[PSF-Volunteers] Wanted: Volunteers to do audio editing

[A.M. Kuchling]

I think it's possible to parallelize the work of producing the PyCon
2007 podcasts (http://advocacy.python.org/podcasts/), and am looking
for volunteers.

Making a podcast consists of:

1) Checking that we have the speaker's release form.

2) listening to the entire talk

3) recording the intro and outro ("Today's podcast is 'Stackless Python',
   by Christian Tismer.", etc.)

4) adding the intro music, and mixing things together a bit.

The time-consuming step is 2), cleaning up the talk audio.  

That requires listening to the whole thing, editing out 'um' and 'er'
and an occasional annoying audience sound, and any passages unneeded
for the podcast.  Doing this slows down listening by a factor of
roughly 2-5; that is, a 30-minute talk can take an hour to 2.5 hours,
depending on the speaker and the recording's quality.  The final two
steps probably take an hour at most.

The editing is largely cutting stuff out.  I've been removing long
pauses, audience questions that weren't recorded, the speaker spending
a minute messing with slides, that sort of thing.  In the first talk I
got very fancy and tried to reduce audience noise by fiddling with the
volume level to quiet coughs while the speaker was talking, but that
was time-consuming and didn't buy very much, IMHO.

If you're interested, please e-mail me.  Suggested workflow:

* I put a recording on advocacy.python.org as a FLAC or AIFF file.  

* You can do the editing and send the resulting file back to me in
  some lossless format (FLAC, AIFF, WAV).

* I then record the intros and assemble the final podcast.

If someone wanted to try recording the intros themselves, I'd be happy
to help with that, but shy people needn't bother; I can keep recording
them myself.

--amk