We’re still finding ways to improve our remote broadcasting, to make it more efficient and easier so we can get more people set up to do it. Over the past few weeks we’ve been looking at doing programmes and interviews through video calls, and how we need to edit these to a broadcast-ready standard once recorded. Here’s what we’ve come up with:
Editing a video call recording
The video call recording may not end up as an audio file that you, or your software would normally recognise. It will probably be an M4A file.
You really want to get to a stage where your editing software can just open it.
- Audacity – You will need to install FFmpeg which allows Audacity to import and export a much larger range of audio formats including M4A (AAC), AC3, AMR (narrow band) and WMA and also to import audio from most video files.
- Ocenaudio – opens them immediately.
- Cool Edit – won’t open them unless you convert them first.
If your editor can’t open them, then conversion to a format that it can handle (e.g. WAV, MP3, OGG) could be a solution. It is far better to do this on your computer than to send it to a website to convert for you. (There are many websites that offer online conversion, but there are many that add spyware, viruses, etc. It also takes time to upload and download files, when your computer can do it in seconds. Avoid!)
There are many software options for doing audio conversion, but at BCB we have been using Fre:ac.
We’ve got a whole host of remote broadcasting tips here
