I may end up needing to get glasses after this project is finished. No, seriously I mean it. For the last three days I’ve clocked at least three to four hours a day just staring at my screen editing audio in audacity, and the craziest part of it all, is that I STILL have about fifteen to twenty minutes left to edit. I’m really beginning to see now, why people who edit audio and video for a living and do it quickly, get paid so much. This, combined with finishing up the last of my work for other classes, along with simply breathing, I’ve been in work mode non-stop all the way up to writing this blog post. Seriously, the reason this is being posted later then I normally do, is because I had become so engrossed in deleting, compressing, silencing, and working on the audio clips for this first podcast episode.
The image above is zoomed out, but a majority of my time has been spent zoomed in on those lines and cutting out any downtime in the audio. I seriously, have gone down to milliseconds. I’ll spend an hour editing out pauses in my speech, breathes between words, bits of silence, and then when I check the total length of the clip, I’ll have ended up only removing 21 to 2 seconds of time off the clip. That’s not even mentioning having to compress and remove background noise, or the dozens of takes I had to do for each clip recorded. I have a really large newfound appreciation for voice actors, even larger then I already had. The toughest pill to swallow, is that I HAVE experience recording. Back in Junior College, I was a play by play announcer and reporter for all the sports teams, I’ve commentated championship basketball, soccer and baseball games, conducted interviews with players who are on the cusp of being professionals. Now, however? I’m taking twenty takes to read off the script I wrote for each part of the podcast episode about Japanese history which has been a part of my daily life for three years now. And this is all on top of the fact that I haven’t even STARTED to do the video portion of the project yet.
Yes, my tiny character courtesy of my friend who’s great at graphic design is all I have so far for the video portion. I expect to be finished with the audio a day after posting this, however, the video portion may be a bit more challenging. However, the advantage I think I’ll have, is that after editing audio three to five hours a day for a week straight, I do believe I’ll be able to pick up on it a lot quicker then I did the audio editing. I looked at the Audacity features after recording and it looked like the equation Matt Damon solved in Good Will Hunting. Thankfully, however, Youtube is free, and I found an Audacity tutorial on it. The way it made the controls seem so simple and I was able to pick it up seconds after watching was a bit of a blow to my ego, but I quickly got over it. I expect to have a similar experience when I get to editing the video portion. I downloaded Windows Filmora for that, and from what I’ve seen it’s pretty basic, but we’ll see what happens as I move on.
I will say, however, despite me seeming to complain about all the editing in this post… I will admit, I think I’ve become obsessed with it. How I’ve gone from the raw audio I recorded in my basement, to the coherent and well researched episode of a history podcast I have now, it’s quite exhilarating. How much I’m enjoying it, is certainly going to play a major role in what I decide to do with my free time going forward into the future.
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