Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to show you how to record a high-quality sounding podcast interview using Squadcast. And at the end of the video, I'm actually going to bring in two other people so you can see what it looks and sounds like when you bring your guest on. So let's dive into that now. What's up, guys? Welcome back to Podcast School. My name is Ryan Helms, co-founder of Legacy Podcasting and Melville.app. More about those down in the description section below. But in this video, we are focused on Squadcast. It is a platform to record high-quality podcast interviews, and I'm going to show you how to use it. And I'm actually going to bring in a couple friends of mine later on in this video to show you how it looks and feels when you have other people on. So to get started, let's head on into the computer here and let's look at Squadcast. So the first thing, we'll look at the pricing here just so you have an idea of that. So $9 for two hours per month, $17 for five hours. So I'm about at this mark right now. I'm actually on this plan, but I need to be on this plan. And you'll see in a minute what I mean by that because it's asking for more money to add more time to my platform. So this is the yearly option. If we go to monthly, $10 and $20. So I'll be very shortly upgrading to this tier here. So but that's not really what we're here for. And let's hop in and look at this. All right, so when you are in Squadcast and you're actually logged in like we are now, you're going to have a couple options, right? You're going to be able to do a reusable session. So this is a common link that as many people as you want can get on to this. Not as many at one time, but as many like repetitive sessions that you want to use. This is kind of like if you're used to using Zoom or something like that, it's like having a personal meeting room in Zoom. That's what this is here. So it is a specific link that you can use over and over in like your calendar events or things like that if you want to. If you want to add a new session, all you do is come down here to the bottom, click add new session, type it in here, what you want that to be called, select the date and time when that interview would be happening. If we say September 9th, we can say what time we wanted it to happen at, time zone, invite the people that we want here. You can have three other guests in this process with you. You would just type in their emails here. Click save session. It's going to add it down here. If you want to copy a link to that, you can just do that here. You can add it to your calendar or you can edit that. So I'll just copy that to my calendar. But like I said, I really don't use this functionality a lot. I use the reusable session a lot. You can see, in fact, I've used it 39 times at the time of recording this. So I would copy this link here and then I would send this out to people. So let's actually hop in and look at what does a session look like before you get started. I'm going to click join. Now the camera aspect is not going to work because I'm actually using it to record right now. So you're going to see this kind of black reverse EOS webcam utility beta on the screen where you would see your face here normally. So this is what I meant here by I have to add more time. So I have 51 minutes left in this month and I can add an hour for five bucks. So the next time I record, I'll actually have to do this, add $5, which in the grand scheme of things is not that much. But I should go ahead and upgrade because I probably end up paying them more money than I need to. I should just upgrade to that middle tier that they have. A couple of things on here. You can change your name here. You can change the microphone. So right now I've got the Rode Procaster. If you like the way it sounds, there'll be a link for that down in the description section. And I have my headphones selected here and EOS webcam, which is not showing here again because I am actually using it to record my face, which you probably see down here in the bottom right hand corner somewhere. You can turn on echo noise cancellation. This might help out a little bit. You don't have to. They tell you a little bit about why you might and might not want to do it here. It tells you where you're at and it'll also tell you where your guest is at. Not like an exact address, but just an approximate, which is cool. But to me, it's kind of like, eh, do I really need to know that? But anyway, so that is a little bit about what they call the green room in here. A couple of things to note about Squadcast and how it works is when you bring other people into Squadcast, one of the values of this platform and how you get the high quality audio is it does something behind the scenes, what it calls progressive uploading. You'll actually see this when we do the demo here in a minute, that as we are recording, it's actually taking each person's audio and it's actually uploading that as we go. So at the end of this, we're not going to have to wait a long time to actually access our files. It's going to be pretty much instant we're going to have access to those files. So that's really good and the audio quality is not going to be sacrificed because what it's doing is if we take Zoom, for example, to illustrate this, Zoom is processing those files over the internet and it's compressing those. That's why you get some of those robotic sounds. That's why the audio and some of the interviews you've probably listened to before have got choppy and things like that because it's processing that over the internet. It's compressing those files, both audio and video, where Squadcast, for example, they're actually recording locally on each side. So even if you hear glitches in the recording that you're doing in that interview, it's actually okay, right? Because it's not processing over the internet. It's actually not going to be picked up in the final audio. This is my personal favorite part about Squadcast because if either person hits a bandwidth issue and it gets a little robotic or choppy or cuts out or anything like that, it's actually not going to impact the final audio. So if you're recording and your guests like cuts out for a second, you don't have to like stop and say, Hey, can you repeat that? Because the end product is going to be okay. It's not going to show that. So to me, that is an awesome, awesome feature. So those are the two biggest things about Squadcast that I like, and they have redundant files in the background. So if you need to go back, you need to access this. You can just reach out to their support, which is a super awesome, quick and easy to work with. And you can request files from that specific recording session and you can get those sent to you. So even if something were to happen some kind of crazy way with your files, you can always reach out to them and you can get those backup files. I've heard people in the past, say files have got corrupted or something. This is another great feature. If for whatever reason that did happen, right? It's technology things can break, then you can always reach out to them and get those backup files that they have. I think they actually have like three tiers of backup. So your original and like two, two duplicates. So super, super useful. And the great thing also is that they're going to be moving to video soon. So you're actually going to be able to do HD video while you record. So as you'll see in a second, the video quality looks awesome that you're going to see. But at this moment right now, in beginning of September, 2020, you cannot actually get that video unless you're recording your screen using like a QuickTime or something like that or Camtasia. So which is actually kind of what I'll be doing to illustrate this. So you could do that and still kind of get the video effect. Just start recording as normal, open something like QuickTime, Camtasia, something like that to record your screen. And then you just mesh them in post. So little hack for you there, but they will be coming out with video soon. I'm not sure how it'll affect the pricing. I'm sure it will in some way, it'll probably go up a little bit or they'll have separate plans for those that want to record video, but it's supposed to have the same progressive uploading backups and HD high quality, just like you get with the audio, what you're going to experience in here in a second. So you could join a session when you join it at the time, you're going to be the only person that's actually in this. So you're going to take up the whole screen here as you join and you'll see in a second, it'll cut up to more people. So with that said, that is a brief overview of how you kind of get started with Squadcast. You'll just send somebody that link that I copied to the clipboard a second ago and I'll show you how to do that right now as I invite my business partner, Daxi, into a meeting. So let's go. All right. So what it would look like for you is when you send that link and you get logged in, you'll come over here, you'll join that session. It'll log in here. It'll start recognizing everything. You should see your face on here in one second. There we go. Boom. There I am. I am not wearing any headphones. Shame on me. Let me go ahead and do that right now because you definitely want to be wearing headphones and you definitely want your guests to be wearing headphones. So let me show this and get this hooked up. Connect. Boom. Perfect. Right. And then we can click join session. You can change your name to join. And here we are now in the session. So I'm going to go ahead and hit record. So we'll be able to like illustrate the audio quality here. So boom. Now we are recording. So Daxi, what is it like from your perspective when you join Squadcast? I sent you the link on Slack and you just click it and it opens in your browser.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It just asked me headphones, mic and camera to use. It's kind of, I don't know. They might change it in the future. It was kind of weird, but yeah, it worked.

Speaker 1: Cool. When you say it was kind of weird, is there anything you could share with somebody so they could help their guest along if they had any issues?

Speaker 2: As far as like just the UI, it showed like the geo map for some reason before my camera connected. So that kind of confused me. Got it. I have to know how to navigate the dropdowns.

Speaker 1: Got it. Got it. And so, you know, on each side you can see our names here and there's three little dots. So you can click that and it'll show you what's connected, how good your network is, where you're at, where your guests at. So like if I click on Daxi's, I can see the mic he's using. I can see his network, where he's at, all that kind of stuff. So like, yeah. Can you click on my name? Can you see that for me?

Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing that is strange though is the chat. It's showing all of your past conversations.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Cause right now I'm in a reusable session. So yeah, I've been using a reusable session versus creating specific sessions for each interview that I do. So yeah, you can see that. And as I'm...

Speaker 2: Apparently. What's that? I can put GIFs in the chat. I just threw a GIF in there.

Speaker 1: Had a GIF. Yes, you can. And so like for those of you looking at my screen right now, you'll see that here's all my past sessions and you'll see that this one with Daxi right here. It's actually uploading right now as we do this. So as it's recording. So this is the progressive upload feature that I was talking about with SquadCast. So at the end of this, I'm not going to have to wait a long time for it to finish uploading. It's actually doing it in real time. So that's what you see.

Speaker 2: I think it's nice that you can see the guest, what speaker and headphones they're using. So you can say like, Hey, that's your laptop mic.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah. That's an awesome point. Cause there's been so many times where I've been on an interview where I'm like, share your screen. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't quite sound like you're using your mic, but I'm not sure. So yeah. Awesome point. Uh, but yeah, so that's, uh, we can right here, you can cut off your camera. You can mute your mic. Uh, I, I mute my mic a lot when I'm talking to somebody in there. Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's it.

Speaker 1: That should be Orlando. I was like, am I on Google maps or what? Like, you know, we can stop recording. You can add another person so you can have up to three people in the session. So you could add somebody else if you wanted to. And then you can, uh, let's see if we can get somebody to join. Uh, I'll send it to two people and see if anybody like this, we, uh, we just sent a link to somebody. So I'm going to cut the video right now and we'll wait till somebody joins so we can see what it looks like with three people. Oh, there we go. Oh, look who it is. What's up dude. So uh, I don't know. So this is like, I'm like, I'm like have the most real estate right now. So this is a, no, not on my side. On my side. I have the most real estate. Um, what about the, so this is a page, uh, uh, he's on our team. So this is what three people looks like. So page hour, we're recording a YouTube video right now. So you're going to be on YouTube. We're just doing a demo of squad cast and I just wanted a third person to join so we could see the layout on that and what that looks like. So yeah, that was really it. I just wanted to, uh, because right now, how, how was it, uh, for you joining? Was the, how was the user interface and the intuitiveness of it? Daxi said it was not bad, but a little bit confusing joining.

Speaker 3: Oh, it's a very simple. The only thing was that I actually denied access to audio video, which is my default reaction. But as soon as I got that fixed, it went smoothly.

Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's a really good point because your guests could easily do that. So Paisa, how, how, if, if somebody is hosting an interview on here and their guest accidentally does that, how could someone instruct their guests to fix that problem?

Speaker 3: Well, on the left side of the URL, you can find a lock and if you left click that one, it allows you to allow location, camera, microphone, and sounds.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So I'm showing it on my screen right now, uh, where you right click and it shows allow or deny on these things. Chrome. Right? That's on Chrome for sure. So cool. Paisa. Well, that was, uh, that was really it, man. We just wanted to come in here and demo what it looked like with, uh, three people on here. Well, I can't at least intuitively see how I can change the layout on this. So that would be a nice feature for in the future. Let me see if I changed the size of my screen, if that does anything. No, not really. Okay. Um, so yeah. But thanks guys. All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed that tutorial and demo of squad cast. If you did click this little circle is probably covering my face right now as I talk and go ahead and subscribe to this channel podcast school, where I bring you more content on how you can grow your podcast bigger, faster, and click one of these videos here. If you want to see more content that YouTube thinks you should listen to, or watch the latest video that I've uploaded here on podcast school with that said, peace guys.