Speaker 1: Have you ever wanted to record a podcast or interview with guests in person with you and others remotely online? This kind of hybrid setup can be challenging. You want separate clean audio and video recordings for every participant. You want everyone to be able to see and hear each other at the same time. And ideally, it's nice to have redundant recordings in case anything goes wrong. We're gonna provide you some solutions to those three major challenges to this kind of hybrid recording setup and even recommend an application for the Mac that can supercharge all of your recordings. Here's how to conduct hybrid interviews with people in person and remotely. The first challenge is headphones. How is everyone gonna hear each other? Your remote guests have the most flexibility. They're probably alone recording in a room so they can use whatever headphones they like, wired, even wireless. When they use Riverside, any of those options will work. Now, for those with you in person during the recording, you're gonna need some different solutions for headphones. You want everyone to be able to hear each other in the room and whatever remote guests are tuning in through a platform like Riverside. Now, you're gonna wanna use physical headphones, especially to reduce latency because you're probably gonna be using an audio interface to do all this and you want people to be able to hear each other in real time. So wired headphones is the best option. Now, if it's only you and one other person in the room, you can use a cheaper headphone splitter. You can get these on Amazon and it will split one headphone jack into two but you will get a drop in volume because it's splitting that signal twice. What I would recommend is using something called a headphone amp. This is a Behringer headphone amp and these kind of headphone amps do require power so you need to plug it into the wall and this will take one audio input in this jack and can split it to four headphones and you can adjust the headphone volume level for four participants in person using these knobs. Now, you might need some of these adapters. They're a quarter to an eighth inch adapters for headphones. They can take normal headphone jacks and turn them into this larger size that you'll see in headphone amps but this kind of amp will allow you to split the signal four different ways without losing volume and then you can adjust each of their in-person volumes if someone wants it a little louder in their headphones, if someone a little quieter and you can do that all with the headphone amp. Now, you'll go out of your interface into that headphone amp which we'll cover in a moment. Now, the next challenge is video. How are your remote guests gonna record their video and you record everyone in the room so everyone can see each other? Your remote guests have the most flexibility. They can use the built-in web camera on their computer or USB webcam or if all they have is their mobile device, they can use the Riverside app on iPhone, iPad or Android. They can come into the call with that device and their video and audio is recorded in a separate track right in the Riverside studio. Now, for guests in-person, you'll either need a single camera setup that has a wide enough angle to capture everyone in the room so your remote guests can see them or there are more advanced options like video switchers. The main point here is you want your remote guests to see everyone that's involved in the recording so when someone's talking, they can see who's talking, they can see their facial expressions so you want a camera that has a wide enough angle to capture everyone in the room. Now, the built-in camera on your computer might be enough or you can use an external webcam that has a wide angle, maybe place it farther from you and your in-person guests so it captures everyone but if you want that more advanced option, you can use something like a video switcher. This is the Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro. You can actually put four cameras into the switcher and switch between them live during the call. Not only that but you can actually use the ATEM Mini Pro as the video input during your Riverside recording so as your remote guests are tuning in using Riverside, you can switch between those cameras live during the call and your remote guests will see the cameras you're switching to. As you can see here, my video input is Blackmagic Design and that's short for the ATEM Mini Pro made by Blackmagic and you can live switch during the recording and again, Riverside will see the Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro as a webcam and you can use all the inputs on the video switcher and they'll show up in the Riverside recording. One thing to remember here, if you are using a video switcher during the call, Riverside is only going to be recording whatever camera is live into the studio and so if you want all your camera recordings to be full length, separate recordings that you have in the room, you're gonna have to record locally to that camera on an SD card. If you're using a mirrorless camera, you can record to that SD card and go HDMI out to a video switcher and you can get both the full length recording from that camera and the switching in Riverside. Now the biggest challenge of a hybrid recording setup is the audio from your in-person guests. Now for them to be able to hear the remote guests, you can try to use Riverside's Echo Cancellation and play the remote guest audio out loud in the room through a speaker. Riverside's Echo Cancellation will do its best to remove that person's voice from the microphones in the room, but a better option would be to use an audio interface with multiple inputs for everyone in the room and then using that headphone amp so they can hear the remote guests. Here's how you would set that up. We're gonna use a simple two-channel USB audio interface. We'll put links to some options in the video description and now I'm gonna show you how to plug everything in. Using a USB audio interface like this, it'll have a USB connection on the back and then it'll connect to your computer on the other side. Then Riverside will recognize that as an audio input. Depending on your audio interface, the mic inputs might be on the front or the back. On this one, you'll see I have two mic inputs here on the front. You'll plug in both microphones for yourself and your other in-person guest and then the headphone jack here is what's gonna go out to your headphone amplifier. Again, if you need to use an adapter, you can. You can use an eighth inch cable or a full quarter inch cable and you're gonna go out of the headphone jack here on your audio interface to the input of your headphone amplifier. So I'm going from the headphone jack on my audio interface into the input on the headphone amplifier and then my in-person guests' headphones can plug into these. This way, everyone I'm recording with in-person can hear everyone remotely through Riverside. Once you go to the Riverside Studio now to start the call, choose you are using headphones and then you're going to choose the USB audio interface for both your microphone and speaker settings. My audio device is called the MixPre-3 and I'm gonna select that for both my microphone and my speaker. When you do this, all the microphones connected to that audio interface will be heard by your remote guests so they'll be able to hear everyone that's in the room with you and because it's being used as the speaker, anything your remote guests say will go through the audio interface through that headphone amplifier and then all of your guests in person can hear what the remote guests are saying. So use the USB audio interface as both the microphone and the speaker inside the Riverside Studio. Now, one limitation with this setup is that your in-person recording through Riverside is going to have all the microphones going through that audio interface in a single track. Riverside just sees the audio interface as a single device and will record all those mics together in one track. If you want a more advanced setup and your budget allows, you can record to an audio interface that uses an SD card locally. I use the Sound Devices MixPre3. You can also use various Zoom audio interfaces and these can record locally to an SD card and they'll have individual tracks for your audio and your remote guests can still hear you and Riverside will record your in-person microphones in a single track. Now, if your budget doesn't allow for an audio interface like that, there is a solution in software, especially if you're using a Mac. I would recommend the app called Audio Hijack. Audio Hijack is an incredible application for the Mac that allows you to record all the different audio tracks and channels separately here locally and you can even get redundant recordings of those tuning in through Riverside. This is what the Audio Hijack interface looks like. The power of Audio Hijack is I can choose multiple input devices and then choose my audio interface. Again, I'm using the MixPre3 and using these audio blocks, I can record each channel individually to different audio files, even though Riverside is recording everything from the USB audio interface together. For instance, this block is gonna record just channel one of my audio interface. That would be you, the host speaking. I can create another audio block, choosing channel two only, and that will record the other in-person guest separately without my microphone in their recording. I'm actually gonna add a third block called Application. Now, if I choose the web browser I'm using for the Riverside call and record that to a third block, I'll actually get a redundant recording of my remote guests and the local recordings from everyone in-person. So this can be my redundant backup plus separate tracks for everyone in-person. Audio Hijack is a powerful application. Again, it's just for macOS, but if you're using a Mac, I highly recommend this for both redundant recordings and getting those separate tracks for everyone in-person. So those are some solutions for hybrid recording, both remote guests and those in-person. If you need a refresher, click the chapters in this video. You can go back and learn about the cameras, the video switchers, the audio interfaces, and all of that. And if you need even more in-depth info, we have lots of videos on the channel. So subscribe to Riverside FM here on YouTube, hit that bell icon so you don't miss a video, and drop a comment. If you have more questions about this kind of hybrid recording setup, we'd love to answer your questions down there in the comments. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you in the next video.