Speaker 1: In this video, we're going to show you how to edit your podcast content using Pro Tools. Pro Tools is a powerful audio post-production application made by Avid. You can learn more about it at avid.com, and we'll put a link to this in the video description. If you had looked at Pro Tools in the past, you may have seen it as a one-time purchase, but now it's actually a monthly or annual subscription, $30 monthly or $300 annually, and that's for the Pro Tools Studio Edition. There's also student and teacher pricing, and there's even a lite version of Pro Tools that you can try for free. Again, you can download that on the Avid website. So let's jump into editing a podcast using Pro Tools. Now this will be an audio-only version of the podcast edited in Pro Tools, so let's download the uncompressed WAV files you get every time you record your podcast content with Riverside. Here I've logged into my Riverside account, and I can jump in and see my past recordings. Here on the recordings page, I can scroll down, and under each guest, I'll choose high quality and then download the raw audio files. I'll download the raw audio file for every guest, and now I'm ready to open Pro Tools. Down in the dock, here's the Pro Tools logo, and let's open the application. When you first open the Pro Tools application, there's a quick start menu available. I would actually keep this box checked to show on startup because there is a podcasting preset right here. I'll choose podcasting and then click create. You don't have to start with the podcasting template, you can always add different tracks manually later, but I was pleasantly surprised the podcasting template is a great place to start. Choose a folder where you'll save all the project files, and now we'll open the Pro Tools application. Depending on the audio input and output devices you set up when you first installed Pro Tools, you might see this warning on screen. Just click no, and you can continue. And here we have our Pro Tools podcast project. How's that for alliteration? Under voice recordings, this would be the audio recorded from each guest. You see they've given us three tracks for that. There's also tracks for music, if you like background music, and sound effects as well. Now let's start out by dragging in the uncompressed WAV audio files we downloaded before. This process would be the same on Windows or Mac. Here we have our Riverside recordings. I'll just click and drag those, the first one into track one, and then the other guest onto track two. Because Riverside keeps everything in sync, you can drag these all the way to the left and they'll be placed perfectly. Now if I hold the shift key, I can actually select multiple tracks, and I'll actually move them to the right because I might add some intro music later. Now there are three main tools you need in any audio editing application. You need to be able to cut the audio, either you're cutting out filler words or you're just cutting out dead space. You need to be able to move the tracks around if you're trying to retime a laugh between the different tracks. And you need to be able to zoom in and out on the audio tracks as well, so you can see the whole project at a glance or zoom in very closely to a specific point. All those audio tools can be seen here in the upper left corner of Pro Tools. If I click the hand icon, that will allow me to click and hold with the mouse button or trackpad, and move the audio tracks around. If I choose the selector tool here, then I can actually click and drag a portion of the audio clip, hit the delete key on the keyboard, and it will remove that portion of audio. Then there's also the magnifying glass tool. Clicking that, I can then zoom in on a particular portion of the audio. Then if I need to zoom out, I can hold the option key on the keyboard if I'm on the Mac, or control button on Windows. And then when I click, it will actually zoom out so I can see the tracks in their entirety at a glance. Now it is rather cumbersome to click the tools when you need them, and then click on the track and keep going back and forth. So I highly recommend you memorize the keyboard shortcuts to access these tools in Pro Tools. If you'd like to learn more about the keyboard shortcuts, go up to the help menu, and then search for keyboard shortcuts. You'll see it here in the top results, and when I click that, you can see all the different keyboard shortcuts available to you. That's a lot to take in at once, but if you search for something like the grabber tool, you can see that shortcut is command 4. If I search for selector tool, you'll see that's command 3. And now we have a pattern. If we hit command 1, 2, 3, or 4, it switches between those tools on our Mac, or control those numbers on a Windows PC. I'll hit command 1 for the zoom tool, and then click a bunch of times. That was too far, so I'll hold option and then zoom out. Now I can do command 3 for the selector tool, select portions of the audio, and hit the delete key, and I can remove that audio. If I need to move something around, I can do command 4, which is the grabber tool, and move that piece of audio around in its track. As you can see, those keyboard shortcuts make everything a lot easier. Now if I need to delete a track, I'm going to right click on track 3, since I only have two people in this podcast. I can go all the way down and click delete. Alternatively, if I need to add a track, I can right click on one of the tracks I already have, and then click new, and that will add a track right below. I can click create, and you'll see that track appear here. You can custom name the track here, and we also have the common tools like muting, soloing, input monitoring, and recording, if you were going to record directly in Pro Tools. Now let's cover adding audio effects like equalizer or compressor to the tracks of your podcast. If you'd like to learn more about what those audio effects do, check out this video above, or the link is in the description. To do that, I'll actually go here where it says channel strip, and you'll see these blank options. I can click one, go to plug-in, and you'll see all the audio effects you might recognize from your other applications. If I click EQ and then channel strip, you'll see the EQ tool pop up. Here I can adjust the different frequencies, and you'll see that's actually a large adjustment, but I can come down here and use the rightmost knob to more granularly control the frequency that I'm adjusting, and then get the EQ just how I like it. There are also some factory presets available in Pro Tools. Most of these are for instrumentals or singing, so I would stick to manually adjusting your EQ. You can click another channel strip effect and then add something like a compressor. If you need to add volume to the track, you can try to increase the gain, and the limiting features of the compressor will help any of the loud sounds of the track, like laughter, come down to a more reasonable level. Now let's say I want to add some intro music to the podcast. I'll go to a royalty-free audio track that I've downloaded previously, and I'll drag this onto the music tracks here in the Pro Tools project. I'll move it all the way to the left, and if I hit the spacebar, I can preview the project. Now if I need to select all the audio from both participants, I'm going to hold the shift button again on the keyboard, select the tracks, and then drag it over to where I want it to start during the intro music. And I'll go to the beginning, press spacebar to preview. All right, and we have the talking right where I want it. If I need to adjust the volume of the music tracks, I can click here in the volume settings, and actually just lower that slider right here. And if I want to specifically control where the audio fades in and fades out for this music track, rather than just an overall track volume, I'll go over to the left where it says waveform, and I'll select volume instead. This volume line now in the middle, wherever I click, I can add a keyframe or key point, and then adjust the volume there. And now that I've made this adjustment, you'll see it'll be silent, and then the background music will fade in. I can go back to waveform, and those adjustments to the volume are still in this track, but I don't have to see them as I'm editing. If you want audio effects added to your podcast, you can add them to this track. And of course, you can just create as many tracks as you need and group them accordingly. Now while there are many powerful tools in Pro Tools, especially for music production, but if you're doing an audio podcast, that's the majority of the tools you will need to edit your show right here in Pro Tools. Now let's talk about exporting or bouncing this project so it's ready to publish to your podcast host. Once I've made all the edits, if I go up to the file menu, I'll actually go down and instead of export, which is how to export the actual project and individual audio files, I'm going to choose bounce mix. When I choose bounce mix, you'll see this menu pop up. I do want to export it as an mp3 file. I would leave mix source unchanged, front, left, and right. For file format, I'm actually going to choose mono or summed. Unless you're doing a very advanced audio production podcast with multiple tracks and voices and left and right stereo effects, exporting a mono track, especially for interview or just solo podcast, is the way to go. For sample rate, I'm going to choose 44.1 kilohertz. When you're doing audio only content, 44.1 is what you want to do. If you have video and audio content, or maybe you'll be syncing this audio back to another video file, then choose 48 kilohertz. I can choose where I want to save this file. I'll choose my desktop and then click bounce. You'll see this menu pop up. And this is, again, really more for music production where you want to put in an artist or title of the track. I would just title it your podcast episode here and then click OK. Once it's finished bouncing, I can look on my desktop and see the mp3 file I just exported, preview it, and I'm ready to go. So those are the basics of editing podcast content in Pro Tools. If you'd like to learn more about Pro Tools or advanced features, subscribe to the channel and then leave a comment below. What questions do you have? Or what is a software application that you want to edit your podcast in that you'd like to learn more about? Also, we have a great playlist on two minute tutorials on things like the difference between condenser and dynamic microphones, how to reduce the mouth sounds in your recordings, and how to white balance your camera. You can find that playlist right over here. And don't forget to hit that like button before you go. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you next time.