How We Podcast – The Tape and Tech that Makes it Happen

When we launched First Ring Daily back in 2016, it was always our intent to properly build out all the tech needed to produce the podcast ourselves. The early days were rough as I had no idea what I was doing and launching a daily podcast is a lot more challenging than it may seem which pushed us down the road to call in some outside help from Andrew to make sure we got the content-ball rolling correctly before diving into the tech side of the equation.

On February 1st, we started producing the podcast 100% in-house which has a couple of advantages; flexibility on time when the show is recorded and the ability and to let me have 100% control over the process because I am secretly a control-freak. The downside is more work for myself as I now edit and upload every episode but with the proper workflow, that process now takes all of five minutes to complete.

So how do I make it happen? Well, if you have been watching the show since the 1st, you'll know that it doesn't always go smoothly and I have learned a lot...which I will detail in this post.

The technology for the co-host (Paul) is quite simple, he needs a webcam that for some reason is always slightly blurry and we don't know why, Skype, and a quality mic. On my side, it is significantly more complex.

The software that I use for every episode is xSplit, OBS, Voicemeter Banana, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Skype. All of these pieces of software (minus Premier) work together to create, at the same time, the podcast.

In our original setup, I was not using OBS or Voicemeter, and I'll explain why those pieces of software are now critical to this production of the show.

xSplit is the software that brings it all together, the video feeds are pumped into this software and it is what I use to record, scene switch, and on Friday's, push the content to YouTube.

The first problem, audio and video were not in sync. If you watch a couple of the first episodes that I produced, there was an issue with audio and video being out of sync. After each show, I was painfully tweaking each audio feed in Premier to align lips with audio as I had trouble finding the root cause which means that this went on for nearly a week.

The first problem is that bringing Skype video and audio into Xsplit is a dicey experience, the video drops frames and the audio is marginal at best. Even though Xsplit supports natively the ability to rip the Skype video feed, I don't recommend using it.

Solution: I configured Xsplit to 'screen capture' a monitor; what I do is make Paul's video feed full screen and record the screen capture into Xsplit which works quite well.

Second Problem: Frames per second. On my end, I am using a higher-end Canon camera that captures 1080P at 60FPS while the screen recording is at 30FPS and you can't force it any higher. When my feed was placed next to Paul's in Xsplit, it caused audio-sync issues that once you see it, you can't un-see the issue.

The solution seemed simp...