What Are The Advantages Of In Person Recording Vs. Virtual Podcast Recording

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All right, we're live on Facebook. What is it? August 10th, and I am solo today. Tracy's coming back from a conference on the east coast on a plane as we speak. So I've got a great topic for you today. I think this will be useful for every podcaster, whether you are experienced or a newbie. I think in the last couple of years, especially with the pandemic, everybody's gotten very used to remote recording and using a tool like Zoom. Riverside, Streamyard, Squadcasts, there's Google Meet, which I really don't like. Microsoft Teams, which I like even less. Anyway, there are lots of different tools out there you can use to record remotely, and we've all gotten used to them. We've gotten very comfortable with them. But now, as we're emerging from isolation, actually, nobody's really isolated very much anymore. But we're getting much more comfortable being in person with people starting to go to events again. I've had a lot of questions here at Potatoes about how to record people in person. Do we need any different equipment? How easy or hard is it to do? So I want to break some of that down today, talk about some of the pros and cons and have you arm you with a little more information so that you can be best prepared if you decide to record someone in person. So obviously, tools like Zoom, which I'm using right now, to broadcast this message to our private Facebook group and to our community via webinar. You really just need a microphone like I'm using here, with a USB cord and USB interface into your computer. And as long as you're just one person in a room and you're connecting with people over Zoom, if you're having an, you know, an interview or a discussion between two people. Tracy and I do this all the time where we, you know, Tracy has an office that's 50ft away. And when we're doing a podcast recording together, we're in different rooms, we're on Zoom. And that works really well because it isolates us, our voices from each other. We each have our own cameras. We, when we did these Coaching calls. A lot of the time we used to sort of sit side by side and I'm way over here and Tracy was, you know, right here and we're squeezing in together and we're putting one microphone between us. And you know, it's nice to get us side by side on camera, but it's really not the best for audio quality. Tracy's voice is louder than mine and it's hard for our team to change the audio levels. Cause if we're both speaking into one microphone, we've got one track recording, the two of us. And you know, you can't adjust that very well. So, you know, that was great. During the pandemic, everybody's remote and maybe most of the time we're all remote and that's fine. But again, a lot of people have been asking me, what about recording in person? Person? I want, I'm traveling, I want to get out. What kind of equipment do I need? How easy or hard is it? And that's what I want to talk about. I think the vast majority of us podcasters are pretty used to those remote meeting tools. Zoom Google, Meet Squadcast, Riverside. Again, all these different tools and used to them and all you need is that USB microphone and a good quality one that reduces noise and is very directional. And that's all you need. But what about when you have people in person? So I want to talk to you about what it takes to do that. So you need a different kind of equipment. You need a. Because eventually you're going to connect it to a computer and you know, if you're going to do remote, because we do, Tracy and I, if we're just the two of us, we could sit and record that audio or video just on us and that's it. But oftentimes, and Tracy and I would do this all the time with one of our co hosted podcasts, we have a guest, so. So we're both on with the guest. That guest is remote. Even though we're together in the same room, similar things can happen. I'm going to actually show you. I'm going to share my screen in a few minutes and show you an example of another podcaster that does this regularly. And what we do is you need another device. So the old school way, and this was early podcasting, Tracy and I start researching it. We're novices, we're researching blogs. We get this really, really big mixing board, which is a serious piece of equipment. It was way overkill for what we needed. I mean, we used about one third of what it's capable of. That's okay. It was fine. So there was. I have a microphone. Tracy's on the other side of the desk, has a microphone, and they're both going into it. And we can adjust our levels with that mixing board, which is really what that's for. But it was still mixing me and Tracy into one track to a recording device, which is not ideal, but that's why I wanted to mix those levels and get them right. And then we had it connected to a USB interface to put the audio into the computer to use it over Zoom so our guest could hear both of us. And obviously we could hear them where it was a pretty complex setup and it was about $1,500 worth of equipment. Fortunately, things have gotten a lot easier now.

You don't need to have a big mixing board necessarily. One of the reasons we did have a mixing board in the past is something that modern software is taking care of. And I want to share this with you just so you understand how easy software has made these things now. We used to use Skype way back in the day to connect with remote guests, which I really don't recommend that anymore. First of all, when Microsoft bought Skype, they ruined it in many ways. Made it much harder to use and not easy to use. They got rid of all these third party apps or plugins that would help enhance more capabilities. And Microsoft threw all of them out and started to try to build in those capabilities themselves. Didn't do as good a job with it. But we did use Skype back then. And what you used a mixing board for was to create what they call a mix minus. And this is kind of old tech and I'm not going to spend too much time on it. But you wanted to make sure that your own voice. Well, actually the person that is on the other remote part of the Skype call is coming into the mixing board and then out so we could hear them. And you don't want their voice going back in to the input and record them sort of again. You'd get a little echo and I'm not going to give. There's a lot of technical reasons why which really don't matter because almost nobody has this problem album anymore. So you had a way that the audio you're feeding back into them from the computer didn't include their own voice. Okay. Only had your voices. And I know that sounds odd, but it's the way things used to work. But anyway, modern software like Zoom handles that for you. And that's why we recommend you listen like me. You can see if you're looking at the video here, you know, I have a headset and earbuds that I'm listening with, and anybody I'm hearing over Zoom is coming into my ear. That's important because my mic can't hear them, only my ear can hear them. So it's separating what I'm hearing from what the microphone is hearing. The microphones are only hearing me. That's going to come back and be important in a couple minutes. But just in concept, the hardware is separating the two sides of the conversation. So the microphone going into the computer can't possibly have the guest over Zoom's voice coming through the speaker of my computer. That's why we always recommend using a headset. But now my modern software, Zoom and all these tools do a really good job of this. And there's no need to have the complex mixing board, unless that's still. If you have two people in person side by side, you want to level their voice as a mixing board will do it. Again, overkill. So, but you still. Ideally, when you're recording two or more people in the same room on a podcast, ideally you want to separate their audio. So, like, each person speaks into their own microphone. And, you know, if it's a good directional microphone like the one I'm using, even another one in the room might hear me a little bit. But this one's going to dominate and pick me up the most. And you want to get the recording for only that microphone and then a separate recording for any other mics in the room, separated so that audio editors can do their best job making everybody sound their best, change their levels, eliminate them entirely. Like, when I'm speaking, you can make the other mics silent. So even if those mics hear me bleeding over into them, they can eliminate it entirely. Obviously, when some of us talk at the same time, for editors, that gets a little tricky. But the best scenario is each person has a separate audio file. Now, the modern remote recording softwares do that, but you really need to be in different rooms. Otherwise, if Tracy and I are in the same room on two computers with Zoom, then we hear each other through our ears in the room, and then we hear each other a little delayed, and it's really can be annoying and take you out of your game. And I'm hearing Tracy twice live and then delayed a split second. That's no good either. You don't want that situation. So what do you do? Well, there are different devices that you can buy, and here's one. It's a Zoom H6 digital audio recorder. And I want to show you it has these different microphone inputs and those of you that always use USB microphone, some of them and the ones we supply our customers have both a USB port and this large circle with these three pronged metal connector that's called an XLR port. That's what goes into here. And you have cable that is this really big thick cable with this old school 50 year old technology from the 70s. My dad was a musician and I remember as a kid and he had all this was the technology still then hasn't changed a whole lot because it's a standard but you gotta use these big cables. It's a lot of stuff to deal with. But this device can take up to six different inputs. Two different microphones on each side and then I think one or two even from the end and actually a left and right. Nevermind. So six different inputs but effectively really I guess a total of five total microphones. One of them has a left and a right channel. But you can then there's a dial for each one here to increase the volume level or reduce it so that before you start recording you plug everybody in, you listen to everybody's voice. There's a level meter and you can dial everybody into. Even if you have a much louder voice than me, just your resonance and your loudness inherently is louder. We can dial you down and we can raise me up and get us to the same level. Which is what's going to create that great listening experience for the podcaster. Podcast listener rather so that it isn't loud and soft and loud and soft and loud and soft constantly. So you're doing some of the work that a usual typical post production audio editor would do after the fact, but you're mixing it so that it's being recorded at that level and makes it a little easier in some ways for the audio editor when they get it, you basically put a headset into here, you listen to it and you can listen to each person, listen to everybody talk, get those levels down and then record it. So you're recording. You can record this offline. It doesn't have to be connected to a computer, but it can be connected to a computer. That's a very expensive device. It's about $350 US well from what I've seen most recently like on Amazon to buy them. We use them when we do in person recording at events. We bring them with us, especially when we have multiple people.

There are other devices. This is A new device called a Vocaster from focusrite who creates a lot of audio interfaces. And again, it's got this XLR port and they have a version for two microphones. And it plugs USB into the computer and it's made to help make leveling those audios easy and putting it into computer. It also has features where if you're using a separate video camera, and you all may not know this because you don't sort of see behind the scenes, but Tracy at her computer setup has a digital SLR camera like a heavy duty, like $750 camera on a tripod over her laptop. She's not using the laptop webcam. She's using a higher quality camera that's plugged into the computer and streaming that video into the computer for a higher quality video. But that camera has the capability to record and you can actually put the audio from this. Vocaster has an output that'll go into the camera. So if the camera is. You're using the camera to record offline, it'll record the better audio from your microphones in the room into the camera rather than just ambient mic built into the camera, which is a nice feature. So I actually got was given this by focusrite on loan to test it out and try it. And I'm going to be doing a whole unboxing and review of this. Not going to go into all the details of that device. Really just wanted to show you there are devices like this that if you're going to have more than one person in the same room, you need an interface to the computer. That's going to take more than one microphone, help you level those audios, get it to be what it needs to be, and then also feed it to the computer and give you the best quality sound and really trying to get more to that studio sound. All right, so I want to show you. I'm going to share my screen and show you a still image of a video, but of some podcasters we work with. So those of you listening to the podcast, you're going to want to check out the video@potatoes.com for what I'm about to show you. The podcast is called the Clip Out. The hosts are Crystal o' Keefe and Tom o', Keefe, husband and wife. I can relate to that because I'm co host with my wife and business partner too. And this is the. What you're seeing is a still of the video we produce for them on a regular basis. And what you see is one of these. They have a camera on Their studio. And I'm showing this to you to show you the complex setup they have. Crystal is on one side of the table, Tom's on the other side. They each have these over ear headsets. So they're trying to block out any other ambient noise and not hear any echo. Just hearing each other through the system. I tend to like that when I have other people in the same room not required, but you can. And they actually are. They have a mixing board set up. Very complex. You can see their microphones are really big. These are XLR microphones. Again, using those big cables that I was showing you before that are connected to a mixing board. Their levels are done and then there's a USB interface from that feeding into a computer. But they also have separate cameras on each of them. And then beyond that they'll have a guest on Zoom. So actually I'm going to go forward in the. To show you in this video you can see here's a different little scene where they have a computer in the back sort of to the right of Crystal in this upper image. And that's the computer interface and where everything's feeding into. And then they have their guest over Zoom. And so they're recording their guests video through Zoom. And then all their audio is being going through an interface recorded locally and in Zoom. So they've got lots of backup and they're giving us like at least four different video recordings, sometimes more because they'll have more than one guest on these episodes or they'll have one guest earlier, another guest later. And our video team puts it all together. But you can see the recording in person with the two of them to get high quality audio. That's a pretty complex setup. And they do it the same way every time. So they have these boom mounts holding their mics, all these things. Now you. If you're going to do this occasionally, you don't need that crazy a setup. And it is. Crazy is the wrong word. It's just complex setup. And if you know, if you have experience with it and you know what you're doing, then it's great. But if you're just going to do the occasional recording in person, probably a simpler device like the Focusrite, like the Focusrite or the Zoom H6 is probably going to meet your needs. It's. They're both fairly portable. Yeah, you got to plug more than one mic into them. But then each person has their own mic. You do want to think about if you're recording video, how you're going to do that. Also you setting up different cameras or using a couple cell phones. I mean, cell phone cameras are incredibly good quality these days. So there's nothing wrong with recording video cell phone, but you might need a little tripod to hold one camera on you, one camera on the guest opposite. Or are you going to sit side by side? And that's what Tracy and I like to do. If we're going to sit side by side, we'll have one camera on the two of us, but then have a second camera coming at an angle, only getting a close up of me and another camera close up, just getting Tracy. And so you get all these different video shots to edit between. But again, the audio is really the primary thing that I wanted to talk about today is what do you do when you're recording someone in person? There are fast and loose ways like Tracy and I, you saw us doing on coaching calls, maybe even as recently as a year ago, where we put one microphone between us so we're both on camera and you can do that. Although the audio quality is not as good and it's harder to edit. Highly recommend a different device with separate audio tracks recording separate audio tracks and it records to an SD card on this device and still can plug into your computer and stream. Or you have a different kind of device like the Vocaster and there are other USB interfaces that allow you to plug in two or three or four microphones. I mean, focusrite has some others called the Scarlet. They're a little more complicated to set up, but work very well to have multiple inputs, multiple microphones for different people. But again, it's going to mix them down into one audio track. So lots of things to consider.

I will tell you, having now shared all that with you about some options. And by the way, we do have on politize.com in the feed your brand podcast section, we do have a blog post if you go onto any of our blog pages as a search bar and you can search on Zoom H6 or microphone reviews, all sorts of different things. And with the Zoom H6 we do have some tutorial videos on how to set up and use a device like that that are very detailed, like technical, step by step. Here's what you need to do. Here's how you set up that device. So if you need that kind of support, you can check that out and then also the benefits of it. So there's a lot of resources there. But all I'm trying to raise awareness of today because I Think now in 2022, heading into 2023, modern podcast recordings. So many of us are using these streaming services and for very good reason. I mean, I'm going live to our private Facebook group as I'm recording this. And you need and want to use an online streaming service that has the capability to record and you know, you may want a better quality USB camera, like I'm even using an external USB camera. Mine's not the $750 SLR, it's a 50 USB one. Still better than the one built into the computer. But the audio quality, as we are podcasters and I think most of us think of our podcast as the main way people consume our content. And I statistically with all of our customers, that is true. Some of them have big YouTube followings, but almost all of them, in fact, I would say all of our customers have a bigger podcast listenership or following than they do a YouTube following. So the audio is really critical. So the question keeps coming up, how do I record people in person? And lots of ways to do it from simple, fast and loose. But if you're going to do it a lot, having the right piece of equipment and an extra microphone or two, understanding how to use it is going to produce a better audio quality. But it is more advanced podcast, how do we say, more advanced? I would say podcast logistics. Because when you use these devices, you're going to get more recordings and you're going to need to take the ones off the SD card, rename the files so for who it is, and you're going to need to upload them to your producer or to us if you're working with us to produce your episode. So there's a bit more logistics and work for you as a podcaster after the recording to get all that where it needs to be to become the fantastic audio and or video experience that you want your listeners to have. Much like I showed you that example of a clip out. I mean, that's weekly, every week they do that for their listeners. And we produce that at Potatoes. So we like all the multiple recordings. It's easy for us to deal with because we're used to it. But you as the podcast host or whoever maybe you have supporting you that's charged with gathering all those files and uploading them to your producer has a lot more to deal with. So it's inherently a little more complex, but great audio quality. At the end of the day, most people, I think your needs are met using a tool like a zoom. I don't have a dog in this fight of what platform to record for remote recording online that's I don't have one that I advocate as it's the best. All right. I've experienced an awful lot of them and I've experienced some of the pros of them and some of the cons. And every different one that I've experienced has had a problem, has had glitches even very recently here in 2022. Doesn't matter which one it is. None of them are perfect. But they're all, they've all gotten a whole lot better and do a much better job recording than they did two, three years ago. And that's to the benefit of all of us because for most people you don't need a whole lot of equipment, you don't need a lot of expense. A good quality microphone in your computer is about it, with this exception of, oh, I've got somebody coming to visit me. I want to record them on my podcast. I want to do it the best way possible. What do I do? And this is why I wanted to share this with you today. So I hope that's been helpful. It's really meant to be an overview, not a deep dive. Technical there's always good tutorials on poditize. Com. We have them. There's other tutorials on YouTube available to you to learn some of the technical ins and outs. And I hope you found this useful. And don't forget, if you're listening to the podcast, Remember, go to podotize.com for the blog post for this episode and you will find the still images and or can watch the video of when I was showing what Tom and Crystal o' Keefe of the Clipout are doing with their podcast. And they've been doing it for a number of years. Do a great job. It's a little, it's a lot of equipment. Most people maybe wouldn't do that today, but it's also kind of fun as a viewer listener to have this bird's eye view into their studio and see how they're doing it. Very cool stuff. All right, I'll leave it there. Thank you all for watching. Be back next time with another great topic. This is Tom on Feed.

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