How to Launch A Successful Podcast Studio

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. Excellent. This is going to be really informal, which my boss will tell you is just because I'm just a uniform kind of guy. So I'll do my best not to drop any F bombs. But what I do want to hear from you is I will be asking questions throughout because I really want to know everything everyone here does. So I can talk to you. I can stand up here and quote speeds and feeds and goes ins, goes outs all day. But that's going to be really boring if it has no bearing on what you want to do now or next month or next year. Cool. All right, so as I'm talking, just raise your hand and we'll try to get mic to you. If not, I'll just repeat the question so the camera catches it. Is that cool with everybody? Okay, so my name is Michael Kammes. I'm the Senior Director of Innovation at Key Code Media, which is a fantastic title that means absolutely nothing, because when you get a title like innovation, it's like, are you marketing? Are you sales? Are you engineering? The good thing is I have my fingers in all those pies, so that means I can talk a little bit about all of that. So what we're going to cover today is we're going to talk about building, or I think Matt called it, our VP of marketing, deploying a podcast studio. There we go. And so I'm going to talk a lot about the gear, right? Because I think a lot of you are like, what do I need in my shopping list for gear? Right? So, but if you want to take pictures, that's fine. I tend to walk around the. Walk around here, so don't just wait till I get out of the way and then you can get the picture. Right. But you can always reach out to me online and I can send this to you. It's not a big deal. Okay. But we're going to talk a lot about gear. But more importantly, why? Because I think what a lot of people rush to do is they say, I watched a podcast and I saw that. That product on that person's podcast, and I want that. And that's good. You know, I'm a consumer as well, but there should be a reason behind it, right? And the technology you buy should service you as you grow. One of the terms we have is corner engineering. Engineering yourself into a corner, right? Where you buy a product and it works for that one purpose, but then it doesn't really do any more purpose for you, but because you have that sunk cost, you then try and build around it. And unfortunately, it doesn't go with you as you grow. So why don't we start with the podcast industry today? Because a lot of people see, see that this podcaster is making a ton of money and I'm being asked to find ways to market our brand or our product or our team. But why? What are the actual numbers on this? So I've got some numbers for you, and I'm not going to read them all verbatim, but as you can see, it isn't a flash in the pan, right? We have almost 600 million podcast listeners worldwide. That's nothing to sneeze at. That's. That's huge. You can see that over half of the US population that's in middle school or higher are listening to podcasts. Look how much money we're spending on podcast spend. That's 40 billion. That's only a quarter of TV ad spending. I mean, just think about that, with how much terrestrial television is and cable television podcasts are now a quarter of that. And it makes sense, right? When you are selling ad time on television, a lot of times you're working around what show that is, right? And what content and what's the demographic of that show. And that could be something that's planned months in advance because it takes months to do a television show, right? A scripted show. But with podcasts, you, you know, the production can be done in a week. So it's really easy to capitalize on a trend with your marketing message. So the turnaround's a lot quicker. You can see that we have the usual standards. YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcasts kind of lead the pack. In fact, if you look at what the most used streaming app is on televisions, it's YouTube. Right? That to me, just blows my mind. And then I realize, yeah, that's kind of what I do. I don't watch TV on my TV, I watch YouTube on my TV. Right? So the market is just absolutely huge. You can see, again, we are going to do a little bit of speeds and feeds, but you can just see the active monthly listeners and then the comparison between the year prior. Right. It's just an amazing amount. And the reason I put these up here is who knows the acronym roi? Yeah, yeah. I'm a creative. I really don't give a shit about roi. But to have a job, I gotta know what ROI means, right? Return on investment. And when you're talking to your bosses, you're talking to the bean counters. They're gonna wanna know if I'm spending X amount of money on a Podcast studio. And I'm spending X amount of money to maybe hire someone to go get sponsors and whatnot. They're gonna wanna know what the ROI is, the return on investment. So knowing how many people are out in your tam, total addressable market, once you have these numbers, it then becomes a way to justify the expenditure when you're building a studio. So this is where we're going to get into the gear and the questions you need to ask yourself. So first is how many people are going to be on mike? And let's just assume for a moment that this is audio only. We'll discuss video in a few minutes. But let's assume this is audio only, right? If this is audio only, you can work in a pretty small space, right? You just need to have that microphone. You need to be at a place where there's not a lot of echo, a place where there's some sound dampening. But when you start adding multiple hosts, you then have to add additional space, right? You have to have multiple microphones and a way to record that. You also need to know how are you going to have guests come in? Are you going to have a podcast table set up where people come in? And now you're talking about two hosts and a guest and recording those tracks individually. And then what if they're remote? Right? A lot of the people that we want to talk to on our podcasts may not be local, Right? And when you're starting a podcast, you're not going to fly everyone in and out and put them up and T and E and all those kinds of things. So you have to determine where that space is going to be, how much space is there. So as I mentioned, lights. We'll get to it a few minutes when we talk about video. But the one thing you also need to consider is how many people are actively doing the podcast with you? Are you the recordist and also the operator? Right. If you're recording the podcast, editing it and then sending out later, that's one thing. But if you're doing a live stream, right? A podcast can be a live stream. Who is administering that? Who's putting in the bumpers? Who. Who's putting in the music cues? Who's rolling the ads during this? Are you doing it in small setups? Yes. But more often than not, don't do it. Don't do it because you're starting a podcast because you have something to say or you have a network of people who have something to say. I want to hear what you think. The questions you're coming up with the topics you want to discuss. I don't want your attention drifting because you want to hit that music cue at the right place. Right. So I don't want the tech to distract you from the story that you're trying to tell. Next is the question that we field the most at KIE Code, which is what kind of room are you working with? Right. Is this a bedroom? Okay, if it's a bedroom, maybe you're renting the place. Well, then you can't really do a lot of changes to that room. What if this is in an office space that has that ugly drop ceiling? Right. No one likes that it's ugly. But how do you alter that without breaking the lease that you have with whoever owns it? Right. So there has to be a discussion of what can I do in this room? And if you own the building, then it becomes, do I need to pull a permit? Do I need to get a GC or contractor to do things? So there are some considerations there. But I'll show you a couple tricks that we can do to kind of maximize the space that you have. And lastly, it's noise, right? If you are playing a podcast and you're watching it on tv, that's a little bit more forgiving because you're sitting in your living room, you're sitting in a space somewhere, and background noise can kind of get lost. But how many people are listening to podcasts on headphones or earbuds? Right? You hear absolutely everything. Now, I have a background in audio, so maybe I'm just a snob, but if I hear that there's a ton of background noise, a, I'm going to get annoyed, and B, if someone is saying, well, you know what, I'm just going to use that Adobe Denoise filter on there. You get that robot effect, right? You get that. Any other sound people in here, Right? How many times have you heard audio on a TV and you're like, isotope, right? You hear it and you're like, ah, that's vocal fry plus crunchy. Isotope, right? Oh, it's infuriating. And it makes it difficult to listen to these. Right? So there are some ways to get around some of these things. Oh, we also have talk about safety. If you have lights that are on sticks on tripods on the floor and you have a guest come in, what if they trip over that? Are you taping cables down? Are you putting rugs over the cables? Right. How do you keep things safe without people tripping over things? And if there are lights that you have in the ceiling. Are they clipped on? In a way. Do they have safety harnesses so they don't fall on somebody? Right. So there's all these things to consider. So here are some things that you can look into. So first, does anyone know what these are? These are called scissor. Thank you. These are ways where you can use drop ceiling. Right. So in your corporate environment, they've got baby pins at the bottom. Yeah. I may be in post, but I know a few production terms to be dangerous. You can connect lightweight lights to this. We're no longer in the age where we have tube lights, Right. We don't need those. Heavy, heavy lights. They're going to melt the ceiling. You can go with LED lights, and by mounting those in the ceiling here, you're able to adjust these. In fact, the podcast studio that Keycode Media built for ourselves, we've been building these for a decade or so. When we built ours, we had the same problem. We're doing this in a building that we're working in, but. But it has drop ceiling and the ceilings aren't that tall. So how do we get a wide shot without getting the lights in there? So we use POE lights. Does anyone know what POE means? Yeah, I know you do. Poe. Okay, so normally when you have a light, you run power to it, right? Thick power cable. And then you run some kind of maybe control cable, Right. Maybe the cable is a DMX cable. Right. Some way to control the light, some way to control the color. So there are companies like icann, among others, where you can run an Ethernet cable. All the same thing that comes from your wall. When you need the Internet at home, that ethernet cable can be plugged into the light, and provided it's plugged into a switch that's rated for poe, it will power the light. And not only will it power the light, it's seen on the network as a device. So you now, via an ethernet cable, thin ethernet cable, you can control over your lights. So what we do at kiecode is we tie all our lights into an automation system where we click one button, all the lights turn on, and then they go to the appropriate color. And then depending on how many people we have with hosts, those lights turn on with either a hair light or a side light. So those are kind of the things you can work on. Also, has anyone heard of the company Auralex before? Yeah, I know we have some sound people here. As I mentioned, we don't want noise, and that means we don't want noise coming from other people in the building. But we also don't want to make too much noise that we piss off the other people in the building. So we have things like this. This is Auralex. This is a sound pad, and it's portable, sits on a tripod, sits on or against the wall. And then you can speak into the microphone and you don't get that slap back so it sounds nice and clean. And then you can also do it in a room like that. What we like from a branding perspective is Auralex allows you not just to get those very cool kind of 80s suede look, right? But they also allow you to put your logo or pictures you want, right? So if you have some history with the people that you're talking about, maybe you're working for an organization that has some things in pop culture. You. You can put your logos, you can put symbols of what you work on into those, right? And that becomes instant branding. Because now if you do introduce video, you now have that logo always in the background, right? So it becomes a way to almost watermark your footage so everyone can see exactly what you're working with. Any questions so far? No, we're doing good. Okay. So next is a control room or producer station. And obviously this speaks to your footprint, how much room you have. If we had our druthers, if we had our pick to do anything we wanted, we would have a podcast room or studio, and then we'd have a second room, and that second room would be where the show is being recorded or the show is being thrown, or where the audio person is and where the graphics person is. But we also realized that you don't always have that kind of rope, right? So sometimes we'll have a producer station somewhere else in the room, maybe off camera, where all that can be run. The only problem is it does distract, right? Because you're trying to get to know your guest, you're trying to share stories, and if you have someone who's moving faders and tapping cameras in the background, that gets kind of distracting, it takes you out of that story. So if we can. If we can, we want to get a dedicated space, and as I mentioned earlier, we want that dedicated operator as well. But because if again, you're doing the interview and you have to worry about punching different camera angles or streaming or answering questions in chat during the live stream, you want to try and avoid that. We also want to take in consideration who's running this, right? Because if you're bringing a podcast to your company or you're working with, there may not be media savvy people there. Or maybe you're the savvy person. And if you're the savvy person, but you're also the interviewer, you can't juggle that. So it has to be built in a way that your team members can operate it. So that's when we get into automation. Has anyone heard of things like bitfocus Companion? I know you have waiting for your arm to go up? No. BitFocus Companion. No. Yeah. Okay. How about Stream Deck? Yeah, okay, now how many of you are gamers and you know about Stream Deck? Okay, I thought so. So Stream Deck is. Is this fantastic desktop device that has a ton of buttons on there that are assignable to trigger macros or series of commands, or trigger different commands in different applications. So instead of pulling up a web page and saying, turn on Poe Light 1, turn on Poe Light 2, make Lite 2.56Kelvin. This is something that, again, we've done before where someone walks in, maybe they're the CEO of a company, and they've got an RFID badge and they tap it against the controller, lights, snap to what that person uses the control surface instantly gets rid of anything that could be messed up and only presents to that user what they need. Right. So that's something to look into as well. Can we automate things? Many of you also may be talking to people who say, you know what, what if we build a podcast studio and then we want to rent it out? Which is very common. We're seeing a lot of post facilities, kind of, given the, the, the, the change in the industry right now, to say, well, we've got this extra space we used to use for shooting, or we used to use for producers for jobs that they were working on. And you know what, it's just sitting there and it's real estate we're paying for. Why don't we rent it out? Okay, if you're renting it out, you have to expect that people who come in aren't going to be that technical. They want to come in and do the interview and then walk out. So you have to then build the automation so when people come in, they can just hit a button and then just do the thing. Right. Because the less automation you have, the more staffing you all have to do, which jacks up the price to handle the things that can't be automated. Any questions so far? No. Okay, the other thing I would add. Does anyone here watch podcasts like the Land Show? Linus? Tech tips? [00:16:49] Speaker B: A few. [00:16:50] Speaker A: Okay. You may know that, and you've probably seen this when they talk to other producers, right? When it's not just Luke and Linus, when they look at other folks, they actually cut to a camera inside the production room. So the people who are throwing the show are actually part of the show. And I find that to be a really good kind of a way to temper the theater of the mind that you get in these podcasts when you have the production folks as part of the show. Right. So there's. Sometimes having the producers in the room is a good thing, but it's something you've kind of got to provision for before you just make that unilateral decision. Here's an example of Exactly Right Media. Exactly Right Media does all the podcasts for Netflix. Key Code Media was great to work with them to build all these different podcast rooms for these different shows. And this is in the middle of us building it right here. And you can see it's the producer room. And then inside there is the room with two guests down here. You can kind of see their setup. And if I click one more, that's one of our senior sales reps. That's Tony Arati at the bottom. He's jazzed about audio. And you can see this is the team, right? This one podcast is going to have three different operators doing audio, doing video, and then also streaming the show as well. All right, now we get to the really fun nerd stuff. How many of you are looking to do video podcasts as well? Not just audio, doing video. Okay, so there's a lot of considerations with video. First off is, as we talked about a few minutes ago, how big is the space? Because if the space isn't that big, then we have to look at. Well, we don't have enough space to have camera operators. At least have camera operators in the room, right? Cause you need the sticks, you need the camera. Then you need someone to stand there, and then you need to make sure that the camera doesn't pan or tilt and catch the other camera operators. So do we go with PTZ cameras? Everyone here knows what PTZ is. Pan, tilt, zoom, Right? Those are the cameras that you control with a joystick. And I'll show you a picture in a few minutes. But those are ones that you can have someone sit in the producer room or remotely and control the cameras. Right. We've even seen in big sporting events where we have people who aren't at the stadium controlling the cameras. Or we go one step further, and I hope I don't spook anyone by Using this term AI to do automatic tracking, to recognize the face and then to track that person. Right. And then also do automated iris controls. Does anyone here know what feathering is when it comes to cameras? Yeah, a lot of PTZ cameras snap to the angle, snap to different angles. They have, they do really hard zooms, hard pans and tilts. But we also have PTZ cameras that can do the fade or do the feather. So it looks more human, looks more smooth. Right. And those don't take up a lot of space. And it's not getting rid of jobs. It's just saying, look, we can't have you in the room because there's not enough space. We're going to have you somewhere else. Also a very common technique and I'm sure all of you who have done editing are. Well, we want to release in high quality. We don't have enough cameras. Why don't we do a 4k medium shot and then do a punch in to an HD close up? Right. It'd be considered two different angles, but it's just one camera. Right. So if you're doing this in post, it gives you a way of hiding a cut, it gives you a way of breaking up a monologue. So it's a very good way of getting another angle. And then we start working with cameras that are larger than 6k, are. Sorry, larger than 4k, 6k, 12k, et cetera. That then gives us ways to pan and scan within the image to add a little bit more vibrance to the image. Something else to consider is that PTZ cameras don't have to be on a tripod. You can mount them on a wall. I was recently talking with the gentleman who was putting together Carson Daly's podcast and it's in his basement. He's got a bar in his basement. It's a, it's a bar for show. But they wanted to have it intimate, but they didn't have room for all the camera folks to be there. Plus, it's his house. Right. So what they decided to do is we're going to put PTZs with wide angle lenses on the different sides of the bar and just use those. And what we're going to do is we're going to put them in a housing that kind of. You can't tell that it's a camera at first glance. And if you go with cameras that have really good lenses, well, hopefully the background will be blurred a little bit. Right. Get that Bokeh. I only bring that up for some of the camera people. Here, if you were able to use cameras like that, it fades into the background and I'll show you a picture of that as well. Something else to consider is that if this is video, are you doing a live stream? Right? Anyone here? Are you looking to do a live stream or are you looking to do what they call live to tape? No, not sure. Thinking about it, live tape. Okay, so the reason for that, and that's again what we do at key code quite a bit, is we're going to bring in a guest, we're going to do a live recording of all the different camera angles. So we have if the show is an hour long wide shot on the host is an hour long wide shot on Guest, one's an hour long wide shot on remote Guest is an hour long. And then we bring that into our editor, whether it be Premiere or Avid or Final Cut or Resolve, and then say I want you to cut, right? I want you to do an auto cut. So every time someone stops talking, cut from that camera angle to who's talking next. If you've worked with Adobe, I think it's called, I think there's a plugin called autopod. I'm sorry, multi. Certainly. Yes, you would certainly use it as multicam. And that's again gives you a way to record live, then edit later, right? So that's a very popular thing to do. But if you are doing a live stream, that complicates things because now you have to have someone to throw the show in real time, record all those angles and then the software you use will save an edl, right? Remember, those of you who have edited are probably familiar with the concept of an edl, right? A cut list. So the real magic is I'm going to record the line cut, right? Usually clean line cut, but a line cut and then I have all my ISOs and then I can take that EDL and, and tell Premiere, Avid, Resolve, Final Cut to look at the original ISOs and then repopulate my timeline with those cuts. So now everything that was done live is now in post. So if someone missed a cue, if a lower third came in late, you can then go in and massage it, right? So that's something that you can do as well. Something else to consider is that if you are putting lights in the ceiling and you're now using video, is that lighting going to affect the other people in the room? Right? Because if you're lighting for a host, it's pretty easy, right? We've all learned three point lighting. But if you now enter or add someone else. You now have to make sure that the lighting on the host isn't affecting the lighting on the guest and vice versa. It also means, and if you've been to Columbia, you've probably Learned about the 180 rule with camera work, right? You don't, you don't want to break that. And the room that you're going to be in and where people are sitting kind of dictate where you can get the angle of the guest and the host. So when you add more people, the angles change where you put the lights and the cameras. So here's an example you'll see here. This is just a Canon PTZ, a 4K that's mounted and it kind of blends in a little bit, right? We also, on the left hand side here have another Canon ptz. And you can see that's on sticks, that's on a tripod and that's matte, and that's with another camera. That's your traditional shoulder camera, right? You can mix those interchangeably and then all of them can be routed to a joystick. Right. That could be controlled. That's the beauty of doing things over ip, over Ethernet is you can control everything via one cable instead of having to run a video cable and an ethernet cable and a power cable. The heart of any production environment is are you assembling a grab bag of free open source software and hoping it works, or is it, you know what, for all the time I'm going to spend trying to architect something that has no support and that changes from day to day basis, or do I get a system that just f and works and that's where we get into complete production systems. What it also means is that as your podcast grows and you need to find an operator, it's kind of easy to find someone because as soon as you mentioned the I need a Ross Carbonite operator, people know what that is. I need a Tricaster operator. I know what that is. Right. So there are a couple popular systems, right? How many here have heard the name newtek? Yeah, Right. Okay, so newtek acquired by vizrt. I think vizrt is on our roadshow and they have the Tricaster series. Tricaster series comes with a control surface as an option, but it runs on Windows and you can throw the show either with a mouse or with a control surface, or you can remote into it and control it via web browser, which is pretty cool. We also have something like Ross and Ultrix and the Carbonite, which is, which is kind of the industry standard, right? You Say, Ross, people know you mean business. There used to be an old joke in the industry, right? No one ever got fired for buying Sony. There also used to be a same one for Avid. No one got fired for buying Avid. Well, today that's different, right? But there, at one point it was no one got fired for buying Avid. Ross is kind of in that right now. If you buying, you're buying Ross. The shit's going to work. We also have a newcomer to the game, which is really disruptive because it's doing a lot of cool things. And that's Quick Link. Quick Link is following the same paradigm, right? Which is we're using a powerful computer with video in and out, and we're going to be able to control that via a control surface or via a web browser. So all of these systems have pros and cons, depending on what your sources are, what your feeds are, et cetera. That's kind of why key code's here. So we can kind of go through the checkbox of will this do what you want it to do? But these are some of the ones you want to look at if you are looking at kind of a unified operator experience. So often, especially if you're doing like an edutainment podcast, you want to share content with the host and with the guests, right? Maybe you're showing a PowerPoint, maybe you're showing a keynote, right? But you want to be able to show that to the audience as well as the host. And then what if you want to play video, right? I can't tell you how many podcasts you're like, I saw this viral video. Let me pull it up. Okay, great. That sounds like a great idea. But now you have to worry about how am I going to show video to the person in studio, how do I show it to the person who's remote? How do I make sure that they can see it and hear it? How can I make sure that people watching it in the studio aren't going to. It isn't going to get picked up on the microphones and cause a feedback loop, right? So there's all these things that have to go into creating a mix or a mix minus, because to get content to someone who's watching, but also hand other people who are in the studio. And a lot of people will try and do this with free web services or via an analog mixer. Riverside can somewhat do it, but often we find this is when you need that production switcher, because it has that built in logic to say, we'll send the video through this channel, audio through this channel, but we won't take the audio back. So that's something to really consider. And one of the things we do at KIE Code is we actually block diagram this. We draw this out and then sit down with you and say so when this happens, this happens. But this won't happen. And this is why we put this in here for that very reason. There is also the concept of recording is when you're recording video that takes up a lot of space, right? If you go with like an H264. Yes, I'm throwing out video codec names. I wouldn't be doing a presentation if I didn't do that. But if you're recording, let's say H264 and, and then you're editing it and then re encoding it and then you're uploading it to YouTube which already automatically does another transcode, you get quality loss. So you want to make sure that what you're recording in is a good stable codec, handles up over multiple generational passes. And you also want to make sure your system can handle it right. If you're using a 10 year old laptop and you're trying to record four angles of video at 4K, you're not going to have a good time. So that's one of the reasons why those all in one systems work really well because they're rated to record all that. You should also consider things like the post workflow, which is after I get those ISOs, after I get that audio, how am I going to edit that together in a way that as fast as possible. But also make sure that I'm shooting it in a way that it works for socials. Right. Because if you're shooting everything in 16, nine, that's great. But if you have a two up, all right, two people on screen, you now have to do what we call neighbors, right? Which is going nine by 16 where you have one on top and one on the bottom. You want to make sure that your framing is good enough that you can move that and still have time to put graphics in the top, still have time to put the captions or the subtitles on the bottom. So you want to frame your images to be able to make that translation between your traditional 16 by 9 to 9 by 16 or even one by one. So will your guests be in studio, remote or both? I touched on this a little bit earlier. Whenever you're bringing more guests in, that means tweaking the lights locally. That also means what audio is coming from them and what audio are you sending back? You also have to understand there's going to be a delay, right? You start the conversation. There's always going to be a second or two delay between when you finish asking a question and someone answers, right? I'm sure we've all seen CNN or Fox or MSNBC and they're talking to a remote correspondent and there's this really poignant question and there's a beat before they start answering. Okay, I get that. But if you're telling a story, if you're really getting into something that's really deep, that pause is just ah. But that also means that if you want that changed, you have to have your editor go in and tighten up all those cuts, right? So just something to be cognizant of. Depending on what type of podcast you're doing, can you handle those pauses or do we have to go in and edit that later? We also find that when you're dealing with, let's say, less technical folks, right? Maybe C suite people who are used to zoom and teams. Those are horrible. Zoom in teams are horrible. I hate them with every fiber of my being because they're the lowest common denominator. You don't get constant frame rate, you don't get color fidelity, you don't get sync audio and video. It's not good. So people start using things like Riverside or maybe they're using some NDI tools, right? They're using tools that will get you that lower latency, that'll give you that full screen 4K video, not just a 720 version. So I encourage you, if you're looking at third party tools, look into Riverside. And then there's another one called hey, Matt just walked out. I think it's called Video Video Ninja. If I'm not sake, am I not mistaken? Video, that's another really good one to look into and I think it may be free. So I check that that out as well. What I would also recommend, as I'm sure all of us have old hardware lying around. An old laptop, an old desktop. Those are great when you're dealing with Microsoft Word, Excel, maybe some web browsing, maybe some YouTube. But they're not great when they have to do multi, when they're orchestrating multimedia sources. So if you're trying to record four or five streams of video, four or five streams of audio and trying to throw the show on the fly, you're going to get dropped frames going to happen. You can't get around it. So I would highly recommend that any computer you're looking to use for these production uses is that we talk to the manufacturer and we say, okay, vizrt you say that we can run Tricaster and record X amount of streams on this type of machine. Can you guarantee me that I can get 3 or 4 streams at 1080p30 and do Dante for audio over IP? Can a system handle that? And they'll tell you that's why they build these all in one systems. They can say no or yes, you can do this, but you can't do 4K. It's gotta be HD. So I highly recommend that before you start pulling a trigger on this computer, what they call ots off the shelf hardware, that we contact the manufacturers and make sure that they sanction the device you're looking to use for this. What I'm also recommending is that we take a good hard look at how are you getting video from the cameras to the video switcher or recorder. Now, traditionally it's been sdi, right? Single SDI cable. It's got that nice satisfying click at the end, right, that you pull up. The cable won't pull out. Hdmi, it's expensive and it's what we call a friction connector. Because the only thing that holds it into the HDMI jack is friction. All it takes is someone to move the computer a different way or jerk the camera sideways. The HDMI pops out. So we. And also cables are expensive to run, especially when you start getting into some of the higher frame rates. So we're a big fan of using SDI or the new sexy is ip. And if any of you are nerds like I am, will you normally use the acronym ST2110? Yeah. No. You don't really talk about that parties, do you? 2110. Maybe the parties I attend. But 2110 is the SMPTE standard for video over IP. Any new broadcast facilities that are being built are going 2110 because it means you can route video over ethernet, a single ethernet cable. So instead of having dedicated SDI for every camera in every camera out, every TV in, every TV out, every switcher in, every switcher out, we now have one ethernet cable. And it requires a substantial infrastructure to do it. It's not the cheapest thing in the world, but it totally future proofs you. How many of you saw all the announcements from blackmagic? For example, at a B, there was barely a feature release that didn't say 2110. Because camera manufacturers realize SDI is going away. SDI is legacy. We need to start doing video over IP. And because we have video over IP and because I talked about POE earlier with lights over Ethernet and dante, which does audio over Ethernet, we now have a unified connection system through an audio and video in control. So instead of running an SDI line for video and running an ethernet cable for your network connection, and running an Ethernet connection for power over Ethernet to run lights and XLR for the DANTE system, and then a matrix for all of those, you have one network, Right? Still gotta be architected, right? Doing it on your wireless router at home that you got free from your cable company, that's not going to cut it, but it does give you a unified way of controlling everything without running a ton of different cables. Any questions so far? No. Staying awake. Okay, great. This is where people usually start. The first start is, I want to have a podcast. I wonder what mic I should get. And I get that, right? It's kind of like planning for a meal. And you're like, oh, what do I want for dessert? Okay, I get that. But you probably want to talk about the main course, right? What are you having? And so often this comes in much earlier on than it should be. But if we are looking at microphones, there's a couple ways to go about this. I'm sure all of you have seen booms and lavs, right? And we're squarely kind of in the middle on the fence. There is. You usually don't need a boom, right? The boom is so you. Or an arm is so the microphone can be put in a different direction than being on a stand, right? Because if the mic is on a stand right in front of you, if you ever look at that on camera, your chin is always covered, right? Unless the stand is very low. And if you turn your head that way or that way, you're then off access. Right? Aesthetically, it just doesn't look good. You have the sitting in front of you. So a lot of people will go with boom arms that attach to the table and then you can adjust that. But. And we had this happen at our podcast not too long ago. We had talent come in. She was not a on camera person, right? And when you do stuff on camera, you kind of learn some of the things you do. Like, you don't move around like that. You don't push your chair back, right? You stay focused on the mic. And because this person kept moving around, audio was all over the place. And, you know, there's only so many cues you can give. Like, right, just don't get that on camera, but just get closer and they don't pick up on the cues. And there's no way kind of around that. I think there is the aesthetic, right? You see someone talking into a mic on a boom and you're like, ah, podcast, right? It's a dead giveaway. So I think there's some aesthetics to it, right. That also goes with headphones. Can anyone tell me why you use headphones in a podcast? They'll talk over one another, but you don't need headphones for that. If someone. If you're both in the same studio, I can see you talking, right? We're talking back and forth. You know what, you know what they're normally used for? If it's not for someone in the. A remote, somebody's remote or someone in the production room. It's so people understand when they move off mic, oh, I gotta get back. Because they hear it in their cans. Oh, quack crap. The volume's now decreased. I gotta get back on there. You really don't need cans, right? If you have people who are remote, you have someone talking in your ear. I get it. But a lot of times it's just aesthetics. And quite frankly, I've never been a fan of them. I would rather have someone sit there and we be as unencumbered as possible with a wireless lav, right? With some good noise cancellation. And hopefully you're talking with someone in that room and I'll show you pictures of that. We also want to make sure that when you're recording your individual channels that you are recording ISOs, right? Isolated recordings. If you say, well, you know what, I'm just going to throw one mic in there and record everything. Even with AI, that can get really hairy because you get people who talk on top of one another, which is very hard to split out. You have to then EQ1 voice over another. So eqing one may not work with the other. So having isolation is very important. And you also want to make sure that whatever mic you use has a pickup pattern that is more focused, right? You can get omnidirectional microphones that pick up everything. You don't want that. You want to pick up the one person who's talking into that mic. So then when you edit that together, you don't have bleed over. So here are some options, right? So on the left hand side we, we have the wired headphones. Again, not a fan of it. We have what we normally spec in. Sure. Is just one variant. You do a quick search on Amazon, you're going to find a lot of different versions. But this I love because it attaches to the table, and it can swivel360, right? So if you're leaning forward, you can push it forward. You want to lean back, you can pull it back. And it also has the adjustable head. So if you want it to talk right here, you can do that. You can do what makes every boom operator cringe. And you can certainly tilt it down here and point it up. Right. You can still do that, but it gives you flexibility to change the composition of the shot with what works with the talent. We also have things like the pop filter for plosives. I know when I talk, I tend to pop very bad. So this works really well. And then we have shock mounts. If you tend to put things on a boom arm, and then you move that, that can cause vibrations. And then on the microphone, you get that recording. So a lot of times we'll put shock mounts on here. So if you bump the arm or you move it, you don't get that to translate on the mic as much. And those up there are the ones I would avoid. Unless you're really tall. If you're really tall, that might work. But on a standard table, I'm 5 11. If I sit down on a chair and I put that in front of me, that mic is right here. So that shot will always have a microphone covering my chin and the bottom of my face. I think that ruins the message of connecting with your audience. Here's a good example. Has anyone seen this show off camera with Sam Jones? It's been off the air for a while, but Sam Jones knows everyone in Hollywood, and he just had a show where he sits. You know, it's kind of like between two ferns, but not funny. Right? And what you can see is they don't have. They have. They have no booms. This is all lava. You can see camera angles are set up great. You get the wide, you get the medium shot here, and it's very personable. She doesn't have to worry about moving the mic. She can just talk normally because just a lavalier. So don't overlook using lavaliers to record things, especially if you're doing this in post, because you can always add a little bit more boom. You can always add a little bit more body to that to try and get closer to what a boom sounds like. And lastly, what's your growth plan? So I mentioned earlier, we have what I like to call corner engineering. I don't want to throw any company under the bus, but there are plenty of companies out There that specialize in point products. Here's a switcher for $500. Okay, that's great. But what if your show gets a little bit bigger and now you need more camera sources? Well, you're kind of screwed. That has to then get tossed out or sold online, right? This doesn't do enough. This switcher doesn't do enough transitions. This doesn't. This won't do 4k. It only does HD. So keep in mind that you want to get gear you can grow with and that goes in with your, with your growth plan. You don't want to get gear that engineers you into a corner. I'd also argue that if you're recording just audio, that's going to trample on some of your marketing abilities. Right? I don't know about you, but when I'm scrolling through Instagram, I I'm looking for faces, I'm looking for something I connect with. And if you're doing just audio, what's it going to be? A static image with voiceover or it's going to be some spectrum analyzer effect. Right. With a title with subtitles at the bottom. Those don't connect with me. So I'd argue that doing just audio is going to cut into the different ways that you can market this. And I already mentioned repurposing the gear down the road. Something else to bring up is that, and we see this with video content, not just podcasts is how many times working on a product has a topic come up that someone may say, you know, we Talked about this two weeks ago. Crap. Was that at 10 minutes in or was it 20 minutes in? Who was the guest going back and trying to find those older moments. Right. So having a media asset management system. Yay. More acronyms. We call it a mam Media Asset Management. But having a MAM that is transcribing everything you've done so you can then search in it to find that right moment. Saves you so much time. How about you do an hour long show? What parts can I pull to then put on social media? Well, if I have a asset management system, I can search for those moments. Hell, I can take the transcript enough lord to chatgpt or Claude and say give me the top 10 moments, it will do it for you. You can upload to Opus Clip and it'll do the same thing. So having a way to transcribe things and then search it later and then find that point in the media, very important. So I can't stress asset management enough when it brings in these AI features So I thought I'd give you some numbers. This is where you take out your phone. This is where you then send me an email and you say, oh, this is different or I don't like this price or I don't like sure mics. Okay, so what we've decided to do is we've put together a few basic kind of bundles just to get you some idea of what things may cost. Right? I don't expect you to go out and then use this as a shopping list, but I expect you to take a look at these and kind of see what the ballpark pricing may be. Right? So we have one which is audio only. Remember I mentioned that audio is pretty easy to do and that's because there's less gear, less things you have to concern yourself with. So an auto only package, pretty easy. Couple microphones, a mixer, couple cans, couple headphones, and then some basic cables and accessories. No fluff, just the stuff you need. And then we get to basic camera packages that have the audio bundle because video without audio is being on an airplane, right? Watching video or surveillance, right? So we get the audio bundle, we get the POV camera of the host, so, and then basic lighting, right? Basic three point lighting setup, hair light key and fill, a switcher that can stream. And then all the interconnect cables. And then we get into the full PTZ studios, right? Three PTZ cameras, studio lighting, intercom acoustics. And here are some parts that we might recommend. But one of the things we do at Chode Media is we want options for our clients. So we don't standardize in only one mic manufacturer or only one switcher. We also have different options. So here are a couple basic options, right? We've got some dynamic mics. The Shure SM7B is great. Has anyone here worked with an Shure SM58? Right? You could build a house with those things, right? These things are workhorses. The SM7B, the rode podcast stuff is fantastic for the cost. We also have Rode stands. Shure and Sennheiser also have closed back monitoring headphones, which are pretty good. And then of course we have Dolby tools for noise reduction and loudness. A lot of times you can do some of that in Premiere or in Resolve, but Dolby does it better than just about anyone else. Then we start getting into basic cameras and that could be anything from a GoPro. Now GoPros normally record on the camera, so you then have to worry about syncing, right, Pulling that out later and syncing it in post production or Finding a way to sync the audio with another audio source, that can be kind of tricky. But there are inexpensive box cameras that we can use. We also have basic lighting. I think the ICANN line is just fantastic. It's controlled via a webpage. We spec that in a lot. It's very easy to control via dmx. We also have HDMI runs or ndi. NDI is video over ip. That's a really good way to go when you don't want to run all that HDMI cable. And then lastly we then get into full cameras and those cameras are PTZ cameras. Bird Dog has fantastic cameras. They'll be with us on the road here. PTZ Optics is kind of a newcomer to the game as opposed to kind of the Panasonics and Sony and Canon who've been a long time. They make great cameras, but that's another option and you'll see that we have poe. I mentioned it earlier, Power over Ethernet. It's a term you should learn. They make the nomenclature really easy with POE and POE and poe. So it can get a little confusing. But I recommend that should be an acronym you should add to your knowledge base. We also look at things like a full switcher. So we mentioned VIS rt, formerly newtek, which do ndi. And they can also roll in lower thirds, have all have music, have pre programmed graphics and also their set and furniture. One of the things I'm seeing quite a bit, and we mentioned this earlier, is we're going to build a podcast studio, then have you rent it out. So if that's the case, then you need to have this automation so someone can walk in and hit a button that says two guests and everything snaps into place, ready to go. So before I wrap up, I've monologued for a long time. What questions might you have or what problems you already have that maybe I can help solve? Yes, sir. What's my favorite podcast? That's a really good question. That's a good one. About the only one I'll put on. But I listen to it more as background. Would probably be the WAN show, right? Linus? Tech tips Because I live tech, I don't want to hear an audiobook on horror or mystery or it just. I listen to them as supplemental learning information. So I usually listen to that. But other than that I don't listen to a lot of podcasts and that's just my generation. I got to chalk it up to that. Yes. [00:50:23] Speaker C: Just for podcasts and stuff in general. This is all for more of like a setup studio. Do you have more suggestions maybe for if there's a situation where it's a more mobile podcast studio, I guess, like are there better equipment or other things that you would suggest that can help improve a system like that? [00:50:39] Speaker A: So let me make sure I understand this. A couple ways to go about doing that. We have one large YouTuber, 60 million subs and they have a big, big podcast area with two different areas in the studio to two different shows and they want to use a rig for both. So what we've done is we've put it in a rolling rack with the switchers, with the gear, and then on the back or then in the cart is the switcher and then on the back are the outputs. And then all around the room we have panels so someone can just patch in an ethernet cable or SDI cables and that can be routed to anywhere else. A lot of high schools will do things like that when they're going out and covering the football game, right? Everything's got to be in a mobile rack. Ultrix or I'm sorry, Ross just released a system that can do a ton of ins and outs and then ration out those for whatever the job is doing. So I'm not sure if that's what you're asking exactly, partially. Please explain to me. So I know what you're looking at. [00:51:36] Speaker C: It's just a lot of setup where we're Sega, the same studio, but in many different cities, I guess. So that's where like we wouldn't be able to build the internal system like what you're describing. I guess. So I'm just trying to look for like, ways, equipment and other advice. [00:51:50] Speaker A: I guess the term I would recommend looking into is flypak. Flypak is what a lot of broadcasters will do when they say, look, we're going to go on site and they're not and they can't take a truck. They're going to say, look, we're going to build a self contained system that has a standard amount of ins and outs, sdi, ip, whatever, but all the processing is contained within this fly pack. The fly pack then has spools of cable in the background in the back. So when you unload it, you're lifting up the back, you're then pulling your SDI line and plugging it in or ethernet. So self contained is probably the way to go. And often the fly packs also have ways to put large format monitors in the back and you hit a button and it pops up. This is kind of an older example, but I'd recommend You go to our website or Google Super Sphere and Key Code Media. We actually built the world's first 4K360VR streaming fly pack that was used exclusively for Facebook meta immersive shows. And that was taken all around the world in these two massive fly packs. And they would then roll those out and they could replicate their setup no matter where they went. You're very welcome. Yes, sir. So a brand new podcast marketing. How would you do it? Brand new podcast for marketing. Well, not about marketing. How would you market that podcast? Okay, it's very interesting because I'm approaching this from a zeros one perspective. First off, is the podcast hyper niche? Because if it's hyper niche, then you can find the subreddits that you post on about this. Right. And if any of you have spent any time on Reddit subs, you know that there could be some cesspools, but as long as you contribute to the community, you're okay. I would focus on how niche this is. And if it's niche, then you go to where those people are. If it's not niche, then I would recommend partnering with other podcasts who already have that following and see if there's some way you can partner to piggyback on what they're doing. Right, so some of this may be, look, we want to interview a person who's already has a podcast or has been on other podcasts where there were tens of millions of subscribers. I want you to be on my podcast, but I need you to help promote it. Right. We do that with key code quite a bit. We say, look, we won't charge you as much if you go on social media and tell people to come out. That's why a lot of you are here today. It may not be just from Kikode Media's marketing. It's because we've partnered with other people to help push that out. Also, there has to be the. I am going to find a strategy to post on on different social media platforms at certain times of the day that play into the algorithm of that social media platform. So you get a graphic designer, you get someone who understands the trends and then what, what daily trends or what's topical in the news. How can I tie in what I'm pushing out there to into the current zeitgeist? Then how would you create a profit line on this? The profit is usually from sponsorship. Right. And that can become in the form of sponsored advertising. Right. There's always a break where you insert that. That advertisement that can either be a live Read, be pre produced. You could also do standalone commercials and whatnot for those folks. You can also rent that podcast area. You know, if there was a secret recipe to earn money making a podcast, I think we'd all know about it by now. Right. So a lot of this is going to be hit and miss to see what, what works for your specific demographic. Yes, sir. [00:55:37] Speaker B: Thank you. Marcus Beeson. I'm a student here at Columbia, but freelance camera operator. So I have a two parter for you. [00:55:45] Speaker A: Sure. [00:55:46] Speaker B: What would you say are the required necessities, Just the required basic necessities for building a quality studio to effectively produce your story? Because at the end of the day, we're trying to share our story. That's what all the equipment's about. That's what we want to network. We're trying to get the story. So, you know, we have the mic, the lighting, the cameras, but the kinds, you know, everybody wants the best. The iPhone 17 comes out when you already have the iPhone 16. It's operable, but you don't need the iPhone 17. So what would be for as far as equipment, the underlying requirements for just that studio setup? [00:56:25] Speaker A: I respect what you're trying to ask, but what you're looking for is a. I need a shopping list so I can go, I'll buy all the cool tools. Right? Right. I'm not here to do that. Right. Keycode Media is here to talk to you and understand what you need and then make guided recommendations. But, but if there's 20 companies making camera manufacturer, 20 different camera manufacturers making different cameras, there's a reason they're making those cameras. So that means one camera for one person isn't going to work for the other. So if I recommend to you, you should go with the bird dog P4K, there's a reason I'm recommending that because their infrastructure already has the AV over IP or also they already have a 3G infrastructure. So SDI works coming in and saying, oh, it's Greenfield, you can do whatever we want. You're going to be inundated with choices. So it's very difficult to give you a laundry list. That's kind of why I recommend taking out your camera and taking those pictures of those bundles. And did you see in those bundles it said sure, road or similar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. For that very reason. Because there isn't a one size fits. All. Right. [00:57:26] Speaker B: So I'm saying as far as you know, I'm starting small. Right. And I know I can't afford a [00:57:32] Speaker A: tricaster like, but you can Because Tricaster is a software only version where you don't have to buy hardware. That's true. They also have a rental model. Right. So that changes the whole discussion altogether. Capex or Opex. Right. So that's why you kind of come to us, because you didn't look like you knew that. Right? That's what we can do. We can also say, you know what, if you have enough manufacturers, and I'm not going to tell you what YouTubers we do this with, but there are certain YouTubers that we can go to and say, you guys are used to doing live reads. If you do a live read on this switching product, that manufacturer then says, we can give you a discount. Right. So there's those marketing levers you can pull as well to get that at advantageous pricing. Okay, there's also those things. [00:58:16] Speaker B: So the second part, I guess now as the producer, what knowledge should be, which, what should I have? What knowledge should I have as far as the language to run that successful studio? So like to knowing all the equipment, to knowing the language, the, you know, the, the types of cable cords and you know what, what goes into the ethernet cables and all that? So what, what's the basic level of language I should know as the producer to run a successful studio? [00:58:40] Speaker A: It's a great question. What I recommend is, and again, I don't know how much time you have, but the way I learned the ropes was working for, working for an AV company who maybe went out and did live events, maybe did corporate events. And then you work with someone who explains to you SDI, HDMI this, 3G versus 6G versus 12G, POE versus this and learning the verbiage from that, just entry level. And I understand that's not really financially attainable for some people, I get that. But there are online courses that can teach you the basics of AV and broadcast. And what we're seeing is that the Venn diagram of broadcast and AV over the years are getting closer and closer. So folks who now know AV have to learn some of those broadcast terms. Right? And there's plenty of broadcasters who, and I'll probably get folks who are angry at me for this, but engineering and broadcast has been done for decades, for a hundred years. And it's been a kind of elder statesman type environment. And a lot of those folks are going to retire. A lot of folks are seeing that, you know what, I'm only going to work for another five or six years. I don't want to learn ip. I know what I know and it works great and hey, I'm not here to cast dispersion on any of that. But there's also the broadcasters who say, well, we need to learn. So you come armed with the information you've learned about social media and all the things that go around the broadcast portion, and then you influence them, they influence you, and you learn as you move up the ranks. So I'd look for AV companies for live events and try to work with them. Cool. Yes. [01:00:28] Speaker D: What considerations do you think in addition to what you've talked about need to be taken into account for, say, like, you're having a live event that your client wants to turn into a podcast? If I'm producing a speaker series and that is going to have a component of people in the room recorded and put out later, you know, as part of a podcast program, this may not [01:00:56] Speaker A: be applicable to you, but don't rely on people who aren't, who don't have experience doing this. I see what happens a ton of times is we're going to start doing a podcast. Do you like podcasts? Okay, well, you're going to be producer and you like doing podcasts. You're going to do graphics. And the graphics person's like, I do marketing. I'm not familiar with broadcast. And so what you find is that people will take on these jobs and it may be easy to learn the software, but it's hard to get good. And when you're doing live production, you don't have a lot of time to think. It's instinct. Ready one, Go one. Ready two. Go two. Roll graphics. The person who is doing this has to be ready to just execute on instinct. And when you're trying to turn a live event into a podcast, if you're not, if you don't have people who are capable, it's going to be a shit show in post. So that would be my big thing. Also not having a scripted rundown, right. Knowing that at this point this person's going to speak, you roll in these graphics, you do this and this. And having dedicated people, if you're having someone who has to throw the show and rolling graphics and mix the audio and check the health of health of live stream and to make sure everything's plugged in right. And you've got the good up, down, that's too much. So there has to be dedicated talent, dedicated production talent that has experience or at least wants to. Right. And then what I also recommend, and if anyone here does post, whenever you work on a project, it's a really a shitty time to test the Workflow when the shoot's done, right, you want to test ahead of time to work out any kinks. So rent the gear early. Ask to get it over a weekend. Right. A lot of rental facilities will say, look, we'll rent, we'll rent it for you day to time. But if you get a week, it only costs, you know, five days, right? So you rent it on a Friday, you get it, you pay one day, but you get to rent it for three days. Look for, look for ways to rent the gear and maybe have someone train you on that before going out and doing it. But that's a number one thing and we've even run. Run into that at Key Code Media where someone is sick. We have to bring in someone in new and they're not, it's not like they don't. They're not trying. It's just they don't have that show experience to be fast. Any other questions? Yes, sir. [01:03:06] Speaker C: Is Keycode mostly ad installations and broadcasts, [01:03:10] Speaker A: or do you want. Great question. Keycode Media is an integrator, reseller, consultant and support mechanism. And that's for broadcast, AV and post. So we're selling the gear. We do have an educational division. So we sell you the car and now we're going to train you how to drive. But we're not a live event rental facility. Right, that's actually, I started my career doing that while I was here at Columbia, but that's not something Keycode Media does. We actually may sell the gear to the rental facility that you end up renting from, but we don't do the live event. We'd provide the gear to them. Yes, but again, we wouldn't be staffing the show or anything like that. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for your time. My name is Michael Kammes. If I can do anything else, please reach out. I'll be happy to talk nerd with you. Big round of applause for Michael Kammes. Thank you so much. Thanks for watching Broadcast to Post. Don't forget to follow KIE Code Media on social and contact us about your [email protected].