Editing basics

Video Transcript

Well, how did that go, then? Did you enjoy your practice recording? I hope that gave you a taste of the kind of fun that you can have, and with where your podcasting is going to be going in the future. When you start getting on some great guests and some really interesting people to connect with, I think you probably got a taste now as to just how much fun you can have.

Did you remember to press record as well, or did you maybe have a false start? Whatever happened, you will remember the first time that you forget to do it. You will never make that mistake again.

Great. What do we need to do next? Well, we have an audio file sitting on our computer, which probably looks a bit like this. We need to start editing it, but why bother editing? I mean, seriously, why bother at all? Why do we need to cut out what’s surely a fantastic interview, right? Everyone edits, in radio news and in podcasting. Why? Because the raw interview that you do, even if it was with the biggest name on Earth, will have some boring bits in it, “umms” and “errs” and things where it just sort of drifts off and doesn’t grab your attention.

If your aim is to make something that is compelling, that people want to listen to, something that people are going to choose to listen to over something else, then you need to edit. I’ve spent many years and I’ve edited other people’s scripts and work to get rid of the boring bits. And here’s the problem. When we are part of the original conversation, when we do the interview – and I know this just as well, having been a reporter with an editor scrubbing my stuff and editing my stuff, and being an editor as well – the problem is we become biased. That interview that we did, that conversation that we had, we kind of mentally assume it is amazing. The whole thing was just brilliant.

But if you listen to someone else do the same interview, I bet you’d lose interest at some point. I bet if you sat down to listen to a podcast right now from someone else – almost any podcast, in fact – you could probably tell me the moment that you got bored or drifted off. It’s really hard to keep someone engaged on a podcast all the way through, so I bet you could tell me that there’s a moment in almost any podcast where you start to drift off.

And the point is that you might be patient. You’d certainly be patient with your own interview. But if you’re listening to someone else’s podcast that you’re not particularly interested in, oh, you might drift off a bit. Your listeners certainly will. You might be paying more attention to hear how they do it, but most people would just switch off and give up. But the good thing is, the very fact that what works and what feels good is something that you can tap into.

You may well have heard of a podcast series called This American Life, and it is massively popular. It’s one of the biggest podcasts on Earth. And one of the key people behind is a chap called Ira Glass. And he has an amazing video on YouTube, which I remember watching a long time ago, in which he talks about storytelling and how you construct things that are interesting, and he said exactly what I’ve just said, which is that you already know – he describes it as taste, and he says, you already have taste. You really know what’s interesting and what grabs your attention. All you’ve got to do – so this is the task – all you’ve got to do is get in touch with that and trust your gut. So instead of being proud and going, oh, that’s an amazing interview, I did it, and, I spoke to someone interesting, you’ve got to listen to it brutally like you are a listener, and if something’s not interesting, you gotta get hacking it out because if your drifting off a bit, someone else is going to turn off and never come back to your podcast.

Now, how much editing do you need to do, because it might sound here like you just have to slash it all apart. Well, it really depends on what you’re making and who you’re targeting. Let’s say you did a one-hour interview. How long is your audience, your demographic going to listen for?

And if you saw that webinar that we did a little bit earlier this year that I co-presented, then I briefly touched on some business podcast out there that lasts, like, two hours every day. Now, real business people don’t have two hours a day. If you’re a wantrepreneur, if you’re someone who wants to be in business, then maybe you do So if you want to reach people that want to be in business, then, great, go ahead and do two hours.

But if you want to reach real business people who are actually in business, you might find five minutes each day as an introduction to their days, something they can listen to when they don’t want to listen to the alarm clock instead. Might be far better to reach that demographic. So the point is, what do you need to create in order to reach your target audience? What does your demographic want? Do they want a one-hour interview? Do they want 20 minutes of continuous chat?

And if you listen to This American Life or Serial, I’m sure you’ve heard this sort of narrative-style podcasts. And those aren’t just long interviews. They’re a collection of soundbites. They’re the very best bits, the minute, or even at times at 10 seconds, the “grab your attention,” and it’s only those bits that they leave in.

I mentioned in a previous video about the fact that I’m currently working on a show called How Not to Get Old and Boring. Well, I’ve done five hours of interviews for that, and I’m making this into a narrative-style podcast. So the first thing I did when I got all that stuff together, well, I started editing it down. My final podcast – it’s five different people’s stories about how they haven’t got old and boring, how they’ve refused to get old and boring, and it’s an amazing variety of stories. And I’m going to be weaving those five different people together into one narrative, and to do that, I needed to grab out the interesting sections.

So I had five hours of raw audio. And I went through it all, and I cut out the stuff which kind of was mm, or repeated itself, or perhaps another person said pretty much the same thing. And from that five hours, I now have one hour and 40 minutes. And that stuff is great stuff. So you can see I cut out a lot of stuff.

Now, statistically, podcasts are about 40 minutes, but statistics really mean absolutely nothing. Because the reality is, as I say, it depends on your audience and what they want to consume. The point is if you have a one hour interview, it needs to fit your audience, and if you need to remove 30 minutes, there is no point being precious and keeping that 30 minutes in if people are going to get bored and switch off and never listen to your podcast again.

So instead of getting strained to editing, before you do that, I want you to check out what other podcasters do in your niche that works for you. And the reason I say “that works for you” is because the chances are that you are your target demographic or close to. So be brutal with that. Listen to these podcasts and switch off when you get bored, but make a note as to why you did. And then when you go to edit your own, you’ll be able to see similar patterns in that and be able to take those bits out that don’t work.

There is one other thing to remove – apart from just the sort of boring or the dull bits or the repetitive bits – and that’s “umms” and errs, and I will show you how to do that in the next video. But the reason is, it’s because “umms” and “errs” can get a bit repetitive and a bit annoying. Now, a few of them can actually make an interview sound a bit more natural, but if you’ve got someone going, I, umm, was, umm, I, umm, went out to, uh, ooh, you know what I mean, right? That is annoying if you will listen to that in a podcast. So you do need to be editing some of those out as well, and I will show you how to do that, as I say, in the next video.

In fact, I remember interviewing – here we go, for a quick unplanned anecdote – I remember interviewing the leader of a council in Britain, many years ago. And this poor person was really not prepared for the interview, and he kept saying, umm, err, umm, err, trying to think of answers. And perhaps I should have left it in there so that people would have heard the authentic voice of the leader of their council. But anyone would’ve switched off. They would have gotten annoyed.

So I actually edited out the “umms” and “errs,” and I cut it down – it was about a five-minute interview – to 90 seconds. There were so many umms, errs, pauses and him repeating himself, but the final 90 seconds made him sound really professional, which maybe I should have charged him extra for. But anyway, the point is that you can turn some of the errs and umms into someone that sounded great.

So here’s my next exercise. Seriously, before you start trying to edit, before you move on the next video, have a listen to some podcasts in your niche and decide what it is that works for you and what leaves you going [YAWNS] or switching off. What is it about that? Write down those aspects. Be brutal. Be genuinely interested in what style of approach of podcast works for you, the duration, the length, the style, the content and that sort of thing. Make some notes on that, and then when we come back to edit your file, you can start applying that directly to it. Have a go with that, and I’ll see you in the next video.