A look behind the scenes of PhotoNetCast: The podcasting equipment, setup and editing of the show.
Since the first episodes of PhotoNetCast, once in a while, I get email from listeners asking me how do we produce the show and what equipment do we use (hopefully because the show sounds good). I always try to answer as best as I can, but I feel like I’m repeating myself. So, while I understand that this is not directly photography-related and might not interest all of you, it will be a point that I can direct listeners to whenever these questions come up. And after all, it’s no big secret… Also, it seems that there is not much information on how to setup the equipment that I’m now using for the purpose of podcasting. I hope this will help there as well.
Of course that our system may not be the best one (I’m sure it is not) but it has been a learning process since the beginning and so far it’s working well for us. So, here we go…
The conference call
As you are aware, we are four photographers located at four different geographical locations. While “one-man-shows” do not have to deal with this, we do. All our conversations are done with what is probably one of the most used applications for VoIP and conference calls: Skype.
To record the conversations from Skype, we use Pamela. This little piece of software is able to record incoming and outgoing sound on two different channels of a wav file which makes it ideal for editing. Up to episode #20, this was our only way to record the show. This has recently changed and we now have a different way to record the conversations (more bellow), but this system is still used as a backup recording, just in case…
The podcasting equipment
As I mentioned above, I’ve upgraded some of my equipment and I believe the difference was quite noticeable after episode #21. Until then, the four of us were using headsets with microphones and we never got any big complains about the quality. In fact, both Brian and Martin are still using them and they sound great (Brian is using the Cyber Acoustics AC-840 and Martin uses the Hama HS-400). It’s proof that a podcast can indeed be produced with an extremely low budget.
And this is what my setup looks like after the upgrade.
I know that Jim has also upgraded his gear in order to improve his sound both for PhotoNetCast and EXIF and Beyond and he is now using a Blue Bluebird microphone attached to an Icicle USB preamp.
As for my side, this is what you see in the image above (besides the laptop, the colorimeter, the hard drives, etc.):
And what do I do with all this mess to record the show?
Recording PhotoNetCast
So many knobs, so many cables…
One of the big “fights” that podcasters have while using a mixer and Skype to record shows is that the incoming sound from Skype needs to go into the mixer and the outgoing sound from the microphone connected to the mixer needs to go into Skype. One problem with this is that usually creates a very ugly feedback loop with co-hosts listening to themselves (usually with some delay) and makes the recording impossible.
I’ve figured out a way to bypass this problem and at the same time allowing me to use a third-party application (such as Adobe Audition or Audacity) to record directly the output from the mixer to two separate channels and still keeping Pamela recording as backup.
The setup is hard to explain, but I’ll try.
Let’s start with the mixer. The left column is what controls my microphone. I won’t go into levels and gain (if you want a good explanation of how this works, listen to Podcasters Emporium 11) nor into equalization settings. Two things you should note is that the microphone is completely panned to the left and the aux knob (the red one) is not completely off but outputting just slightly.
The next column is the sound coming in from Skype (yellow line connects the headset output from the laptop into this mixer input). This one is completely panned to the right and aux knob is off.
On the top of the third column (and unrelated to it) is the aux-bus out, which is outputting the sound from my microphone (remember the red knob turned up just slightly on the microphone? This is where that sound goes). This is connected to the mic-in on the laptop (gold line) and allows my co-hosts to listen to me (and not themselves avoiding that feedback loop I mentioned before). It is not used for the main recording.
On top of the fourth column is the headphones output which allows me to listen to myself and the sound coming from Skype.
Over on the right is the main mixer output. My sound and the sound from Skype are separated into left and right channels (remember the panning to the left on my microphone and to the right on the Skype sound?). These are connected to the USB interface (red and blue lines) which then connects to the laptop. The advantage of having such a USB interface is that the computer recognizes it almost as a separate sound card. This way I can have Skype using the laptop sound card (with incoming and outgoing sounds flowing through the normal mic and headset plugs) and the recording third-party software using the USB interface and recording what comes out of the mixer (both my voice and my co-hosts’), equalized and ready to go. I pan my sound to the left and Skype sound to the right so that I can record into the same track my voice in one channel and my co-hosts’ in the other which, again, is perfect for editing.
I told you it was hard to explain…
Editing and Publishing the Show
If everything went well, I now have two WAV files: one from the main recording and a second one from the backup recording. Hopefully I have to use only the first.
The editing consists of cutting out the things that you shouldn’t really be listening to(some are ending up as outtakes at the end of the show) like some middle show conversation, me loosing the train of thought, silent patches, Martin one of us dropping off the call, too many ahhh hmmm and the like, etc. The intro and outro clips and bumpers are also added at this stage, usually everything into different tracks.
The next step is mixing all the tracks and channels into a single mono track (second track on the image above). To give consistency to the sound levels, the track goes into a compression algorithm which amplifies the lowest volumes and decreases the loudest ones. A normalization step goes next to amplify as much as possible without clipping the sound. The final version of the WAV file is now ready.
Next, the WAV is converted to mp3 (64kbs mono), the file is tagged, uploaded to the server and the corresponding blog post is written. It all ends around 4+ hours later by hitting the Publish button.
And that is it. Listening to the show is your part of the job (and writing some iTunes reviews also).
I know that I went into probably too much detail on this one, but one of my aims was really to get out some more technical details to anyone wanting to use the same setup. And at least, now you know almost everything that is going on (at least on my side) to produce PhotoNetCast.
As always, if you have any questions or are curious about any further details, just ask. I’ll do my best to explain.
