As your business activities expand interstate and overseas, travel becomes inevitable. How easy is it for you to ‘take the recording studio with you’? Could it be anywhere?
Let’s set the scene…
Two podcast host customers of mine were recently overseas, both in different countries. They had planned an interview with one of their clients for the next podcast episode who was in yet another country. And the podcast producer (me) was in a different country again!
How could they easily put a quality audio podcast episode together without everyone being in the same room?
I did some experimenting with my dear son, and we came up with a plan that appeared to fit the puzzle:
Use the iPhone built in iOS screen recorder to capture a video from a Zoom video conference call
But there was an issue. If you’re screen recording a Zoom meeting, only your voice is recorded and not the other’s. I’d been wondering for quite some time why call recording was not a common smart phone feature, despite being technically possible for many years now. The answer was: to support privacy.
Recording a conversation without the consent of all parties is against the law of most countries. We expect the freedom to choose either what we keep private or what we make public. So, if we were going to use this new recording idea and have both sides of the conversation, we would need to get recordings from all the interview participants.
Here is how we did it…
- My podcast hosts asked for permission to record from everyone involved
- One of the hosts and the interviewee met each other over a Zoom meeting, and both used the screen recorder during the interview
- The interviewee ‘air dropped’ their recording into the cloud from their phone (the host did the same thing)
- I combined the two recordings back into a single conversation
- The two hosts met on Zoom to record the ‘before and after’ interview sections of the podcast (I later reconstructed that dialogue from their two cloud recordings)
- The final stage was to put all of the audio pieces together in show order and publish the podcast episode
Our technique saved a lot of unnecessary delay and helped the hosts (and their listeners) stick to their weekly podcast routine. Not only that, we had some video footage to use on social media.
Of course now, podcast episodes and interviews can be recorded and produced, no matter where on earth the hosts and guests are.
Dave Stokes is the producer at author2audio. For tips on all aspects of audio book and podcast production, please visit the website at: https://www.author2audio.com.