Hi,
I've been recording podcasts for over a decade and when I started it was simple to edit as I used a Roland field recorder where the only talent speaking was me, and doing so on loction where background noise was desirable.
Now I record a podcast with my partner in a 'studio' (background noise not desirable), which we video as well. Audio is recorded via two lavs on two Tascam DR10L units. I sync these two channels to the camera's audio, and then go through the painstaking task of manually ducking each track. This means cutting track one when track two is speaking, and vice versa. It works well but an hour-long podcast takes literally hours to edit this way.
I've not done any auto-ducking on speech before and I am not sure if there is a feature in Premiere Pro or Audition that could assist me. Bear in mind the mics are picking each others' voices up, so I'm not sure an auto tool could differentiate between the talents, but before I go any further, is there a feature within Audition or Pr that might be worth a try?
Failing this, perhaps I should look at a field recorder. How reasonable is it to rig two mics up and record to a single track? Do field recorders auto-level the two inputs? Should I be using lav mics with XLR or are there field recorders that allow multiple TRS inputs? This is not an area I'm particularly familiar with.
I should mention that we are limited by space. We don't have a desk so we are not geared up for XLR mics on stands, desk-mounted mics etc. A field recorder mounted on a stand using the built-in mics could work, though I suspect it would be too far away to record two people sitting next to each other in conversation, and will probably end up recording lots of ambient noise.
That's about as far as I've got in my thinking of hardware. Ultimately I'm looking for a way to massively reduce that editing time, so any pointers gratefully received.
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