Looking for suggestions for work flow when editing multitracks for a podcast

[Kristy26550400mnh3]

Greetings,

Does anyone have a workflow that you would suggest for using Audition to edit a podcast interview?

I have 2 or 3 different audio files, separate for each guest, recorded from Zoom, often 30 - 50 minutes to clean up. I work mostly in multitrack but sometimes enter waveform for more detail.

Here is the order that  I have been doing, so far

1.  Noise Reduction to clean up ongoing background noise that is consistent

2. Diagnostics to Strip Silence to identify breaks

3. Listen and manually edit ums/so/you know, odd single noises/word fumbles

4. Essential Sound for a little enhancement

5. Add intro and exit sound clips with music

6. export mixdown

I've noticed that I spend a lot of time waiting when I do my manual edits and am wondering if I should do those first.

What other effects/edits do you use regularly?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

De-umming and de-erring is one of the few tasks that I think it's worth doing in Waveform view. As long as you retain a sensible flow, you won't want to redo it, and it means that if you put marker ranges around the bits you want to keep when you've tidied them up, it's easy to drop them straight into your multitrack session. One thing that unfortunately Audition won't do at present is to let you set sensible speeds for that J,K and L keys - it jumps straight from x1 to x2, and x2 leaves speech sounding unrecognisable. If it had x1.25 and x1.5 as well, especially without a pitch shift, it would make locating gaps, ums and errs a lot quicker, and speed up one's workflow significantly. (I think that the chances of me getting that added are pretty slender, unfortunately, but I'll give it another go...)

Other than that, the only other thing I can tell you is that after a while, it gets quicker to locate all these things visually, as well as with your ears - pay careful attention to the waveform itself; it can tell you a lot!

[Kristy26550400mnh3]

Steve,

Thank You. Where can I find "De-umming and de-erring"? Does this impact the voice when the speaker says, "um" or is this for a humming sound from the microphone? 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

They aren't tools - you don't find them! They are just things that people say when they want a bit of thinking room, and that's the name the process was given. The expression came from broadcast use, when originally you had to do this with 1/4" tape and a razor blade. Doing this in Audition is unbelieveably quicker and simpler!

[Kristy26550400mnh3]

Steve,

LOL - I have been removing the ums and errs manually. Your reply got my hopes up that there was some magic button that would allow Audition to find them for me. 🙂  As a new host/editor of a podcast,  I have learned that I say, "SO" way too much. I need to learn some other words for segwaying to a new topic or question. lol
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. I appreciate it.

I have read the heated debate elsewhere in the Audition discussion about removing the breath sounds that people make. I totally agree with your idea of keeping things natural but I have noticed that because my guests are not using quality microphones and are not paying attention to their sound quality, their breaths can be very distracting. I wish there was a way that I could 1/2 the volume of a selection instead of silence. I did figure out how to create a shortcut in multitrack that allows me to quickly create silence but there are some occasions where I wish I could just minimize that sound so it isn't so obvious but not gone entirely.  Do you have any suggestions for that?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

You can create a favorite for Waveform view (won't work in Multitrack unfortunately) using the Amplitude effect - then you can make a selection and it will just apply it to just that bit. The trick to getting this to apply to just your selection is to select the entire waveform whilst creating the Favorite. When you come to use it, it won't do that - it will pick up just your selection. In the Edit Favorite box, it should look like this:

I think that people are now getting used to remote guests sounding crappy, although I'm not suggesting we should necessarily accept that. All I'm suggesting is that we shouldn't perhap go overboard on trying to fix everything... A trick we've used in the past which can work quite well if your guest has a half-way decent portable recorder, is to get them to record their side of the conversation at their end, and send you the file, which you can integrate into the production. When this is done carefully, it can sound as though your guest is in the room with you. Years ago I managed to confuse a few people in Australia like that, although I used two feeds from one mic rather than a separate recorder, simply because they weren't available then.

The 'So' conjunctive is okay to use as a continuation of an explanation, or a reply to a question, but not at the start of every sentence! Other things you can try are 'okay', 'right', 'moving on', etc etc or - just do what broadcasters do when introducing a new topic; plan a cue for it. IOW, write down your introduction, or at least the first sentence.

[Kristy26550400mnh3]

Thank you!