> Is it possible you’ve set the bar too high for yourself?
Probably but I have no way to turn this off and be happy with myself.
I try to approach everything I do from the angle of "what needs to be done to make this as good as it can be with my current skill set?". From a listener's perspective if I had to listen to something with a bunch of mouth noises, ums every 3 seconds or long pauses I would end up focusing on that instead of the topics being covered. It would give off a wrong impression that conflicts with my core values.
>Probably but I have no way to turn this off and be happy with myself.
I can appreciate this, but...
>It has gotten to the point where after 2 years of running my podcast I'm seriously considering *stopping the show* because I'm getting burnt out from editing and without sponsors it's not feasible to hire an editor, but even with the show making no money I would happily pay triple your asking price if I could click a button and have the problem solved in a way that matched a human's ability to edit out filler words.
(emphasis mine)
I don't think it's actually the case, but extrapolating a list of priorities from this, I can only arrive at the following:
Priority #1 - no aahs, umms, slurps or smacks
Priority #2 - no ads or obvious sponsors
Priority #3 - surfacing hard-won lessons from experienced folks for the world to learn from
Maybe that resonates, maybe it doesn't, but to me it seems upside down.
I'm only commenting because what you're describing used to be me. I used to do this type of editing for recordings of live audio production and I've gone down the rabbit hole you're describing above. The problem is there's no obvious point of 'done', and chasing perfection in the output can become a pathological obsession. You can get so lost in mating phase angle at each end of a trim or taking an eraser to get rid of a sleeve drag across the desk that you lose sight of the totality of it. Ultimately you end up in a weird uncanny valley, like those folks that keep 'fixing' their face with plastic surgery. Once you get to that point, you can no longer identify specific issues to correct, you just fall into a diffuse unease.
For me podcasts are a way to join a conversation that I wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to listen to. I don't see them as a show or corporate media product, and the more they start moving that direction the less inclined I am to listen to them. Julia Childs had a quote that I've found oddly applicable in this context: 'It's so beautifully arranged on the plate, you know someone's fingers have been all over it.'
Hope this doesn't come across as negative. Good luck!
Do you mean the editing process isn't what's making me want to stop the show?
For perspective, phrases like sleeve drag aren't even in my vocabulary. I mainly do my best to quickly get rid of filler content without it sounding like there's hard cuts. It's not chasing absolute perfection where I'm zoomed into the waveform so much it looks like an oscilloscope while I hem and haw about there being a 35ms or 50ms pause between 2 words, or agonizing if I should leave an um in there so things don't sound over processed.
Here's a screenshot while editing an episode where the guest was extremely fluent and I didn't have to edit much filler content: https://i.imgur.com/7CBZ1yc.jpg, for context the episode was 90 minutes long but I zoomed into the point where you can see a ~10 minute chunk (normally I'm zoomed in much more while actively editing). This is a best case scenario where I "only" had to do 305 cuts for a 90 minute show. In the worst case scenario it's gone as high as 1,800 cuts for 90 minutes.
I try to keep things organic while being respectful to listeners. All of the cuts you see there are related to removing filler content (umms, ahhs, mouth noises and long pauses). I also remove their dead air when I talk to avoid any of their mic's background noise overlapping my voice since it's all recorded in an uncontrolled environment.
The before and after is pretty staggering even with a fairly minimal amount of filler editing. To be honest I would feel embarrassed posting the unedited version of most episodes.
It's also very interesting because in a way I think posting a much less edited version where I kept all of the filler content in wouldn't save me much time in the end. Not to sound too over confident but I'm really confident in my ability to perform quality assurance of each episode while I'm doing the editing. I haven't listened to a single episode in its final form because I've gone through each sentence and phrase multiple times during the editing process. For example I'll start playing it, hit a cut point, make the cut, rewind a bit and ensure things flow smoothly, then continue onwards.
If I did a much less edited approach I would still need to listen to the show at 2x speed, so no matter what I'm spending 30 minutes listening to 1 raw hour. However I'm also creating timestamped show notes like you see here https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/99-a-custom-electron... along the way while editing so I have to pause to write these down.
Basically I would still be spending quite a lot of time to produce things and I don't think I can outsource that because it would involve finding someone who is not just an audio editor but they would need a ton of domain knowledge around 100 different assorted technologies. A lot of those timestamped notes aren't verbatim quotes. I'm mixing quotes with trying to keep it concise to fit into 1 line. I'm also making judgment calls on what to include because not everything is worth making a note over, otherwise there would be one every 30 seconds (I used to do this in earlier episodes).
Personally I would rather have a transcript with timestamped links where each guest is broken up into their own paragraphs but to have them done right costs a lot of money. Every machine generated transcript service I used had really bad grammar issues and mistakes. A human reviewed one would be well over $100 per episode to make which is a lot when the show already has a net loss on every episode (hosting).
That quote you mentioned was really good by the way. I'd like to think my editing style is more on the side of someone occasionally using their hand to make sure the food doesn't slide off the plate while you run the plate over from the kitchen to the customer. That's how I feel during the editing process. I'm trying to get through it as fast as possible but taking great care to ensure a high quality meal arrives to the customer. I'm optimizing for folks wanting to come back to their favorite restaurant on a regular basis, not serve an artificial feeling $10,000 plate to a king.
> Do you mean the editing process isn't what's making me want to stop the show?
No this is just confusing language on my part. What I meant was that I don't actually think those are your list of priorities in order, but that is how they could be extrapolated based on which part has to give.
OK so after your description of your workflow I think I was reading too much into where you were at specifically with regards to the content clean-up. I was worried that you were hovering over every sentence trying to optimize it and was just trying to talk you down off the ledge. :) For some reason I tend to gravitate towards jobs where I'm at my best when nobody knows I did anything at all. Editing is probably one of the best examples of this and, as a result, it's hard for anyone that hasn't done it to truly appreciate how much work there is behind it.
(Some of this is selfishly motivated btw, I've been following your podcast since the spring and don't want it to go offline lol. If i have to listen to some CTO's lips smack every time he gets ready to talk I'll allow it. :) )
> For some reason I tend to gravitate towards jobs where I'm at my best when nobody knows I did anything at all.
Yes, this is perfectly said. It's exactly how I feel and what I strive for. I think most folks would be surprised if they listened to a before / after even if all that was done was occasionally remove filler content and mouth noises. It's like that one business analogy iceberg picture with "success" being the 10% that's above water and the other 90% is buried with all sorts of things you never hear about.
> Some of this is selfishly motivated btw, I've been following your podcast since the spring and don't want it to go offline lol
That really means a lot and I'm happy to hear you like the show but unless a big pile of money falls from the sky to afford hiring a dedicated editor and human reviewed transcripts then I have to pull the plug. I've already been feeling this way for 3-4 months but tried to power through it. I've reached the point of feeling resentment and disgust just thinking about opening my editing tool of choice and it's taking its toll. It sucks because I would love to record the show until the day I die but these are the cards I'm dealt and I have to choose sanity over suffering at this point.
There's no middle ground due to the last half of my previous reply.
Sorry to hear that man. You did it once, quite well in fact, so you could always do it again if the opportunity strikes. Hopefully we'll figure out a way to make it simpler for this kind of thing to sustain itself. Until then I'm glad there's no ambiguity at the number one priority, health and well being.
It's all good. That feeling was very much compartmentalized to just the editing bits of the podcast. Maybe one day it'll work its way out to being doable.
I posted a new episode today since I still have 6 unedited episodes left, I figured I would release them once a month until they run out. I'll also be posting a "what's happening with the podcast?" video on YouTube tomorrow.
Probably but I have no way to turn this off and be happy with myself.
I try to approach everything I do from the angle of "what needs to be done to make this as good as it can be with my current skill set?". From a listener's perspective if I had to listen to something with a bunch of mouth noises, ums every 3 seconds or long pauses I would end up focusing on that instead of the topics being covered. It would give off a wrong impression that conflicts with my core values.