[qmmmur]

What post-processing do you do already to catch the low hanging fruit? Izotope? I reckon putting in 100 hours of editing and not being able to get an hour down to sub an hour means there is something which could be optimised out quite quickly.

[nickjj]

> What post-processing do you do already to catch the low hanging fruit?

None, everything is manual.

I use DaVinci Resolve to do the editing where both the guest and myself have separate tracks. Then I line up the tracks (only takes a few seconds) and start playing things from the beginning at 2x speed. I stop to make cuts mostly to remove filler content.

Through out this process of editing I'm also creating show notes as I go. An example of the end result is here https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/103-great-question-m.... Basically every few minutes I recap what was said into a 1 sentence bullet point with a timestamp. Along the way I list out techs used as tags and list out reference links / libraries into a Markdown document. Then once I'm done editing the show I write a few paragraphs which is a TL;DR of the episode.

All in all if the guest uses minimal filler words or noises it takes about 1 real life hour per 1 hour of recorded content to do all of the above. For context, the episode I linked has someone who I would bucket into a category of speaking very fluently with minimal filler content. I was able to blaze through that one.

I also have a 2560x1440 display and use the "always on top" feature of most window managers to layer the Markdown document and a preview of the page just above the waveform in DaVinci Resolve so I can quickly make cuts and update the notes with minimal mouse movement. Almost everything is keyboard driven.

What tools can be used to speed up that process?

[qmmmur]

It sounds like the show notes are the most costly part I would assume? I imagined you were exhausting yourself on scrubbing through manually and editing little clicks, lip smacks, inhales out slowly. The former is much harder to automate away but the latter is definitely easy with some commercial audio plugins.

[nickjj]

I've timed myself going through episodes where the guest spoke very fluently vs guests where I had to stop every few seconds to cut a filler word. The latter takes multiple hours longer which makes me think the time consuming part isn't the show notes, but the mechanical editing. Each note only takes about 30 seconds based on listening to the last few minutes of what was said.

It is mentally taxing though, it means during the whole editing process my brain is constantly identifying and removing filler content, listening for specific tech choices to tag, listening for specific references that could be interesting to link, listening for mentions of libraries to link and also digesting the main takeaway of what's being said to sum it up into a note. All of this happens in 1 pass during the editing process. I tried doing it in 2 passes where I only focused on mechanical editing the first time around and doing the show notes on the 2nd but it took longer in the end.