Podbang Post Mortum

[paraka]

Wow, this was quite an experience for me. So far, the only podfics I've posted have been shorter ones. I've started large podfics, but I never seem to actually finished them.

As diurnal_lee said, as soon as I read that there was going to be a podfic exchange I went running downstairs yelling about how we had to sign up. kronos999 was taking a shower when we found out. But diurnal_lee and I waited, a giant ball of squee, and bombarded her. kronos999 doesn't even listen to podfic, but in our household, squee wins the day, so she agreed to sign up for a group one with us.

I learned a lot while working on this project (and even more reading other people's posts about their experiences). Probably the biggest things I got out of this, personally, were:

-kronos999 helped get me over my fear of Audacity (for all of my podfics I'd record in Audacity, export as a .wav file and then would edit them in Nero). She's not someone to do things by half measures, so even though she doesn't really care about podfic, once she signed up with us, she went out and read a bunch of tutorials and learned how to do fancy stuff, like canceling out background noise and showed me how.

-I kind of hate editing (that is not a new revelation), and I discovered that it's more worth my time to do a good recording then to try and fix things in editing. This lead me to reading everything at least twice. Once cold, without recording, and then another time while I record. Sometimes I'd have to redo parts when I went through to edit or would scrap an entire recording if something was off.

-Because we decided to break our group fic down into POV parts, I ended up having small sections per file instead of big long files, like I had previously done. This worked amazingly well for me. I found it a lot easier to edit like this. I would record a section, then right away I'd edit it.

This was helpful in a couple ways. First of all, it meant that my mistakes were still fresh in my mind, which sped up the editing. It also made the editing seem like less of a chore since I only had to do a small chunk at a time, and I wouldn't allow myself to record further until I had edited what I had already read, so there was the motivation of being able to read soon that got me working on it. It was also easier on my voice since I'd only record small sections at a time (generally between 5-15 minutes) and then I'd have a break.


Some things I stumbled around with:

-I have asthma, and the one time of the year that it always flares up, no matter what, is this time of the year. Also, if I get sick my asthma always acts up, turning even the smallest of colds into something that lingers for weeks. So of course, I caught a cold making me lose about a month of recording time.

-I should think really hard before signing up to read in certain fandoms/genres. It's all well and good to say that I read gen, and I do! I really do! However, I'm a helpless romantic, and want most of what I read to include romance, otherwise I find it kind of boring. All the gen fics that I've read and love are short. I cannot think of a single long gen fanfic that I've read. Ever. So searching out a long, gen fanfic was really, really hard. And in the end, I ended up getting recipients switched so I could use the long Torchwood fic that I had actually finished recording before podbang (and was able to use my month down with asthma to edit it).

-I am a hopeless procrastinator! The only reason why I got my parts done in time for the group to meet the deadline was because I used up my last two vacation days that last week in November to spend all day podfic'ing. :P

Still, I had a ton of fun doing this, and can't wait for next year's and to get podfic'ing in the meantime. I've already started a new project and diurnal_lee and I spent a couple hours talking about future projects we could do together. Yay! for podfic!

Comments

[cybel]

Yay for you guys!

[revolutionaryjo.livejournal.com]

And I'm still thrilled with the Torchwood fic! So sorry to hear about your unfortunately timed cold. It seems to have worked in my favor though. :)

Thank you, thank you, thank you, once again!

[paraka]

Well, the cold worked to your benifit, since it meant I finished your podfic :)

I'm really glad you liked it!