4th Gen. Focusrite Scarlett Series Interfaces – Solo, 2i2 and 4i4
October 19, 2023
2 Comments
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Some podcast hosts and guests have these kinds of speech patterns: Long Pauses for Thinking, Hesitations or Awkward Cadence.
The question is — how to best edit that kind of audio?
A few thoughts: Tighten them up as much as you can WITHOUT ruining the naturalness of their delivery. It’s a balance between keeping the naturalness while speeding up the pacing a bit —versus— cutting it too tight and making it unnatural/weird. Long pauses have to be considered on a case by case basis. Sometimes you really want the long pause to emphasize that they are thinking, however even in those cases you can usually remove some of the original pause to speed things up while still leaving enough to give the impression that they are thinking.
How do _you_ handle these issues?
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3 Responses
Firstly, I do a verbatim transcript and highlight where the guest as meandered, spoke gibberish, stumbled or used crutch words.
Secondly, get rid of those bad boys and tighten up the media with the virtual razor blade.
Thirdly listen through each section for a speaker and tighten up/loosen out. Often fade outs and fade ins between some edits. When happy with each section, merge the clips. At the end, merge all a speaker’s clips.
Next is EQ/Compression/etc to fix the sound.
I find I can use the truncate silence to easily find and shorten, but not eliminate silences nearly automatically. I usually start at shortening any silences longer than half a second to 25% of the original length. This keeps things snappy but also leave the pause in place, just not as noticably. I of course manually remove any long ones that remain before finalizing the project.