Optimize Your Video Podcast: Expert Tips On File Management

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed. Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard, and today we're going to talk about how to optimize your.

Podcast, your video podcast.

Pardon me. Yes, you are right, Tracy. I buried the lead there. I'm so sorry. Optimize your video podcast. Extra tips on following file management, among some other things I think we're going to cover.

Right, right. So in the description, Tom, I wrote about it and called it the elephant in the room, because that's the problem with these videos. They're gigantic and they sometimes take up a ton of space, as we've discovered. And, you know, I could have used an expletive there, but you know, they take a ton of space, right.

We'll just say a boatload of space. How about that?

A boatload of spades.

Yeah. And it's something that I've actually been dealing with a lot with new podcasters who we've been launching their shows. And the real majority of all new podcasts that we're launching are also recording and publishing their episodes in video on YouTube and on their website. And for very good reason. About 75%, I think, of all of our podcasters are doing it in almost every new podcast. There are some exceptions. There are people don't want to do video for one reason or another. And those. That's perfectly fine. Those are good reasons, too.

So when we started our first podcast, it's a decade ago. Oh, my gosh, it's a decade ago. More than a decade now, actually, because we started it earlier in the year. But we thought we would do this like, really cool video thing. We had like multi camera setups. We had a green screen.

We did like on that because when we were back then, you remember this, we gotta find one of the old videos. I know we have them and we'll put a link in the blog post.

I think I have a photo of us doing it.

It's worth seeing because in our space, you and I were sitting at a partner's desk facing each other. But one of the cameras was from the end. So you had both of us in the shot looking at each other in toward the middle, and there were a couple windows behind us. And I painted some, like, panels green for the green screen and stuck them on the glass and. And had our video editor. That was kind of a gag at first. Cause we put different scenes out the window. Like we were in Hawaii or there were mountains then, and it was kind of a gag. What was it gonna be in behind us that week?

Well, we thought that's what we were gonna do.

And it became, oh, painfully long and expensive, really, to have our video editor do all that work.

Well, but today you can have AI do it. It's actually a whole lot. So, like, this is the thing. This is why I mentioned it. If had a decade ago when you started your podcast, or even six years ago when you started your podcast, didn't want to do video because it was more cumbersome, it was more difficult. It's time to reconsider that. However, it's not without its complications and its costs. Hidden costs, I'm going to call it. And part of that is because of the size of files and the blowup it takes in your space. So out there, there's all these people who's like, oh, start a podcast. It's really cheap. You can do it with your phone. Like, how many times have we heard that from some gurus out there? And the thing is, is that starting a video podcast, it may sound like you can do it inexpensively, but very quickly you'll find you gotta pay for the higher package in Zoom. You've gotta pay for more storage space in Dropbox or Google Drive. So some of these costs will start to creep up on you, and we want you to be aware of that. But there are also some ways to manage it, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

I agree. There's also some additional costs in time and logistics. And if you're trying to make your life easy, recording multiple cameras will not necessarily be your fastest path to bringing your message to the world. So there's cost and time as well, right?

Absolutely.

So let's talk about some of these kind of things from the beginning. So if you're considering doing a videocast and. Or you've already been doing it, and maybe you want to make it a little more professional and more expansive. One of the things that Tom just mentioned is doing multiple cameras.

And I will have to tell you out of gosh, what 1300 podcasts launched in our business that poditized Tracy. There's maybe been three or four that actually have implemented multiple camera views. And there's nothing wrong with it at.

All that kept doing it. See, a lot of them will try it for a few episodes and then give it up quickly. Right. Like they have this plan just because.

It'S more work for them. Right. And that's really the issue. I mean, it's also if you have multiple camera angles, usually you would do that when you are having someone that you're interviewing who's with you in person. That's most of the time when people do that. I mean, you can do it when it's just yourself, but then maybe you only need two camera angles at most. Right. But the idea when you're interviewing someone in person, you're going to be sitting side by side and there's one shot of the two of you, and then there's a camera at maybe a 45 degree angle pointed at one of you, and then another camera at the opposite 45 degree angle framing the other one of you, and you can cut between them. And there are advantages in that because you can really do more extensive video editing and remove things because you can just cut the cameras every time you want to cut something out. That's the good part, but that's because you're probably not doing that video editing, or most of the people, at least that we work with would not be. The pain in the butt comes with, all right, I got three cameras I got to turn on. I got three SD cards I got to put in there, or three cell phones I have to deal with. And then I got to make sure I label them right. And I get them off of there and I transfer them. Where am I transferring them to and how am I getting them to my producer? And do I upload them to cloud drives on? They're huge.

Yeah. You've got three times the file size to deal with. And so this is where those complexities start to add up in your time, energy and costs. And that's what we wanted to make you realize today. There are some easier ways, and we're going to talk about that as we continue on, is like, hey, we found that some of this really works and some of it doesn't. So if you are really trying, and you are extremely good at doing Instagram stories or reels or TikToks, and you've got a iPhone or a camera on a phone that you're using, and you're using a vertical view, but you're taking a horizontal shot that's good for YouTube right. That's good for the video cast itself. That's okay to have two cameras for those things, but you're not integrating them and editing them together. In your video cast side, you're using that other one for clips only. So you might hand them off the files to two different people. You had one to your editor who's editing your show and you handle one to your social media team. So that's a way to do that, to keep that simple and easy for yourself and to keep that distinction. There are times where you really do want a really great vertical. So we solve that problem here. So if you're looking at this video of me right now, I had to solve this problem with my environment for my social media team because I do not capture two cameras and I don't want to do it because of the situation where I am. They'd be on top of each other and it would be weird. But they can very easily cut a vertical here and have it be framed in the frame properly. So I'm in the bottom two thirds of it. There's area over the top of my head for captioning. It's spaced that way. I actually have three pillars here, right. Of bookcases and it's cutting only the middle one. So the two get cut off when it's shown on Instagram or TikTok or in shorts. Right. So that is why it is my setup is set to assist in this type of video editing so that we don't have to have multi camera angles and don't have to do multiple files.

Very, very great point, Tracy, and helpful. I know this topic is one that you were feeling pretty strongly about and wanting us to do today and I. There's a couple of technical things I want to share with people about using external cameras, but I'm not sure if you want me mention that now as you're talking about the file sizes or you want to wait a little bit. What would you prefer?

No, let's talk about the external cameras. So there are some things and Tom actually has a whole tip and section that we did or coaching call we may have done in the past about how to use an iPhone camera in conjunction with your regular camera through zoom. And so we will make sure to link to that in the blog post for this episode so that you can get that. How to. If you decide that that is what you want to do.

I've become a huge fan of. For those of you that use zoom and I know some of you don't want to use zoom and Scoff at it. And that's fine. I mean, everybody has their opinion. I'm a fan of Zoom because I just use it all the time anyway. And it's much easier for me to record a podcast in it than sign into another service like Riverside or something to use it. But I am a huge fan of using my iPhone as the camera used in Zoom. I do it whenever I do a webinar, for sure. And whenever I record high quality videos to demonstrate parts of our productized client portal. When we add features and functions there. Wow. Is it easy and seamless? It's a wonderful thing. And it's a better camera than any external webcam you would buy and plug into usb, in my opinion. And it's all wireless. Zoom's set up to do it. If you're using the latest Zoom and you have your iOS updated, it's so easy to do. So just that's just a general statement about that. And there is a whole nother resource, Tracy's right, where I demonstrate that. But let's talk about other kinds of cameras. I'm talking about a lot of people who do the two or three camera setup will use a real HD video camera. It records mostly to an SD card these days. Not, you know, I don't think anybody's really using any kind of videotape anymore, but they're all digital to an SD card.

Or streaming like mine is.

Or streaming like yours. Yeah. And that is one of my pet peeves. It sort of bugs me when people say we're taping this. It's like, really? Are we using tape today? I don't think we are. All right, anyway, all right, pet peeve over. But the digital video cameras that do full HD video, they're wonderful and they have a lot of settings. And if you have not really optimized those settings, you're going to find you end up with 50 and 60 and 80 or even 100 gigabyte files for maybe what's an hour recording session. This becomes very problematic for you when uploading videos to cloud services or directly to anyone that you're is going to be editing your stuff. It's very problematic. So there's a couple quick tips. Obviously, there's so many different cameras out there. I am not going to go to the level of detail here to talk about this camera. You do this, that camera, you do that. That's not it.

And there's always so many new models coming out all the time too. So it changes frequently. But there are a lot of YouTube you type it into YouTube. If you're looking for the best camera to do this, there's always someone doing some tutorial review.

But there are a couple of fundamental things I want to make clear is that number one, you don't record in a higher resolution than you really need. We have one customer that records in 4K, which is bigger than full HD. I mean that's like cinema recordings stuff. Don't record in a higher resolution than you need. Now the one customer we have that does this, their theory is, well then you can zoom in on certain things and it can still be 1080 HD because you're starting with 4K. It's like, okay, that's true, but let's talk about practicality. Yeah, we have these discussions, right? So I really don't think you need to record in anything more than true 1080 HD, which is 1920, I think by 1080, if I remember right. Hopefully my memory's right on that. But anyway, that's the really no reason to record more than that. But there's another hidden feature of video recording that I see a lot of rookies making this error and they don't realize they're recording it like 60 frames per second in terms of a frame rate. That's wonderful if you're recording full motion sports. Okay, if you are recording soccer game and you're recording your kid out playing and you want to really get some good high resolution fast motion shots and slow down something.

Maybe I need it because I talk with my hands.

Probably not. But yes, anything where there's a lot of action going on, that's the only time you'd want 60 frames per second. 30 frames per second is really the standard. I mean, some people do 29, whatever. I mean, you're in the neighborhood. Nominally, 30 frames per second is plenty. And guess what? When you go from 60 frames a second to 30 frames a second, your file size is 1/4 of what the 60 frames per second would be. And the same thing when you make resolution changes, when you go from a higher resolution to half of that resolution, again, 25% of the file size, or if you increase that, if you double your resolution, you're making quadruple the file size. So I mean, there are other things that impact it with your phone settings. Those are general guidelines and consequences.

Your phone or camera settings?

Yeah, phone or camera settings. Sorry.

So I do want to say and stop right there for a second because I discovered this with my camera. Sometimes you do have to go up slightly in your frames per second based on the camera if you're using it in the live stream mode, because it gets like. I don't even know how to explain it. It's like it's skipping frames. And so every hand motion you do, it looks like you're missing out. And that can happen for two reasons. One is that the frames per second isn't really matched with what the camera's sending to the computer. And so it can be too high or too low. And the other part that I found is that it's also there's a cache involved. And so there's a cache on the camera that you sometimes have to reinitialize and reset your camera periodically. So I end up doing it about once a week. Just to keep that in mind that that's what happens. If you get your frames per second too high, you'll do it even more often.

Okay, so for those of you that don't know, and that's probably most of you listening and watching this right now. Tracy was very picky about her camera. She does an awful lot of recordings and video and she wanted to buy a really high quality digital SLR camera. I think you have a Sony and I think it was like 6 or 750 bucks, something like that. I mean, it was not a cheap camera.

I have a Sony ZV1, not a.

Cheap camera, but it also is made to be connected to your computer for live streaming. And she wanted the really high quality video. Had her reasons. Great. I mean, it was an investment a few years ago and it's paid off. You do use it every single day and you're using it right now, so that's great. You do have some consequences at times where it overheats and it shuts down. I mean, it can only go so long, right?

Yeah. So that's another thing. If you have the frames per second, there's a lot of advice out there to raise your frames per second when you start to have a camera shutdown issue. And it's bad advice. It's the wrong advice. What I found is it's actually a cache and temperature problem. It's the two things combined. And so if you set your temperature to high, it won't shut down in the middle of a recording because that's what it used to do when it was like it would get too hot and it would shut down. So you have to allow the temperature higher. But you also need to not have that, that frames per second too high because then the cache builds up too quickly. It gets into this where it gets disjointed and it looks like you're out of sync with the audio. And when that happens, the only thing you can do is reinitialize the whole thing. And it can happen right in the middle of a webinar, right in the middle of an interview. And you don't want that to happen. So keeping that frames per second at just the right amount for you to be able to live stream successfully and not overdo it for file size that is going to be per your camera, maybe a slightly adjustable setting. And you may have to experiment to get to it.

But I think we need to be transparent with our listeners and viewers here, Tracy, that your kind of setup is not for the tech averse or people that really don't want to have to spend the time to figure out how to get something like this configured. Because it's high maintenance to say the least. You spent a lot of time setting it up, getting it right and continuing to deal with it. You spend a lot of time on that. But for you, you're willing to spend that kind of time to get it the way you want it. I'm much more of a plug and play type of guy. I'm again huge fan of the iPhone. They shoot movies on iPhone cameras now, the modern ones, 14s, 15s, whatever or. And I just have a normal USB HD webcam plugged into my laptop for more of the everyday stuff when I'm not doing a webinar and I do record podcast video with that. You gotta figure out where your tolerance level is for kind of a balance of increase in technical difficulty that you're gonna have to deal with and high maintenance of taking those files and uploading to your producer or how much you want it to just be really plug and play. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

So here's a really good example. Tom uses that iPhone flip between it. Not here on our webinar. He doesn't do it on the coaching call, he does it only on the webinar because the issue was he was doing it, but then he'd never transfer the file to us and we'd have produced the episodes before he ever sent us the file. So if you are in that situation with like co host or a guest or whatever it is that you're doing and you can't access and get those files immediately from all the different sources and locations, it's just not going to happen for you. So for us we record all of these into the zoom cloud. If it's not in the zoom cloud, no one's ever going to go get it and process it, because Tom and I are not going to take the time to go send files from our computer somewhere. We just don't have the time for that. So if our team can't access that, it's not practical. Don't record it. Don't waste your time if you do not have a process that can make that simple for yourself. Now, there are cases I do not record, record my podcast for the binge factor in the cloud. I actually record it to my local drive and put it in a folder that syncs to my Google Drive so my team can access it immediately. But I do that because I want the two track audio. Tom and I don't care as much about the two track audio here because of how we do this. And it's also downloadable. Like they can go into the cloud and get those two tracks. But if I do it the other way, I have to go into Zoom, download the two separated tracks and put them into the file for the team to access. Whereas if I just download it to my computer, that's all there. And I don't want five camera angles, I want one. And so whatever I record here, my. I use speaker view when I do my interviews. That's all the only one video file. So it makes it less confusing for the processing of my personal show for me to control that. But I have a simple system where it's going into the Google Drive folder, sync to my computer, and that syncs up to the Google Cloud to the Google Drive and then the team accesses it within 12 hours. So it's working for me in that format to control and have less files to transfer.

Yeah. If you're a single host of a podcast and most of your guests and. Or some of you, all of your guests, you're connecting with remotely over a tool like Zoom or Riverside or Zencast or whatever you might be using, then having multiple cameras is not practical or easy to do. You really don't need to do that. I will share. I'll give a shout out to a podcast we've been producing for many years that you can go to and we can include a video in the blog post for this episode on Podcasters United. Org, so you can go look at that. But there's a show called the Clip out that is about a peloton fan podcast. And they have a very unique situation where they're co hosts in person, kind of Tracy, the way you and I were in our first podcast many years ago, and they have guests, which we also did. Right. And they connect through a meeting sort of service. But they've got unique camera situation where there's one on each of them independently, there's one on both of them in their environment where they record. So you get a window into their environment and then they'll also have someone in Zoom. That's the most complex one. And it takes quite an effort to do it on their part and on our part to produce it. But the quality is great and so you can check it out again. We'll have it at the blog post for this episode. But you can also just go to TheClipOut.com and check it out. They have them there too.

So I think the theme that we want to get across to you today and like all the advice that we're giving you is stop saving and recording all the extra stuff that you're not actually going to be able to use. So you're not doing it at a higher frame rate than you can utilize. You're not doing it at a higher resolution than you can use. You're not saving different file types that you're never going to use. Right. So that is going to help cut down on the number of files you have to save number one and the transfer of those files, making it clear. Now keep that in mind that especially if you are using any of the AI tools out there, like tools to do shorts and clips, tools to do actual editing, like where it does like in Descript or something where you might editing the transcript. Right. The more files you have, it can't handle it. You pay twice to do it again for the exact same thing from another angle. So like really keeping in mind that that's not practical for use of that. So if you are doing it yourself and utilizing those tools, you only need one file to begin with and you might need to break the file into pieces. That may be also another tip for how you want to use it too, just to keep your costs down. But it is overdone sometimes to be having those things.

It's a really good point, Tracy, because some of those services charge you for each different media file you put in there going through its full time length. And that's that you know when you're editing them, that's how they charge you. And so when you have multiple videos, it can be a problem. If you're using a real full video editing system like the, the Adobe products or any of those that are full video, you could put multiple video tracks into it. But it's still a lot of work. It's a lot of overhead, a lot of computer overhead.

You got to sync things up and lots happens to it. And so if you don't have a process that your video team is using where they don't want jump cuts, for instance. So that this is why we're not a big fan of the descript process where you edit the transcript and then you cut things out of your video because it only can create jump cuts. So you'd have to go put it into another software where you'd use another angle or you'd skip from one to the other. You'd process the second file like it just makes it way more complicated to be able to utilize it in that way to avoid that jump cut situation. And they tend to get very like it just jumps to the next because you cut out something you didn't like in words. But it doesn't look so good in video.

There are ways to try to deal with that, but it's still not really ideal in terms of creating the best user experience for watching your video. But look, there are pros and cons for all of these things. We're just really wanting to share today about optimizing and making sure you're not making your life and your editor's life more difficult and causing yourself sort of some pain of the amount of time and or money it's going to cost you to bring your content to the world.

Right. So this brings us up to the storage. Not all storage is created equal as I've discovered in the last few months. So we did a massive migration from Dropbox to Google Drive. Now we were doing it for a whole bunch of other reasons that had nothing to do with storage. But I'm not about to pay for double sets of storage when I get it already from having my entire team with all their emails and all their chat and all the other stuff in workspace. I have 144 terabytes available to me in the Google Drive, which is big.

That we pay for whether we use it. It comes with what we're paying for. Right?

Right. It comes with it. So I might as well be using it. So we've started to move everything out of our. Well, we finished it, but we moved everything out of Dropbox and into the Google Drive. And here's a few things that I found. First off, I found some clients that were doing like every file was like a terabyte. Like I mean these things were gigantic. Like it was like an entire episode. Ridiculous amount of space. We realized that some of those clients needed some advice which is why this topic has come up here today. Secondly, we discovered that we had 100 terabytes or 92 terabytes actually over in Dropbox. When I moved it over, it only took 45 terabytes, half the amount of space.

Now why is that, Tracy?

So I think it has somewhat to do with metadata and how Dropbox is utilizing it, but I also think it is Dropbox features where they're allowing you to play it within it, make comments, do edits within it. They're blowing up your file size in terms of what it takes in the storage, even though the file is not actually that big. So it's not one for one. One gigabyte for one space that it's taking up in your drive. And so you're paying for more space than you are actually physically consuming it when you go to download and transfer those files over. So I believe that's what it is. I'm not a technical person. I don't really know what's in Dropbox formula for it or if Google Drive is just so much better at compression, but you're benefiting from it by not overpaying.

Yeah. And you know, we've been Dropbox users from the beginning of our business at Potitize and we had a business level Dropbox account that for many, many years, up until late 2023 was. And for those of you listening to the podcast I'm holding in my hands in air quotes here, unlimited. It was an unlimited Dropbox and we didn't have to pay anymore. When we needed another few terabytes added, I would call them up, get their support on the phone and give them our can info and they would add a few more terabytes. There you go. Well, that changed late 2023 and this year and 2024 when we've needed more, we got an allocation for every user that we have in our business account. But if we need more beyond that, which we did, we'd have to call them and request it. We have to pay more for it. So you either can add another user at a higher price and get five more terabytes, or you end up just adding some more terabytes and paying some lesser amount additional on your account every month, but you're paying monthly for it. So the days of unlimited storage on Dropbox not costing anymore are over. Just FYI, in case you didn't know that. And another thing you have to consider, as Tracy was saying in your costs when you're doing this.

Yeah. So what I'm saying is, is that like if you know that you have a file that's 10 gigabytes, right. And sometimes the video files very often are that big, it's not easy to download it and upload it, to transfer it to places that can be very difficult for yourself. I find that downloading out of Zoom is actually really easy. But uploading somewhere else, not so easy. Zipping those files, this doesn't really decrease it by a ton. So zipping doesn't always work. And then sometimes when you unzip in a Google Drive or you unzip in Dropbox, you unzip in the drive location, the cloud location you're using, it fails the bigger the files tend to fail. And so just keeping that in mind, that thinking that you can just compress something and it will be fine is not always the easiest. And it may not compress it enough to really transfer it to someone overseas who might be working on your files and need it to be much smaller. So keep that in mind. If it's not under, I think if it's not under a couple of gigabytes, like you could be like two and a half gigabytes if you've got an hour long show, if it's not under that, it's too big for this transfer situation. Real extreme situations where you need it bigger than that. But try to, if your files are not smaller than that, then they're probably not working out. Now most often we have ones that are under a gigabyte or a gigabyte and a half. But.

Well, now there are going to be some people, Tracy, listening, who want large files and have large files and transferring those to people across the Internet. Yeah, you can use Dropbox, you can use Google Drive. Like you said, they're not always the speediest for uploading and downloading and there can be a lot of errors we've experienced in doing that. So it's worth mentioning there are other services you may want to use to transfer files.

File transfer services, exactly correct.

Like a Wetransfer transfer is one specific for video, there's like frame IO. I mean there's a bunch of different options out there. And this is not meant to be a directory resource for all of those. But just to raise awareness, there are services that are made to transfer particularly large files. And especially if you have Internet speeds or bandwidth that are limited or at times are not consistent, you're going to want to use a service like that because they're very good at dealing with starting and stopping, resuming, uploading, downloading and things like that.

That's a really good point, Tom, because we've had a few clients who are dealing with some massive weather issues over the last couple of weeks and they are not able to transfer at the rates that they used to. And it's taken them sometimes 24 hours to get files to us. So it can be difficult. And just keep that in mind for yourself as these large file size, keeping them smaller can really be of great benefit to making this streamlined and simple. So in addition to this sort of find about the transfer of all of these is that what we also find is that the quality of the resolution of what you're recording in can start to cost you more because you may want a better quality and sometimes it's not so good on your Zoom. And that's if you're paying for a free Zoom, you don't get a choice, right? Or you're not paying for Zoom or you're paying for that. You're not paying for the space essentially. And so you have to download and move it out of there quickly. But you're also never going to get 1080. You're not going to get it unless you have a paid version of Zoom.

You need to have a business level account and there's a specific kind of account and they have modified it a little bit so you got to look up in Zoom and check with their support, which you can get some free support before you're a customer or even if you are, you can get some support. You have to have a certain level of business account and or a webinar level account to be able to record in full 1080 HD. And even though you have that kind of account, you need to ask their support, please unlock this feature so I can start doing it. And they will do it, but you have to ask for it, otherwise they're going to default you down to 720, which was sort of the very first level of HD. Instead of 1080, it was 720. And like, remember when the first plasma TVs came out and they were HD, they were all 720 and they weren't 1080 yet at that time. It's sort of a little older technology, but for most of us in the size that we're doing things and putting things up on YouTube and our websites, 720 may be just fine. You don't necessarily need, especially when it's like we are Tracy too, talking heads on a video here, it's nothing really moving in the background. Do we really need 1080? Probably not.

Probably not. And, but that's a choice that you need to make and you do have to request it. So it is something you have to reach out to Zoom support and say, hey, I want you to turn on my 1080. Now keep in mind, if you have a big company like ours, it turns it around for everybody. So even little recordings of like sales calls and everything ends up in 1080. You can't just turn it on for certain types of calls.

Just internal meetings we have.

Right. So now our internal meeting recordings started to blow up in size too because of the 1080. So just keep that in mind that these things do happen.

So unintended consequences of getting the best possible video quality.

Yeah. And then just really keep in mind that especially in the recording, like if you're in Zoom, there is a way for you to set up a special room that's only for your recordings for your podcast. So if you're consistent about it, you can always turn off all the other videos. So like I only record speaker view, I don't even allow it to save it or record the other views because I'm not going to use it. So this way you're keeping only the files you absolutely need. And I, of course, for us purpose, we always turn on two track recording for the sound. Make sure you turn that on. It gives you the most options. Because how often do Tom and I talk over each other? All the time. And you do it with your guests. So having the two track recording is really important. But that's the voice sync, not anything to do with the video. So just make sure that you have those options selected.

I'm still surprised how many people submit episodes for us to produce and they just give us a single track recording. And that's okay if it's a solo cast, don't get me wrong, if it's only one person, you don't need to. Right. But if you have co hosts, and we have a lot of shows that co host surprised me how many of them give us just a single track when it's so easy to give us more and then we can do a better job for you and make it that much better.

Yeah, but this is why, Tom, look, if. If you're like trying to get your podcast up to your editors or you're just trying to get it out and done. The issue is that you have to either be recording locally to get your 2Track to download automatically, or if you've got all your videos recording into the cloud, you actually have to go into a subfolder and download the two tracks because I cannot sync the two track recording from Zoom to Dropbox or Zoom to Google Drive.

It doesn't. The automatic saving to a cloud service does not save the two. This is a problem with Zoom. Okay, let's not go off too far on this. But two track recording in the cloud didn't even exist a year ago. Zoom made it available, but then it's sort of off in this island where.

Like you say, it's hidden in a folder.

Those same files are not in the folder with all the other recordings. And if you have that automation, we used to have it to go from the Zoom Cloud directly to Dropbox, so we didn't have to do it. Those separated audio tracks did not automatically transfer. Bad, bad, bad on you, Zoom. You need to fix that. Okay? I mean, boy, I hope somebody from Zoom is listening. And we need to make sure to complain about that because really, that's because of some technical coder who we need to add to Direct Recording in the cloud. Okay, fine, we'll do it. And they didn't do it in the best way, and I'm sure there's a technical reason. But you know what? You need to fix it, because we all want those recordings and they should just be in the same place. Come on.

And when they're not, a lot of people don't even realize it. They're just sending the link to their folder that they have that was saved to their Dropbox or saved to their Google Drive or whatever their storage system is. Right? And you're just not even thinking about it, because the last thing you want is you're done with your interview and you need to move on to doing what you do best. You're handing that off to your team or your assistant or whatever that is, and you haven't really taken the time, because you shouldn't. This is busy work. This isn't stuff that benefits the show.

Unless you really care about that ultimate result, and that's something you're going to do yourself, then you'll go find those files. Right? So these are the things that are having to deal with as hosts to get our show out and where we want to spend our effort and time. Maybe you don't want to spend it on storage space. The last thing I want to leave you is when you're finished with your full video file, you've checked it over and it's really good. Why are you saving all those backups? Do you really need them? You get it up into YouTube, you've got everything working. You're sure it's all fine, maybe you do an automatic delete for yourself. Delete everything every 30 days or every time it's 30 or 60 days old. After publishing, go ahead and think about purging things on an ongoing basis. Because I can tell you, when I went back to my 70 staff members and said, hey, go through your files, they didn't have time to go through that many files. So at some point they were like as Tom always email bankruptcy, Dropbox bankruptcy. I'm going to just say anything older than 2021 that I've not accessed, just delete.

Right?

But what if you want it in the future? Right? So be sure if you're deleting on a regular basis and you're saving only the stuff you want, that's a good way to go.

All right, Well, I think we packed an awful lot in that episode for today. We've got the blog post@podcasters united.org for all of you that want to get some of those links, see some of those videos we mentioned. It's all there for you. Other than that, we'll see you next time on the next episode of feed. You'd brand.

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