The Edit - Team Clarity Matrix Part 3

Editing your own podcast is seldom the smartest move. I'll say that again. Editing your own podcast is seldom the smartest move. Hey, this is Paul and this is part three of our Team Clarity Matrix series. The Team Clarity Matrix is a tool that we use here at the Podcast Partnership to help you understand the team that's gonna be putting together the podcast. The motto around here at the Podcast Partnership is team before tech. And, well, you gotta understand what that team is. You need clarity on it. And that's the part of the Matrix. Last two episodes, we talked about the idea of strategy review. Not only having a strategy, but looking at it to see if it works. We talked, took a look at the talent who's actually going to be recording the content. Today we're going to chat about the edit. Really just three sub bullets here to the edit, but they are important. Bullet number one, there are lots of choices and many times this is the first question, and many times people spend way too much time searching out an answer to who it is that's going to be doing the edit. And what I would suggest in this recording is that I can give you the stuff that you need to know, what questions to ask so that you can make your edit decision quicker, better, faster. So there's a lot of questions. It's made time. It's the first question. We put it third on the Matrix. And as you see this series come together, we do that for a reason. Seldom the answer is doing it yourself. And really it's just a simple issue of math. If you are in this for business, the time spent doing this yourself, and even the time spent overtly managing the doing of this yourself, you could take that, get out one more episode and see more profit and pay for it. So, lot of choices. Let's help you make the answers or get the answers. So two options here, skill and strategy. First, let's chat about the skill of editing. Now, there's no empirical measurement in editing. It is at the top, a matter of taste. People are going to respond to and look at edits differently. And that's just the game that we're playing. And that's what we have to deal with. But just know at the front it's a matter of taste. But in dealing with that matter of taste issue, know that you are not your audience. See, you know this topic considerably more than your audience does. And so the edit that might be good for you is not necessarily the edit that is good for your audience. The review process, in checking what consumption is and checking how deep they Go. The favorite edit process, the style of editing, the approach that you take to editing might not even be perfect. Don't assume that a better edit means better consumption. We have seen time and time again that that is not necessarily the case at all. Actually, when it comes short to it, don't assume anything. The editing process should be tested much the same way as is your ads process and your titles and your SEO work and your calls to action and everything. So number one on skill, it's a matter of taste. Number two on skill, you gotta decide before you hire, before you look to having someone do the editing for you on what kind of edit you want. And then you gotta figure out if your editor can do it. This is key. There are some people who would love to do a certain kind of edit, but they can't. There are others who just almost have moral feelings about certain kinds of edits. You want to understand the kind of edit you want and then match the purchase of your editor up against that. There are really two different kinds of edits and then there's one kind of side dish that happens in the edit Edit number one is just the simple edit. That's where you take out the big problems. We do internally what we call the three clap edit. That's where if an edit needs to be made, the talent clap three times, tells the editor what needs to happen and then the edit is made. The simple edit that is start, stop. The three claps, in and out pretty quick. Now they're cleaning it up and they're taking out background noise and they're doing leveling and these types of things. But there is the simple edit, then there is the soundscape edit. The Soundscape edit is a more, to be honest with you, is a way to say the NPR style. The soundscaping is where maybe you take parts and you move them around, or maybe you throw in some music in the background. You do transitions more like a public radio storytelling type of thing, which in some cases is fantastic. In some cases kills the buzz of just the instant live person in the room type situation. You have to decide, do you want the simple edit or do you want the Soundscape edit? Once you've decided that you need to decide, are you going to remove the ums and ahs? And this is not an empirical budget issue. The removal of ums and ahs is an issue of simply do you need to do this? Do you want to do this? There's definitely an issue of, you know, I mean, if you got an hour long podcast and there's Two minutes of ums and ahs and you edit out the ums and ahs. And that's downloaded a thousand times. You've saved 2,000 minutes of people's life. There's that issue, but the other issue is podcasting is the conversation. Podcasting is the real life. You're catching me. I'm actually recording this on a Saturday afternoon. It's been one of those crazy weeks. I had to come into the studio to pull this off and one other video that I needed to do. This is real life. And for many that's the communication of a podcast and the removal of the ums and the ahs and the awkward pauses and that kind of thing. Remove from the reality of what it is that's going on. Some people don't want to see the edit, Some people want to see the real action. Some people want to see the really scene. And you just. The real scene. And you just decide what you want to do with that. So decide what kind of edit you want, then look for the editor. Do you want a simple edit, do you want a soundscape edit? And do you want to pay for the ums and ahs to be removed? So that's the skill issue. Now, the strategy is much more important than the skill. There are a lot of people out there who have tremendous editing capabilities. And you can buy local, you can go offshore, you can go to things like Fiverr, you can go a lot of places to get the edit. But let's talk about the strategy, because this is huge. Number one at the top of the edit, and this is very important. And we've seen, we had multiple clients who have been affected by this. Let me explain. You want to edit, record lossless until the very last second. You want to record your podcasts as a loss. You want to record your audio as lossless audio. You want to record your video as lossless video. You want to get the best possible quality that you have. And then you want to edit it, and then you want to compress it, make it an MP3 at the very last minute. Now, a lot of people have been in a situation where the audio was recorded low rate and then a low rate MP3 was made and then the project files were thrown away. Then lo and behold, a couple years later, that needs to be made into a CD that sounds bad or needs to be re edited, which sounds even worse. So edit, record lossless until the very last second. The last thing is to take the big project and make it the mp3 file and then in that process, keep the project files, because one day you might want to come back in and fix things. We're in a situation right now where we've got a client where we're going back in and we're fixing 300 episodes of which the original project files weren't done, of which the MP3 was created. So it's going to lose a little bit of quality, sound quality, but unfortunately, what we're, or fortunately what we're trying to do is going to be worth it. But it's a better case if you just keep the projects. And of course, in keeping the project files, the big question, of course, who owns them? Do you own them? Does the editor own them? What does the editor do with them? When do you get them all? Questions you want to ask another thing you want to have. It's because it's a skill and because it's something that other people are better at. You want to ask the question of industry standard stuff. Yep. Technical term stuff for cross compatibility. Because the thing is, if they're using a tool that only they know how to use, or only a small group of people know how to use, what happens if, you know, they move to another job? What happens if they get hit by a bus? What happens if editing needs to be done? If there's some special thing that nobody else has used or nobody else very few other people use? You want to, yeah, you want to kind of shy away from that. So grab industry standard stuff across compatibility. If you edit one, can you pick up the other? Can you pick it up on another? If you are working entirely in lossless files, you could take everything, export it there, bring it into something else, but that seems a lot more work. Work with industry standard stuff. Now, once you're working with industry standard stuff and once you are protecting the files, and once you're working with lossless, then your options get a lot bigger. You don't have to be, um. The editor doesn't have to be physical. You know, this table right next to me, that's where the app developer works, not where the editor works. My editors, I got a number of them. Some are in this town, some are not in this state. I've got no international things going on right now, but who knows, that might happen in the future. And because you work with these files that everybody else works with, you can hire the best person for the job and that's a good place to be. They don't have to be physically located with you. Use the cloud, but use the cloud intelligently. Do the dynamic updating stuff. If you're working, you know, a good audio project file can be big and that going back and forth for edits and that kind of thing can be a mess. Use a cloud platform that makes sense long, short of it is is you don't want to pay for your editor to sit and wait for things to download. Makes sense. You want to pay your editor to pet it. Define turnaround times. Know how quick things are going to go. This is the part of the project management which is the last piece that we take a look at this. Editors can be overexcited, can take on a bunch of jobs, can be kind of putting out fires. Define turnaround times and then last but not least, have a backup plan. What happens if things go wrong? So at the top, a lot of choices. Many times it's the first question it shouldn't be. It should be part of your strategy. Though the skill questions do answer which we chatted about here. Matter of taste. Decide what kind of edit you want and then the strategy issues of working in lossless, working in industry standard stuff, working in the cloud, making sure you know what the ownership is and you go from there. That is the edit strategy for your team Clarity matrix. Next session we'll be talking about publishing what that means, some of the things you want to think about there. You can take a look at our website of teambeforetech.com to get this video, this audio and the worksheet. Thanks so much, we'll chat soon. Bye.