Hey All, ( Apologies for the length of this post. )
Massive thanks again for the feedback on the first podcast.
We all had a feeling it was going to be ropey and I think its fair to say it was..
Every Journey has to start with a first step, and this was ours. It was the foundation upon which....oh hang on Xen banned us from talking in cliches!
So we are off the mark! Episode 1 is in the can ( I really can't help it, I am a walking cliche soundboard!).
Moving forward we need to look at how we can improve the cast and build it into something that hopeful not only appeals to Teh members but to the wider web audience at large, first we conquer iTunes, then the world...
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(tldnr - This is the process we followed to record the show, help us make it better...)
Firstly it would be good to try and get some ideas on how to produce the show.
The first cast was recorded using Skype to conference and then each party recording their own speaking inputs only which were then email to one person to piece back together and edit into a whole show using Audacity.
- This was done because a quick search on the web suggested that this was the best way to get quality audio from all parties. If we tried to record the conference as a single sound file it would have suffered from brown outs due to internet connection issue which are inherent when skyping. This is what the web said but we did not try it so cant say it we found it to be the case.
- In editing the results there were a few issues:
The first being trying to stitch all the tracks together so that they ran coherently. To do this we had one member count us down to press record on audacity at the same time and then each person counted to five. These counts were easy to distinguish on the recording in audacity and allowed the tracks to be matched up.
The second issue was down to echo. This obviously happened when a host was using external speaker to listen to skype or just getting bleed from the headphones into the mic. To solve this although i confess not 100% I went through the podcast highlighting the parts of the track where a host was not speaking and created silence in that section overwriting the echo. This took the best part of 2 hours.
Finally it was a bit of a challenge to match the levels of each person. Oscar had recorded very low so need his gain increased a lot. Patch was turned up so high I could hear each drag on his cigarette, I was somewhere in between the two.
We all felt (as I'm sure people listening to the show did too) that we meandered in sections. As I mentioned in the other post I think creating a show running order on Google Docs and populating during the week with it being the hosts responsibility to look at and add topics and research the one up for discussion. This should reduce the rabbit in the headlight moments that occurred.
To those people that suggested that actually some of the best bits about the cast were the informal chatting bits. I agree that this was when we were most comfortable. We recorded a huge section of the preshow prep and listening to that I think there was some better material cut then was included. A whole section on the meaning of
lifeXen was extremely witty and will never be heard.
:)
Music Jingles, Intro Outro, Podcast picture.
These were awful and just things we grabbed last minute. I would be grateful if people would help out here and do a quick bit of art of suggest jingle music etc. The Music or sound between sections needs to stay for practicality reasons. Its easier to edit in chunks and during the recording people need to get fluid or get rid of some! (My headset is wireless and unless we break the show into sections I will take you all to the bog with me!).
Show Hosts,
This is "Teh Podcast" and is open to anybody in Teh who is prepared to read the suggested show notes do a bit of research and turn up for recording with something to say. If we have a lot people on at the same time it might be a bit unwieldy but heck lets try and see. Our USP could be that we have the most amount of hosts on a podcast at any one time and make it sound good!
Web / Blog Space / iTunes
If we want to keep and archive or create a feed then we will need somewhere to store these? I setup a wordpress site which uses podcast feeds
See Here
Could we do something similar? We could then link into feedburner etc and monitor stats.
Once again thanks for the feedback .
Fozza, Patch, Oscar