Production Workflow of My New Show, Fractal Bitcoin (video and audio) – PES 249

In this episode I detail my production workflow for my new show, Fractal Bitcoin. I publish daily episodes both as video and audio-only. Fractal Bitcoin covers Bitcoin news and other Bitcoin topics. 

Overview my current audio equipment setup: 

• RE20 microphone — https://products.electrovoice.com/na/en/re20/
• sE Electronics DM1 Dynamite Active Inline Preamp — https://seelectronics.com/products/dm1/
• Neve Portico II Channel Strip — https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/rupert-neve-designs-portico-ii-channel
• Sound Devices MixPre-6 Gen.1 — https://www.sounddevices.com/product/mixpre-6/

Overview my production workflow: 

• Gather posts and news stories from Nostr, X and a few other industry websites. (Takes me around 2 hours) 
• Order all the posts and stories for the shownotes. 
• Create a title for the episode. 
• Create a 16×9 thumbnail for the episode using ChatGPT which uses DALL-E 3 to generate images. — https://chatgpt.com/
• Restart my computer. 
• Arrange all the browser tabs. 
• Open OBS Studio and do a short test recording. (My audio levels, video camera and lighting stay the same everyday) 
• I record my episode as if it’s LIVE to a .mov file at 1920×1080, 60 frames per second, video bitrate at 16,000 kbps, and audio bitrate at 2304 kbps. (My average video is about 15 min. long, which ends up being around a 2Gb .mov file) 

First I produce the video:

• Process the audio in iZotope RX:
  • Make it a mono file, usually
  • Silence any lipsmacks and noises (can’t delete anything because the audio has to line up with the video)
  • Level it to -16.5 LUFS mono or -13.5 LUFS stereo (for video)
  • Save it as a 32-bit .wav file
• Bring the raw video and processed audio into Screenflow. Usually I don’t need to make any edits but sometimes I do. — https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm
• Render the video as a .mp4 file at 1920×1080, 60 frames per second, video bitrate at 16,000 kbps, and audio bitrate at 256 kbps and audio sample rate at 48kHz. (The resulting file size ends up being the same as the raw video recording — about 2Gb for a 15 min. long file) 
• Upload and publish the video to YouTube, Rumble, Bitchute, TikTok, and Flare.pub (a Nostr platform to which I upload a smaller 960×540 version)
• I promote my YouTube video on Nostr, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and a few other platforms. 
• I also post the Youtube link to my Locals community that I’m growing. 
• I also use Opus Clip to create 5 shorts from each of my daily videos. I post all 5 to YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok and LinkedIn. — https://www.opus.pro/

Then I produce the audio-only podcast:

• I edit the audio a bit:
  • Remove any isolated umms and flubs
  • Reduce the length of any dead air, if there is any, in order to speed up the pacing slightly. 
• Level it to -18.5 LUFS mono or -15.5 LUFS stereo (for audio-only podcast) 
• Save it as a 32-bit .wav file as well as an .mp3 file (96 kbps mono or 192 kbps stereo). 
• Tag the .mp3 using ID3 Editor. — http://www.pa-software.com/id3editor/
• Upload .mp3 to Captivate along with shownotes and publish. — https://www.captivate.fm/
• For my website I use Podpage which automatically brings in each podcast episode from Captivate as a blog post. I’m able to quickly optimize the post, add the YouTube video, and add images, etc. — https://www.podpage.com/

FRACTAL BITCOIN LINKS: 

• YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@fractalbitcoin
• Rumble — https://rumble.com/c/c-5471042
• Twitter — https://twitter.com/fractalBitcoin
• Nostr — https://nostr.com/npub1jz42cy8qxw6dres86sn0cr42hww24pnjqssa4k9wxqvzm5l0mvqsq2f5ku
• Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/fractalbitcoin/

A GREAT BITCOIN RESOURCE: 

• BOOK — The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous — https://saifedean.com/tbs

OTHER NOTES:

• If you ever have questions please reach out!
• The start date for the next PES semester is JUNE 4, 2024! (fyi, the course is delivered once per quarter)
• Check out the PES YouTube channel
• If you’d like to share this show with any of your podcaster friends, feel free to send them a message saying, “Btw, here’s a show about podcast audio production you may find useful” with this link: https://podcastengineeringschool.com/subscribe/
• My smaller course for editors/producers who want higher-paying clients: Getting New Clients at Higher Rates

Let me know if you have any questions or need any help with anything,
~Chris