Welcome back to the Podcast Academy blog. We are breezing through the weeks! As an introduction for those new to the blog, and a refresher for our followers, this blog will follow the journey of our six projects within the incubator. Each week, our class of seven will engage with industry professionals, mentors, and one another to produce their very own narrative podcasts. Ultimately, they will complete a trailer and entire first episode, which will all be presented during Podcast Academy’s Live Pitch Event (September 26th), where our participants will pitch their podcasts to a live audience and industry professionals. With that, let’s roll into our recap of our second Week 3 Session on ProTools!
An Intro to Avid ProTools
This week, the Academy met with - or rather vc’ed with - Matteo Marciano, an award-winning sound engineer and professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. Matteo offered the class a crash-course in working with ProTools. Basically ProTools 101. He offered some quick shortcuts and easy to remember tips that helped even the most inexperienced person - me - understand how to navigate the program much better.
Major Takeaways from the Exercise:
I) The best way to transfer and save files is by using the “Save Copy In” function into an external hard drive.
II) Though ProTools is a great way to edit audio and is considered the industry standard, it is still a computer program that is subject to overproccessing and unexpected crashes, so set up the auto backup feature in the Setup tab to ensure all recent edits are saved automatically.
III) Exercise caution when switching between the shuffle, slip, and grid functions as they have vastly different editing settings.
IV) Every voice in an audio recording, especially in podcasts, should be in its own track to streamline the editing process
V) When sending and saving a ProTools session, you must send the entire folder to ease the editing process.
A Roundtable of Drafts
Following Matteo’s insightful and much appreciated lesson, the class then workshopped their first drafts of their episodes. Though a daunting and anxiety-inducing exercise, the activity allowed each participant to gain valuable insight and recommendations from their fellow creatives. The healthy discussion offered some valuable areas of consideration for each project as they fine tune the episodes for our Pitch Event in less than a month!
That’s all for Week 3 here at Podcast Academy! Thanks for joining us and following our journey. Please continue to follow our blog for a glimpse into how to produce your own independent podcast. Remember to pay close attention to our blog because there may be a special prize given out during our Live Pitch Event for those of you who followed our journey and learned with us along the way! Next week, our class is meeting with their mentors independently, so no posts about sessions this week as we won’t be hosting any :( But we’ll be in full swing next week as we gear up for September 26! We hope to see you again here at NYU’s Podcast Academy!