Hello – First off René and Timothy really appreciate you volunteering to help us out with the edit of an upcoming episode of the Tonebenders podcast.
The following is a breakdown of the process we normally follow when working with volunteers. Every episode has its own specific needs and quirks but this should be a good group of general guidelines. We will give you a rough time frame of how fast we need the episode turned around. It is usually a couple weeks, but occasionally a little faster.
We normally conduct our interviews over Skype and have everyone including our guests record their own voices locally. We then combine all of the feeds of the conversation into a single Protools session. We normally record the Skype feed also. In most cases this is discarded entirely and is just included to help with syncing the other files. Sometimes a guest can not record themselves though and in these cases the Skype feed would be used in the edit. We will send you a protools session with all the files lined up so they are in sync. If you don’t use protools and prefer just the audio files to use in another DAW, just let us know. We will send you the files via Wetransfer usually.
Once you get the files/session, we would love for you to edit out any pauses, and long ummms and ahhhs. Kill the feeds of anyone who is not talking, clean out any pops or clicks and generally clean up the session. We also encourage you to make any editorial choices you feel are needed. If a part of the conversation doesn’t really go anywhere – you can just cut the whole section out. Same goes if something ends up not really making sense. During the recording René, Timothy or our guests might leave verbal instructions to cut something out, please follow these instructions.
Basically we want our guests to come across to be as smart and interesting as possible. We don’t want anyone regretting coming on our show. Keep that in mind when doing an editing pass.
If you are up for it, after you have done an edit pass it would be great if you could do a quick mix as well. We like to mix to -18 lufs. Feel free to use compression and EQ to make it sound good to your ears.
Keep in mind that this is a podcast not a feature film, it will be delivered via mp3 – you don’t have to clean up every single word to perfection, just anything that really sticks out.
When you are done please send us a .wav of your edit and the protools session, Wetransfer can work or any other way you prefer. We will take a listen and let you know if we have any requests for changes or ideas for things that can be done differently. There will not be a lot of back and forth, we understand and respect the time you have put in helping us out.
We will then add in the opening and closing music, and record an intro and wrap up for the top and bottom of the show. In one of these we will mention your name and a big THANK YOU for the time and effort you put in the help us with the episode. If you would like we can also include a couple sentences about you and the sound work you do. We are also happy to include a few links on the episodes homepage on our site. These can be for a blog, company website, Twitter, Instagram, or what ever you think is appropriate for the most part. You can send us your mini bio and the links with the .wav file when you are done the edit.
Finally – if you think we will have any difficulty pronouncing your name at all please send us the proper way to say it, either by spelling it out phonetically or recording your self saying it and adding that to the end of the .wav file you send after 10 second of silence.
Thats about it. We are around if you have any questions along the way. Once again Thank you so much for helping us out!
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René recently did an interview with Production Expert about he mindset while editing Tonebenders episodes. Feel free to give it a read here.