yeah, we'll start with a quick little studio tour which is just my office.

guitar room. And then we will go to the computer you see behind me and we'll talk through editing and post production. So I'm usually doing it at the standing desk here. You can see, you know, we're computer work set up plus the monitor. I only use my own personal stuff for this stuff. If you've ever read your employment contracts, don't ever merge the two.

And yeah. So that's an important caveat you can see there. Now, behind me, you'll see the normal, Background that we usually have, and then here's the lighting setup. I got these LED box light-ups. I'm using indirect light That's behind me to get the backlight Over here. You can see the one I'm actually bouncing it off of the wall behind the the screens there and then using the natural light from the road to Or from the outside To do the majority of the lighting.

So that's the lighting setup I Have this is a wonderful webcam if you want to go more professional get Like the Sony you know, or the Canon, like actual cameras, but, you know, for most people, good enough is good enough, right? You only have so many funds to do what you need to do. So I have this Logitech 4K, this thing's wonderful this Shure SM7V, I think, is what it is.

This is a wonderful mic, it is. It is beautiful. That's primarily what we have going on for my setup. I will shout out the headphones while recording so you have no audio bleed. That's an important step. So yeah, let's get going over to the post-production desk and we can talk through that setup.

All right. Hey, what's going on?

Transitioning to Post-Production: Audio Editing Insights

Dave Dougherty: We are now transitioned to the post production desk. Quick thing on microphones. I did say the wrong thing. It is the Shure MV7 that I'm using for You know, recording, recording this as well as, you know, any business meetings. It's just that really nice audio quality just, you know, brings it to a next level.

I will say if you are thinking of doing any kind of podcasting or recording you know, out into the world and not having a dedicated studio, I do have two recommendations. This is the part of the road podcaster. It is a directional mic, which means where you point it. Okay. It picks up, it comes with one of the big fuzzy balls for a windscreen.

This is what I was using when I was talking into my phone for the intro of this show. Another one that I would recommend would be this Sennheiser MKE 400. It is a. essentially a boom mic that you would find on more professional recordings in a mobile package. The only downside is you can see it has this mic out.

So if you are using if you're using an Apple iPhone or anything, you would need one of these dongle extensions to get the audio into your phone. However, this is This is a little bit better now with any of the tech or any of the things that I show this is about four years of iteration to get to where we are today for the setup that we have, the most important thing, like any project is just to get started.

So just use what you have and level up as you as you find yourself doing more or Find out if you don't like it, right. And cause that's, that's the other thing, right. Test and iterate as Ruthie would say. So yeah, that being said now, once I share my screen here, Oh, you can see that there's a little software program that comes with the the Shure mic that is quite nice.

If you want to, you can do a lot of stuff on this one. One thing in terms of audio that I would say is if you use any of the built in. You know, voice fixers for a lot of people, those will be great. It does improve things wonderfully, especially with some of the AI functionality. For me though, with the music production background, I find that it can overly compress the voices.

Which just means it's not as full and as nice to listen to. You know, it can sound like you're, you're talking into a tunnel or something. So that's just something to, you know, to play with. What, what you like and what you don't. So the process, once we, once we shoot, we use zoom to do the meetings.

We've played around with some other things. You know, other options are, you know, tools like Descript or Squad Cast or any of the Riverside. Any of those things do, do a fine job, but for us, we've discovered that Zoom is what works for us. And one feature that we've been using recently, which has been really nice has been the meeting summaries, the AI meeting summaries.

That has been actually, I forgot to turn that on. So the AI summaries via Zoom are a great starting point in terms of what occurred in the meeting. And then you could use that to. Write a blog about any episode that you come up with. But as it goes to the, um, enterprising minds podcast, what happens is you get this output from from Zoom.

You can see here that it's just awful. The. The file names and whatever else. So the first thing I do immediately is to put all of this into this nice little titled, you know, here's the raw file, audio, video files miscellaneous meeting files so that everything can be Nicely titled and in, and in one place, right?

So what I use is logic. First, I take the audio and I have custom presets in Apple Logic for Alex, Ruthi and myself based on the equipment that they have. And I. I played around in the beginning with EQ settings and, and some compression settings for each of us so that we have a really nice drag-and-drop post-production kind of setup.

The Power of Templates and Audio Normalization

Dave Dougherty: The biggest thing, if you want to do this on top of everything else you do throughout your day is to use Templates, build out a template and leverage that like crazy. That is the only way that I'm able to do all of this and not, you know, lose my mind. So you can see this opens up and what I typically do, I will save a copy.

So here's the episode that was just recorded. Or one of the episodes that was just recorded, we, we typically work in batches, which is great 'cause then we can save a bunch of time and we can have some things in the back, in, in the backlog because like all of, you know having young kids and working and having something, time to do something that you're interested in life just gets in the way sometimes, right?

Sick kids. daycare plagues, all that kind of stuff. So, having a number of things scheduled ahead, I would put that as your, as a top thing. So now that I've saved that we can come in, but I bring the exported things from Zoom. They're rather high, you know, M4As but you can see they're titled to the individual Channel the individual who speaks so I just drag and drop And it will, it will process.

So since Rudy wasn't with us on this one, we're done. All right. Now, one thing that I do is I normalize the gain. So what does that mean? That means that I will expand the volume because not everybody's right up on a microphone perfectly. And I I want everybody to be at the same volume level for the export piece.

So you can see, you know, as much as, as much as I like Alex, he tends to be a soft speaker, right? So this is important for people like, like him where You know, he might start at a high volume, but then tail down a lot of people do that. So this is just a nice way to, you know, boost his speaking to where everybody else is.

This also prevents clipping. So what that, you know, that distortion sound you hear when the volume's too high on the input side. So this prevents that keeps a nice clear audio. With that, you can see here, I have specific channel EQ compressors, and then a limiter on there again, to prevent any of that from the volume and gain from being too high and, and distorting the volume.

Cause when things clip it distorts. So for Alex, here is a, just a little preview here. Nothing really fancy. I just did. a preset. I played around with the various presets in, in Logic and you can see where I've boosted his voice. And you know, I wanted a little, little more in the uppers, little more in the mids, same.

This is a little nerdy, but, For the three of you that will find this interesting. Alex and I share a very similar EQ range with our voices. So I ended up taking some EQ out of. His where there was a lot of overlap with mine and played around with it so that we have different EQ settings as they relate to the both of us so that my voice occupies a very specific frequency range, his voice.

Occupies a specific frequency range while also retaining kind of a natural sound. This way your ears will, will hear the difference and it won't be so muddy when we when we inevitably talk over each other. This is a very common thing with You know, kick drums and bass guitar, they occupy the same thing.

So you scoop out certain EQ frequencies to make space for both instruments and provide some separation. So just a little, a little trick there. So now that these are normalized, I'm not doing any editing in here on the last, you know, they changed the, the, you know, their podcasting setup, which, you know, none of them have.

So I just find out where the end is here, and then we will bounce this to disc. I save it as a high-quality file, the AIF or a wave file, as well as an mp3, just to have some options. Six, six 60 just to have some options. Cause you know, throughout the signal chain, you will get some compression.

You will get More and more of that, that frequency just kind of destroys itself. Okay. So you can see here the selection or the options for all of this. I like to go to the next measure above the end of the file, but you can see we're bouncing to AIF that higher quality as well as MP3 just to have some options like I said.

And then this will. Go through and be done. Okay. So while, while this is bouncing why do I separate this audio piece from the video piece? Part of it is control. And part of it is because as I've played through the options available on the market in terms of audio editing and automating things where, where you can when it comes to having three.

people or two people on a project on a video call having more control over some really nitty gritty things is my preference. Do you need to do it this way? Probably not. If you're going to be doing multiple hosts or, you know, doing screen shares and B roll and whatever else, then, then, yeah, I would recommend this.

That there'll be, you know, the higher quality stuff we'll probably use. Some of the stuff I would say that, you know, if you invest in something like Zoom or Stream Yard or high-quality equipment on the front end, Right. Like the microphone Like a proper video camera. All of the inputs on the front end are going to be better and it will save you a lot of, a lot of editing.

So the more perfect you can have for on your inputs whether it's video or audio or whatever else, that's just going to be. That's just going to be better and it will save you a lot. If you are just recording some, you know, kind of like a diary show or you know, random thoughts kind of thing. You know what your, your iPhone and Your iPhone has a really good mic in it, and that's probably good enough, just recording that, and then leveraging your podcast host and, you know, things like Buzz, Buzzsprout the tool that we use has magic mastering which, you know, can be worthwhile if you are completely unfamiliar with audio editing That's that could be a great option.

Like I said, I like to have a little bit more of control also because I have, you know, just because I have that audio audio background. So yeah. Okay, great. So this finished bouncing now I'm going to open Final Cut. And we can get into what the video editing looks like.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

Dave Dougherty: Hey there, what's going on? Just jumping in here quickly. So, I had originally intended this to be Straight through showing you what the progress or whole process is for creating one of these episodes. And I got to admit it was really long. So I think from here on out, we will split it into two or three episodes and this will be the end of the first one, focusing specifically on audio recording and the process for that.

The reason for doing that is a lot of people will just do audio only. Right. Not everybody will do the video component and that's totally cool. But wanted to at least give you insights into part of the process. Jump over to davedoughertymedia.com/enterprising-minds, where you will find the link to this episode and all of the tools that were listed.

And all of the mics that were. Listed so that you can go easily grab those and find out specific information on anything with the process. So thanks for hanging in. We will see you in the next episode of Enterprising Minds. Thanks.