Basic Podcast Production with Adobe Audition - Lesson 3

Now, when we ended the last lesson, we talked about— in this one, we're going to be talking about how to do the initial cutting of the raw files, and then I was going to do a recording at the beginning of this one to purposely include some fluff-ups and things that we need to remove. So, let's go ahead and do that. I'm first going to remove this file by clicking on it and hitting Delete from the multitrack. I'm going to keep this and record right here in the multitrack just because It's easy and we're already set up to do that. So let me record a sample file. Hi and welcome to this episode of the Digital Podcast Podcast. Um, we're going to be talking about things that you can do to improve your— no, we're not. We're going to be talking about things that you can do to improve the way that that you produce your own podcast. Okay, so as you were listening to that, you saw that I purposely added in some things that need to be removed, and this is very common of the type of things that you may find within an actual audio recorded file. So now what we're going to do is we're always going to be initially cutting those things out in the waveform view. So let's go ahead and double-click on this. And we're going to open that up. I'm just going to throw my headphones on so I can hear the audio playback as we go through this, and you'll be able to hear it along the way. Now, when you got a long file— this one's not too bad, it's only a couple seconds, so it displays really great on this screen— but let me just go over here and show you the one that we imported. So, this one here is quite long and really hard to see a lot of the waveforms. My mouse has a dial on the top that I can scroll, When I do that, I can zoom in or I can zoom out. You can also zoom in and out on the very bottom where this little plus sign is for zoom in, zoom out, or at the top you see this little slider. I can move that in and out by grabbing the handles on either side to zoom. Okay, so let me just go back to the file I recorded. Let's take a listen at the beginning. Hi and welcome to this episode of— okay, so Welcome to this episode. The first thing at the top is there's a little bit of space here. We're going to highlight that by clicking and dragging. We're going to click delete. Hi, and welcome to this episode of— okay, and now I thought for a minute what I was going to say. There's space here and here. I'm just going to remove that. Let's see what it sounds like. Of the Digital Podcast Podcast. Okay, now I had an um. Want to remove that. Now, here's one thing that I'm going to point out. If I pull that out and cut that out very close, let's see what this sounds like. Podcast. We're going to be talking about— okay, it was very unnatural in the way that it was spoken being that tight together. So I'm just going to go and I'm going to do an Edit Undo just to bring that back. I want to add a little bit of space. Over time, as you get better at this, you'll start to know just by looking at the waveforms things that you want to delete and leave in there. So, I'm going to delete that just to leave a little bit of space. So, let's just see. Podcast, podcast. We're going to be talking about things that you can do to improve your— no, we're not. Okay, so I had a fluff there. We're going to be talking about— okay, so what I tend to do is think of where I start up. We're going to be talking about— okay, so where did I say we're going to be talking about? We're going to be talking right there. So I'm going to pull that out exactly where it was. And we're just going to fully remove that. Now you see it's snapping into that file. If I zoom in, it's going to give me more control to get a little closer to it. Delete it. Podcast. We're going to be talking about things that you can do to improve the way that you produce your own podcast. Perfect. Delete the rest. And that right there is a great edit on a file that you can use. So what you're going to do is you're going to go through any interviews that you have and you can cut out the ums, the ahs, the pauses, the redos, and things of that nature. One little trick that I do if I'm recording a segment and let's say I'm a couple minutes into it and I make a mistake and I want to start over, what I'll do is I'll clap my hands because if I clap my hands, there's a large spike in the audio, and you're going to see something like this, but it's going to be much taller. So, as you go through your several-minute file, you can see these spikes. You know, oh, there's an edit there. I can quickly go to that to find it. So, that's what I would do with all the different files that I'm going to be working with, and you just go through the, kind of like the, the cutting block and chop out the things you don't want and make sure the files are as great as they can be for you to work with when we start to get into the next lesson, which we're starting to layer and assemble our podcast. We'll see you there.