After 7 hours of production time (editing down the large files, learning how to use Pro Tools on Mac, pulling intros and outros down from xdrive, deciding in what order to place them and finally converting them to MP3 for your portable pleasure). Here is Irish Podcast 0506 in all its glory 7.11MB. View shownotes in : opml or html and subscribe to your favourite Irish Podcaster.
At the start of this project I knew zero about recording/editing or even what a podcast was. 4 months have pasted and I must admit I have podcasting sussed completely which is great and can always retell how at the start there were only 452 entries in google for podcasting. Podcast sites were rare to none. iPodder.org, Podfly and Podstar were the only chance apart from the yahoo podcast group to find information on Podcasting, four months on we have podcast stars (Dawn and Drew). It has appeared on BBC2, CNN and many major newspapers; unfortunately Ireland is slow to do a feature but it early days and Ireland is slow to catch on.
Back to the recording/editing status. I am currently working on Podcast 0506 with technical director Mike Kiely. Most of Friday was spent in college, more specifically between the AV lab and the Sound Studio. From 10am until just after 3pm we worked on getting all the sound files together so we could make adjustments and get them to sound in tandem.
Firstly we tested each track in SoundForge to see what they actually sounded like. On Tuesday I had all the tracks editing down (in SoundForge) as best I could, unfortunately as I found out the default for Soundforge is to save file as .MP3 so once I had them on disc I opened them on screen, Mike needed to convert the sample rate of each track so they sounded on the same level, we located this thanks to google. We entered the sound studio and opened Pro Tools on the Mac, now he needed to grab the tracks from my CD and convert them back to .wav; I had three CDs with me, the originals, the edited versions and the intro/outro segments. I hadn’t labelled the CDs properly so this held us up as I gave him the wrong CD to convert (Note to self: Use a black marker). During this time Mike found that the Ellen MacArthur piece was in Mono and all other clips were Stereo. So to overcome this difference he copied the file and pasted it into a left and right output.
Now once we had all .wav files on a USB storage card we could save them onto the Mac and get ready to get our show together. Mike gave me a demonstration on how to use the ProTools which in the end looked simple to use. I have never had any experience with Macs before so that was an experience in itself. ProTools has a nice layout to understand and follow, we laid out the segments on two different parts, one for the interviews and the one below was for the introductions and outros. We made a quick outline of where the content would appear along with the intros and iteming following to the next section.
Problems with the recordings:
Ellen MacAther: Sound quality was good except it was in mono which set us back a bit on productivity. Maeve Connolly: Segment was just 20 seconds long but involved an awful hissing noise due to the surroundings or a connection lose, this was completely blocked out by using the dehisser option under audiostudio. Feargal McKay: Two separate recordings sounded okay, one of them was louder than the other so we used the limiter to quieten it down. Eamon Kearns: This was a phone interview which actually was of great quality but we wanted to give a more realistic sound, so people actually knew it was recorded over mobile phone so we used the limiter.
I spent just over an hour by myself getting to know ProTools and figuring out where each action was which was a very valuable experience, I could easily move the files around and put them in the order which I preferred.
