Starting the Podcast: Backstory, Early Days & Studio
Backstory
In late 2010 when I came across the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I was immediately fascinated by the format. I simply loved unfiltered, long-form conversations that allow you to better understand incredible people, their stories, the nuance and depth of their views on all kinds of intriguing topics.
Ever since that time, I have wanted to start a podcast of my own, to have amazing conversations with people from all walks of life that fascinate me. Through the conversations I would further develop my understanding of the world and the human experience that we call life, and hopefully the audience listening would too.
However, I’ve not been able to justify (towards myself) prioritizing this endeavor, until late 2024.
Meanwhile, countless podcasts have been launched, some of which have offered me a lot in terms of inspiration, information and boosted my journey of personal development and self-discovery. For that I’m very grateful.
That being said, this has also lead the podcasting space to become increasingly saturated. However, I will not let the fact that others’ pursuing this endeavor be a blocker for me in pursuing my long-held (14-year old) dream.
If for nothing else, I’ll do this for myself. As part of self-actualization. Scratching my own itch. Proving to myself that I’m capable of taking action and actually doing what I wanted to do (which I’ve previously done in other areas of life). I’ll feel proud and good about myself for doing this. It’ll be worth it solely for this reason.
It would be a hope, and a bonus if others’ also find value in joining my learning journey, to accelerate their own learning as well…
…and so it began, the materializing of my passion project.
1 year & 3 months after starting my podcast, the YouTube Creator Silver award was delivered to my door for passing 100 000 subscribers 🤩
But a lot happened before reaching that milestone.
The Early Days: Selecting Tools and Creating the First Videos
In order to create my first videos in an inexpensive and swift manner, I contacted the film & media institute at the nearest university. I got the contact details for the relevant lecturer, wrote a half-page about what I was looking for, and the lecturer posted it for all the students to see. 5-7 of them reached out sharing their credentials, portfolio, current year of study, etc. After evaluating the candidates, I chose a guy in his 50s who also had background from music.
As a student, he could borrow very high-end video, audio and light equipment from the University for free, as long as he booked it well in advance. Given his background from music, he also knew a lot about microphones and audio setup. We recorded about 10 videos, and edited them in DaVinci Resolve.
DaVinci Resolve is free, while DaVinci Resolve Studio (which have some additional features) has a one-time fee of about 295 USD. This significantly lowers the threshold for getting started, and it’s an editing tool that you can continue to use as your capabilities and requirements grow. It’s even used to make large Hollywood productions. It has a very intuitive user interface, and the software is frequently updated with new features and fixes.
From the very start, it was very important to me to select an editing tool that would allow me to work collaboratively with people contributing remotely in the editing process. One of the other key reason for choosing DaVinci Resolve (other than costs, feature suite and active developer team) is that it integrates seamlessly with Blackmagic Cloud. The solution hosts all my projects, and I can add remote team members by just inviting them to my cloud space using their email address. It’s very intuitive, super easy to use and allows me to work closely with anyone, anywhere in the world. For a bit more info, check out the Tools section.
The local student and I tested this out from the very start, got used to the process and saved a lot of time by working on the various projects in parallel, going back and forth between him and me doing updates.
The first videos we made during these early days was introductions to what I was doing and videos of various mental models.
Studio
After making some calls to people running venues locally, and visiting the sites, one of them recommended me to reach out to the head of a local TV station. We spoke on the phone and met soon thereafter. They had a studio I could use, and we agreed on a setup with 3 cameras on tripods, a certain lighting rig, a curtain backdrop (that also served as a major sound absorber providing better acoustics), two chairs with mic arms, and a coffee table between them.
Later on, after some learnings from the recordings, the studio was renovated a bit. A new backdrop was built, and the seating area was moved to a different part of the studio, which (among other things) allowed for more distance between the cameras and us giving more depth to the video.
Rethinking Recording & Editing
I realized that the editing work was taking too much of my time, which lead me to look for editing support from an expert using the outsourcing platform Fiverr. The best way to go about it is writing a Project Brief, and then invite candidates you find to be promising, to bid for your Project Brief. After several months of evaluating profiles, and seeing some of them in action after inviting them to my Cloud space, I finally found someone who was a match for me and my needs at a price point that would allow for this to scale (this was a very time-consuming and frustrating phase).
As part of the process of finding this candidate, I also learned that we had to record in another manner as well. Up until this stage, we had recorded from all 3 cameras in the studio, but a technical team members from the
TV studio was live editing the episode while we were recording. What I received afterwards, was the results of that.
At first this seemed like a great idea, as this seemed to be saving me a lot of time in the editing process. However, it’s quite challenging to do great editing and camera angle changes live. This lead to much more editing work afterward, which turned out to be really difficult and thereby time-consuming, when you don’t have the full video source stream from each of the 3 cameras. When doing an edit, that leads to poor transition to the next video clip, you then basically have to find another video segment, within the video material you have, that matches an appropriate reaction to what was just being said, and then add that in to make the transition seem natural. This is a nightmare in practice!
A much better way to go about it was just to avoid live editing all together (which also saved some cost), and rather get the raw video stream from each camera. Then, when importing the video files into DaVinci Resolve (the editing software), create a multi-cam timeline, which allows you to very quickly and easily choose which camera angle you want for each video segment (just by right-clicking on a video segment). This approach (no live editing + outsourcing editing + multi-cam timeline) saved cost and reduced editing time by a whopping 80%! I was super happy!
Podcast Evolving
As the podcast evolved, I noticed that a lot of the guests I wanted to have on, was not located in my city (Stavanger, Norway). They were spread across the country, or in other countries. It became tedious and very time-consuming to make the logistics work for the next time they might be in Stavanger (while doing a speaking gig, conference, customer meeting, etc.). At this early stage, it would be to costly to fly them in specifically for my podcast, cover accommodation, etc., and it would definitely not scale.
The natural next step was to establish another studio that I could use to do podcast recordings over video call. This studio setup took a bit of trial and error, and currently has a light rig of 6 different light sources, an external webcam, an external mic & mic arm, a headset, a laptop, a monitor, and an external mouse. I use Riverside.fm to host and record the video calls, which great as it allows you to record in HD (standard) and 4K if you camera allows it. It also gives you separate video and audio streams for everyone in the call, which is ideal for editing. For more details on equipment & software, check out the Tools section.
Since the above image was taken, I’ve swapped the large noice cancelling headset to tiny ear buds, to avoid the visual distraction that they caused in the video.
This setup new studio setup, allows me to record podcast episodes with guest regardless of where they’re located in the world. As a result of much less logistics and fewer people having to involved and being available at the same time (e.g. from the TV Studio), I can record episodes much more frequently. Currently ~1-2 every 14 days. However, time from recording to publishing takes about 4 weeks at this stage. I’m continuously working to further streamline the editing process, so that new episodes can be published sooner.
At this stage, the idea is to have guests in the studio, if they’re in Stavanger, and if not record via video call.
This is is where I’m at right now. Excited to see where the journey will go from here…
Check out the overview of podcast episodes published thus far
Leave a Reply