This is what my podcasting “workflow” looks like :
After deciding what I’m going to be talking about and that it should be in the time range of 15-20 minutes, I write down a few points that I would like to help me stay on point. I ramble and that can make a terrible podcast.
Then I put on some make-up – if I’m in the mood for it – also because the device I use for recording has no “beautification” mode on the “selfie” camera.
I sit opposite a window draped with white curtains, so if I’m recording during daylight hours, there’s a nice, soft light on my face. I try not to record when there is no sunlight. Because no matter ow much you try, you cannot really do much to the look of a video after it has been recorded. Well-lit scenes are more tweakable.
There is still no timetable of when I sit down to record every week but similar to my editorial calendar for this blog, I’m going to have to work on a calendar when I sit and write and record. I’m on it.
The recording is done on the selfie-video mode on my Google Pixel XL. Don’t forget to turn off WiFi so that you don’t get interrupted by social media update pings and emails and also do turn on Airplane Mode, so that you are not disturbed by phone calls or texts while you’re recording.
I could use a DSLR to record – especially because I dislike how bloated my face looks on the selfie camera – as compared to the HTC One M8 that I used to deploy earlier. But file size can be a problem. A 15 minute selfie video on the Google Pixel can be a 2GB file. The same thing on a DSLR would be way bigger and even more unruly to handle. ( Unless you’re a video / audio producer, in which case you probably have much better equipment than I do – and that includes the machine that you use to render / process. )
There’s no external mic – I just talk to my phone. One tip is that you must look at where the camera is on the phone and not at the phone’s screen where you can see yourself. If you want to make eye-contact with the viewer that is. It took some practice.
Once the recording is done, I copy it via USB to my laptop and open it up in Adobe Premiere Pro, where I add my logo, make some edits to the color and contrast and then I export the video file as MP4, trying to keep the file size to as low as possible.
The audio is also exported separately as MP3 files – these files are much smaller than the exported video files.
The video file with the audio is uploaded to YouTube and the audio file is uploaded to the accompanying blog post that I make for the video’s release. This gets picked up automatically by FeedBurner and consequently by iTunes. Once in a while you can go back to FeedBurner and check the health of your feed. You can even change the blog feed that you added to FeedBurner, without having to alter what you submitted to iTunes – because you submitted the FeedBurner URL there. This is great because if I decide to change the primary domain or the category name tomorrow, I don’t have to re-validate or re-submit my podcast all over again.
Seems pretty simple in retrospect, making me wonder why I didn’t do this sooner. But like I said in my previous post, I hope I’ll be able to follow my own advice about podcasting : equipment doesn’t matter, where you record doesn’t matter, to some extent – what you talk about also doesn’t matter. Consistency does.
The Naina Redhu Experience : Blog | YouTube | iTunes | Others
In Part I, week before last, I shared what my preliminary considerations were, prior to attempting a podcast. In Part II, last week, I share how I prepared the RSS Feed and what I did with FeedBurner and how I validated the feed on iTunes and submitted it. This above is Part III, which wraps up this series on how I got started podcasting!
