Top Guidelines Every Podcaster Should Know in Recording with Zoom

Hi, everyone, this is Tom from Poditize. And today I'm here to share with you a little tutorial on using what has become one of the most popular pieces of software to use to record your podcasts and also your video casts, if you're a videocaster, and that is Zoom. Now, we've done some other videos in the past showing people how to use Zoom Zoom, and it was in conjunction with other software like maybe a Zencast or something like that, and certainly you can still do that. However, Zoom has really improved a lot in the last year or more. And most of our customers, and including ourselves, when we're conducting any kind of interviews or doing webinar content or even just a live stream video that we turn into a podcast, most of us are using Zoom all by itself. Its quality has gotten quite good and we highly recommend it. So today I'm creating this Zoom video as a brief tutorial of how to get started with Zoom if you're new to it. So first you're going to want to go to Zoom us. That's the URL. If you, if you have never used it before, you're going to want to sign up for a free account. And for most of you, a free account is going to be all that you need. For others that need some of the advanced features, there's a pretty reasonable monthly subscription fee that you can sign up to to use some of their more advanced features. So that's what you're going to want to do is sign up and then they have a desktop app. I mean, here I'm in a web browser and I'm on their website, which is where you sign up and create your account. But you are going to want to download their desktop app whether you're on a Windows PC or a Mac computer. I'm demoing this on a Mac. They have a great, you know, desktop app. I highly recommend it. And right now I'm going to go to it and show you, you know, when you're running it, this is what you'll see. And then one of the things that's very important is that you go to your settings within Zoom and in the Mac, it's preferences, I'm going to bring those up here on PC. It's, you know, I think it's called Settings and go. Obviously, one thing you're going to see here is your microphone. And my microphone is plugged into a USB interface because I'm using kind of an advanced system, but it's called USB Audio Device. But usually you have your built in microphone. And any other microphone that you have plugged into your computer will show up in this list. And it's always good to make sure that it's set to use the right microphone. But the most important setting is under this recording tab. And I want to show you this here, see this checkbox? I'm going to uncheck it and recheck it. Record a separate audio file for each participant who speaks. This is incredibly important for recording the best quality audio, because if you don't, check this when Zoom records its video and it will output a video if you're doing video. Or it will also just output the audio if you're using audio and you, you can do other way, but if you're interviewing a guest or if there is another person you're connecting with through Zoom, because you know Zoom was intended as a communication tool, a virtual conference room, if you will, that you can connect with others, but you could just connect with a single person as well. And when you do that, if you do not have this checkbox selected, it will record one single audio track for both of you. And while you might think, well, that's simpler for editing and that's easier for me to use, that may be, but if you and your guest ever accidentally speak at the same time, then you are stuck with a single audio file. An editor, either yourself or a professional editor, cannot change that for you. However, if there's a separate audio file for each participant who speaks, what that means is one audio file it saves is going to have my voice only me on my side from my computer, and when I'm not talking, it'll be silent. Same thing for your guest. They'll have one audio file recorded for their audio. What is their audio input to their computer or what you hear of them. And when they're not speaking, their track will be silent. And in audio editing, it's definitely a best practice to use what are called separated tracks or multiple tracks, so that if both of you talk at the same time, an audio editor can actually edit one of you out and just hear the one person who was saying what was most important or most relevant. And there are a lot of other benefits. That's just sort of a simple example. But for instance, your guest audio might be very quiet and you can really not hear them very well. So your audio editor is going to want to raise their level of their volume level of their track, but leave yours where it is, or maybe yours is too loud and they need to lower yours. And when you have separated tracks, you can do that. But if everybody's in one track, it's very difficult, very complicated to edit. So this is the most important thing. You also have options with Zoom to record in the cloud or record on your local machine. I personally like to record on my local machine, but I don't think there's any problems with recording in the cloud. I know a lot of people that do that. When you're in Zoom, you have here some things on your dashboard. This is your home screen. You have some settings you can access from there. Now, meetings. This is something I want to show you. You have a personal meeting id. Now, you can set up recurring calls or different reasons. You might have different meeting IDs, but you have a personal meeting ID. And when you're going to schedule a meeting with someone you know, this is always yours, it will never change. And you can always copy that information and then paste it in an email, or you can also paste it into a booking calendar schedule. So if your guests are booking to be a guest on your show, they know where they have to connect. They get a link of this information and all they have to do is click that link. It'll bring them to the Zoom website where they can log in and connect with you for your meeting if they have the Zoom app installed on their computer, when they click it, it'll ask it if they want to open the app and then they'll connect with you. So I'm going to start one here, and you can do this at any time. Basically, I am starting a. I'm going to say join with computer, because that's what I'm doing. I'm going to say, hey, you know, start a meeting now. Right now. Mine's set to automatically record. You don't have to do that, but I like to set mine to automatically record so I never forget to turn it on. I'd rather have to cut off some stuff in the beginning than to realize I forgot to press record and I missed my interview. But that's up to you. You can also pause it and then you can resume it. And so even as a tool, even if you're not going to connect with anybody, interview them right here, right now. You can just record yourself. And it's. It's recording my audio right now as I'm creating this video, although I've muted myself, and that's an important one. You need to make sure you go into the lower left and unmute yourself. And then if I just want to record a solo cast or an introduction to an interview, I already conducted. Or maybe it's my final thoughts on an interview I already conducted. Right now. Boom. Using your. Your microphone, you can record. And this is recording you, and it'll save it. And you don't even have to connect with anybody. So just as a recording tool, very useful. You have here, just like I showed you. In other preferences with the microphone, it says, hey, select your microphone. Mine's already selected, so I'm gonna leave it there. But if you add more than one microphone, like maybe you have a Logitech webcam you use, and that has a microphone in it, too, you're gonna want to make sure you're using your best microphone. So check these settings then. Video. If you have more than one webcam, you can choose it here. But now I'm going to turn on my video and you're going to see me in my little setup here. And.

So, you know, if I'm going to record just a solo video, I can also do that right here. So go ahead and record that video. But then when you have a guest, now there's this button here called Manage Participants. And when somebody clicks on your Zoom link, they're going to come right in here and. And they'll join your call if you've given them that link. And then you also have a chat window. If, for whatever reason you're doing a webinar or something, or you're just talking with somebody and you want to give them a link to click on to look at something on the web, you can just paste that into the chat here. There's a lot of great little functions. And then when you record a video, well, it is recording video right now. But when you have a call with someone, you're doing an interview, and you record that video, the video that it outputs, when you speak, it's going to show your video. When your guest speaks, it's going to show their video. There's some other preferences you can change in or settings you can change in the Zoom software to maybe show both of you always at the same time in that video, you have some choices. But anyway, this is the really the best recording tool you could use, in my opinion. That's short of being in a DJ studio. I mean, if you're recording podcasts, this is a great tool. A lot of people used to use Skype. Even the very early days of my podcasting experience, Skype was the primary tool I used. I had a plugin to record Skype calls. But Microsoft has changed Skype so much over the years, and in my opinion, changed it for the worse. It's not as easy to use. I don't think it's reliable and the quality is not as good. Zoom quality is much, much better.

So then, you know, when you end a meeting, and I will technically end this one right now so you can see it and you're gonna, you know, end the meeting and then it's gonna automatically pop up here because I'm recording on my computer now. It's gonna go and process and save that video and all the audio files and you just let it finish and do it. If you're recording in the cloud, you don't need to worry about this because it's all in the cloud. And then you will need to log into your Zoom account on the web in order to access those files. And then another thing that I want to show you is I'm going to go to.

I'm going to go to my.

Let'S see Documents and go to my Zoom folder and I'm going to show you what it looks like here when you have a Zoom meeting.

Is that you have, you know, when you have a zoom, you have depending on how many people. Now here's a Zoom meeting. This is a good one. It saves all the files for your Zoom session in one folder with the date and also the meeting room id. And then it gives you all sorts of different files. You have an MP4 file, that's the video. You have one audio track that's combined of all the audio. But remember how I told you to save a separate audio file for each participant who speaks. Whoops. It finished the other one. So it put another window in front when you had clicked. When I clicked that one that says save a different audio file for each participant. Well, here you get, I had this meeting had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of us. These people with their names were logged in through the web. This person that doesn't have a name, it just has an number was actually somebody that called in. And that's an important thing you need to understand. You can connect on the web, but if you have people that want to just dial in from their phone to be interviewed or to participate, they can do that. Remember when I told you here about, you know, your personal meeting id? You can, your personal meeting id, you can.

Within all this, when you copy it and paste it to somebody, there's actually a dial in number that you can give to people and a code they enter in order to join your meeting. So it doesn't just have to be on a computer. So it's very Flexible software. And each one of these separate audio files, it's a separate track with only the sound of that participant, makes it much easier for editing.

So the other great thing about Zoom that I actually, I do want to point out, and I'm probably going to start another meeting just to show you.

Is that if you have. I think you have to have the paid version, but if you want to go live on Facebook, you can actually do that. Okay, now I'm going to show you one other really important feature of Zoom. And to do that, actually, I got to go to this home screen and I got to switch accounts. I have actually more than one Zoom account for different reasons. And.

I'm going to show you. I mean, you can just. You can have more than one account if you have a need. Okay. So now that I've logged into my other account, because this is a paid account that we use, and it's the one that we conduct our webinars through. And if you're going to go live on Facebook, you're going to have to have the paid version and do, you know, have the live webinar version. You can't just hit start with video. In that case, you're actually going to. And I'm not going to go through that detail right now, but you're going to set up.

A different kind of an event here. I've got one I can start that I know will work where I'm going to go and start this kind of meeting. I'm in the webinar version of Zoom that I have access to because I pay for it. And now when I go under. Oh, I'm muted here. Now when I go under the more button, it says live on Facebook. And so if you're going to go live on Facebook, you're going to have to have the paid version. But what it does is it opens up your Facebook account for you, especially if you've already been logged into Facebook recently. It's going to say where you're going to share this. Well, sharing on your Timeline is probably where you're going to do it. You, you're going to click next, and then it's going to bring you up preparing to do a Zoom live stream to Facebook. And you're not going to be live on Facebook yet, so I don't want you to worry about it. I'm actually not going to go completely live here on this one. I'm going to stop just short of it. But I want to show you what it looks like and what it means. So here Basically is where here I have a preview of me and you have a few different stats it gives you. And then you're basically creating a Facebook post where you're going to say my awesome livestream. Obviously you're not going to say that. You're going to say something else. You're going to decide if this is public or if it's actually going to be to only your friends. I mean, generally, I think all of us want it to be public. You're going to have any tags that you might want to put in there, a title of your post, and, you know, you already put whatever descriptions you want here. You can tag people, you can put a location in, you know, all sorts of things like you would normally do with a Facebook post. And one important note is you don't have a whole lot of time to do this before it'll time out. So I always like to prepare all the details ahead of time, what I'm going to put in this field up here, know who I'm going to tag if I'm going to check in and have a title for the live broadcast. So here you see it said, unable to stream live to Facebook, restart live streaming, right? That's because I took too long. So that's a good example. I wanted to show you that. But once you enter in all this stuff rather quickly, within a minute, and then you hit go live, and then you're going to go back to Zoom. I'll go back there right now. You're gonna go back to Zoom like this, and you're gonna automatically be in, in Zoom and your webinars going on, and it's live on Facebook at the same time. I did this once for about 12 and a half or 13 hours straight on international podcast day in 2018, I had a different person interviewed every 30 minutes. So I had like 24 or 25 interviews I conducted in one day, and each of those I did as a separate live stream. So I had a Word doc on the side where I had all the information about my live stream that I kept pasting in because I would start and stop live streams. Because Facebook actually will only let you go live from Zoom for four hours in total. And then you have to stop and restart if you're going to do any more. So I did that, stopped and restarted, and I had all my information from a post in a Word doc so I could just copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, go live, boom, done. So anyway, there's a few little tips like that. And you know, if you're Watching this and you know you get all the gist of it, but you're gonna go live at some point. You want a little advice? Reach out to us in email or raise the question at one of our monthly client coaching calls, which we have the last Friday of every month. We can address issues like this. Many of our customers use this tool. Very useful, very valuable, highly recommend it. Going live on Facebook is a very cool thing and you can even when you're doing webinars, this is something I'll show you at the bottom here. In addition to a chat window, there's Q and A, there's polling. You can conduct a live poll of everybody, say hey everybody on here whose podcast are listening today, how many of you have gotten past 25 episodes in your podcast. Or you can create a poll that's written and you can prepare it ahead of time and just launch it and it'll pop up on every attendees screen and they can just click from multiple choice and you get some good results. It's a way to have some more interaction with your listener, a little more advanced. Not trying to overwhelm you, but I'm just letting you know there are more tools there and you can share your screen. If you have a PowerPoint presentation you want to share with your audience, or if you're interviewing a guest and you just want to show them something to get their reaction to it, you can use the share and share your screen to do that. And it's very flexible. You can share only a specific program. If you don't want to share everything on your computer in terms of your desktop, or you can share the whole desktop and they can see anything you can see, but that's about it. That's a quick tour of zoom. Probably told you more than you needed to know if you're just going to record podcasts, but at least you know what some of the capabilities are. So I hope this is very helpful. Thanks so much. This is Tom signing off for this Zoom tutorial.