This Podcast is a culmination of my series on Blevis-ian editing, and the audio from my Editing Techniques and Decisions presentation at PodCamp Toronto. I highly recommend that you also listen to Bruce Murray’s presentation on Editing (How to make a layer cake with a butterfly and a sledgehammer). Between Bruce’s humourous and philosophical study of editing and my demonstration of editing techniques, you will gain a solid understanding of this area of audio production.

What makes this Podcast different from the video recording of my presentation (available at the Podcamp Toronto website) is that I have spliced in the audio clips that I played during the presentation. In this way, you can better hear what the edits sound like.

Photo: Timothy Pilgrim (Twisted Wrist)

 

 Editing Techniques and Decisions presentation at PodCamp Toronto [39:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In part 5 of this series, I outlined how to do an edit within an audible sound, such as splicing two words together using a common sound within each word as the “pivot point”. In this installment, I introduce an edit style that pushes some boundaries.

Editing is a powerful activity. Editors can make or break songs, interviews, documentaries and movies, just by the where and how they make their cuts. Why am I saying this? Because I’m about to introduce a style of editing that, when done well, can both disguise the cut and potentially misrepresent the speaker.

The predicament

I’ve done a lot of interviews where I’ve completely botched a question; maybe I do a long set-up, trip up on my words, don’t ask the question properly, or I’ll never actually get to the question. Ooops! Other times, I’ve found that the speaker has strayed from the line of questioning and I didn’t redirect the person during the actual recording. Hey, we can’t be perfect all the time. If we were, we’d never get to edit.

The Staggered Edit

I call this the Staggered Edit because I usually work with multiple audio tracks and can cut each track in a different place — hence, staggered. Then, I slide the staggered cuts together so that one audio piece occurs before the other.

Take the example of me messing up my interview question. In that case, I’ll get enough of my set-up to communicate the thought — sometimes this involves doing several edits to the ramblings to make it sound good — and then I’ll move my guest’s question into place to make it sound like a natural conversation in which my guest is bailing me out of a bad situation. Done well, the results are shocking. It sounds like a real conversation. However, it’s incredibly artificial and puts your guest in a position where they are committing a “light-interruption”. What I enjoy most is how deceptively effective this is.

To make this type of edit work well, you have to play with the placement of both the interruption and cutoff of speech. This takes a fair degree of patience — shifting the edit into a place that feels and sounds natural sometimes means using milliseconds of movement. Working in your favour though, is that the average listener will be distracted enough by the overlapping audio to actually notice that the interruption is artificial.

Do you want to hear a sample?

You’ll have to come to my Editing Techniques and Decisions session at PodCamp Toronto, February 24th, 2007, or wait for me to publish the audio from that session.

Part 4 of this series dealt with the creativity of editing interviews. In this installment, I am returning to applied editing.

When I first mapped out this series, I figured I’d be done by now. I had a neatly compiled list of the types of edits I do and some soft skills I wanted to share. As it turns out, I left out a number of really interesting ideas and techniques - so the series continues.

One of the techniques I had overlooked is one I’ve dubbed Buried Edits. It’s an easy one to forget because I use it so rarely. However, it is a very powerful way to unite two different recorded elements, and disguise the edit in the process. For the purposes of this entry, I will present in terms of spoken word recordings even though the same concepts can apply to music - or any other recording.

First of all, what’s the trick?

In a Buried Edit, I unite the same sound that appears in two different recorded takes using a Clean Edit.

What???

The spoken delivery of two recorded elements may have been significantly different in each take while still having a common delivery element in each. I call this common element the “pivot”. In a Buried Edit, you find a pivot inside a particular word in each take and make your cut inside these pivots, then marry the two desired pieces together.

An example, please.

The word “so” is a really good word for a pivot. The “ess” sound is nice and static. You can cut that sound in half from two different sentences and marry them in a way that noone would ever know, as long as the audio quality is similar, and the thought is continuous. Even if the delivery by the speaker has a different cadence in each sentence, it’s a very forgiving sound.

When to use Buried Edits

In all cases, the speaker in the recording I am editing has run words together which makes it difficult to have a transparent cut between words. I have used Buried edits in the following situations with great success:

• The speaker has gone on a tangent and I need to remove a large section of talking. I find a pivot within each of the first and last thoughts and eliminate the thought process. Having a pivot means that I was able to make the speaker’s comments more efficient and fluid.
• The speaker records several takes in a row, sometimes without a pause. Different elements of each take are great while each full take has its problems. I will take the elements from each take that work well and make them into one stream. Buried Edits work well here because it isn’t the insides of the words that pose a problem, it’s the first and last sounds of the words.

In part 6 I’ll talk about something I call a Staggered Edit to disguise an edit in a multi-track recording of two speakers.

I ended Blevis-ian editing, part 3 - Blended Edits with the announcement that the next part of the series would explore editing decisions for an interview. That was August 22nd. Better late than never, I suppose.

Editing doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly, or even moderately stressful. It should be an integral part of the creative process of putting together a great audio program - Podcast or otherwise. That is, there’s a lot more to editing an interview than just cleaning up the “uhms” and “uhhs” so I’ll talk about those last. Depending on your approach, you can be incredibly creative and the results rewarding.

Storytelling

Not all interviews follow a natural evolution. This means that when editing an interview, it’s important to ensure that you have a flow. Each question should build on the last, or explore a new tangent if the previous one has been wrapped up. I like to think of this as the storytelling aspect of the interview and I try to edit my interviews in a way that enhances that natural flow. This means knowing the end point and keeping it in sight at all times during my edit - especially when, on the odd occassion, the interview I recorded is significantly different from the one I had planned. I work with my source recording to make the best show possible.

Focus

Your listener’s time is valuable. You need to make sure that the information you share is relevant, or at least entertaining. While, it may be interesting to explore a variety of tangents with your guest during the discussion, try to be as efficient as possible so that you don’t irritate your listener. If nothing else, be aware of how long the program is going to be.

Cleanup

Cleaning up the “uhms” and “uhhs” is a part of editing that is particularly controversial. Many people insist that the best approach is to remove all of the “verbal pauses” and breaths. Nothing can be more unnatural than listening to a person who never takes a pause or collects their thoughts. In fact, I’ve listened to many interviews where I find myself gasping for air only to realize that the speaker hasn’t drawn a breath in nearly two minutes - sympathetic participation, I suppose.

I’m not saying that verbal pauses aren’t annoying; the same goes with phrases like “you know”. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to wipe your audio clean of natural speech if for no other reason than you may never produce anything because you’ll spend six hours cleaning up ten minutes of audio.

Here’s what I recommend… Leave everything alone unless it’s overbearing. If the speaker says the odd “uhh”, leave it alone. If you find that there is one “uhm” for every ten words, you might consider removing every second or third “uhm” - or scrap the interview.

One thing that’s very important to remember is to let your interview breath, both literally and figuratively. This means that if your speaker draws a breath, leave it in. Similarly, if your speaker pauses to collect his or her thoughts before answering a question, leave a reasonable pause (perhaps one to two seconds) in the interview.

The most important part of interview editing, and I can’t stress this enough, is that you don’t want your audience to know where your edits are.

In part 5, I’ll present something I’ve been doing for a while and just named this morning… Buried Edits.