Unit 5 | Audio & Podcasting

Introduction

Unit 5 shifts from video to audio. Planning a podcast episode, writing a natural-sounding interview script, recording clean audio, and mixing it with Premiere’s Essential Sound tools. Building toward a fully delivered, branded podcast episode.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:

Define a podcast episode’s driving question and assign talent/production roles
Write a bullet-point script that avoids sounding read or robotic
Record clean voice-over audio with correct levels, avoiding clipping
Mix dialogue and music using Essential Sound’s ducking, leveling, and repair tools

Calendar of Events for This Unit

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
11/30	12/1	12/2	12/3	12/4
S \| 4	S \| 4	F \| 5.1	F \| 5.1	F \| 5.2
11/30: Grade Correction Deadline (MP1)
12/7	12/8	12/9	12/10	12/11
F \| 5.2	F \| 5.3	F \| 5.3	F \| 5.4	F \| 5.4
12/10: Interim grades open in Infinite Campus (MP2)
12/14	12/15	12/16	12/17	12/18
S \| 5	S \| 5	S \| 5	S \| 5	S \| 5
12/16: Interim grades due, close 4:00pm (MP2); 12/18: Interim Reports Available
1/4	1/5	1/6	1/7	1/8
S \| 5	F \| 6.1	F \| 6.1	F \| 6.2	F \| 6.2

Lessons

5.1 – Podcast Production Planner. Guided notes: driving question, talent & roles
5.2 – Podcast Script. Guided notes: the Two-Way format, bullet-point scripting
5.3 – Recording & Voice-Over. Guided notes: room tone, levels, avoiding clipping
5.4 – Essential Sound: Mixing & Repair. Guided notes: Auto Ducking, Loudness Auto-Match, Repair
S5 – Podcast Episode. Summative project

Unit Vocabulary

Driving Question: The specific mystery or conflict your podcast episode is trying to explore. Narrower than a general topic.
The “Not” List: Related topics you deliberately exclude to keep an episode focused and within its time limit.
Interviewer (Host): The talent role asking questions and guiding the conversation’s arc.
Guest: The talent role serving as the subject matter expert being interviewed.
Floor Director: Manages the recording set, provides timing cues, and coordinates the crew.
Video Engineer: Operates the live switcher to change camera angles and graphics during a live or live-to-tape recording.
Audio Engineer: Monitors volume levels and triggers music or sound effects during recording.
Two-Way: A radio term for a conversation between a host and a reporter or guest. The goal is to sound natural while still delivering accurate, prepared information.
Bullet-Point Scripting: Writing key facts, dates, and names as bullet points rather than full sentences, so the delivery stays natural instead of sounding read.
Attribution: Telling the listener out loud where information came from (“According to a study from…”). Required any time you share researched facts, not just opinion.
The Arc: The logical order of questions that makes an interview feel like a story, not a random list of questions.
Hot Mic: Treating every microphone as if it’s live the moment you sit down. Sounding natural starts before recording officially begins.
Live-to-Tape: Recording a full take start to finish without stopping, even though editing is possible afterward. Keeps energy and conversation authentic.
Room Tone: The ambient sound of a specific recording space with no one talking. Recorded and kept for use when smoothing edits later.
Natural/Ambient Sound: The real sound of an environment, recorded to add realism and context to a scene or episode.
Foley: Sound effects recreated and recorded in post-production to match on-screen or implied action.
Levels: How loud or quiet an audio signal is, monitored while recording and during a mix.
Gain: The setting that controls how much a microphone’s signal is amplified before recording.
Clipping: Audio distortion that happens when a signal’s levels are pushed too high. A hard, harsh digital error, not a stylistic effect.
Sampling Rate: How many times per second an analog audio signal is measured/digitized. Higher sampling rates capture more detail.
Voice-Over Record: Recording a narration or host track separately from other audio, to be mixed in later.
Scratch Track: A rough, temporary audio recording used as a placeholder during editing before a final version is recorded.
Enhance Speech: An Essential Sound tool that automatically improves dialogue clarity and reduces background noise from field or podcast recordings.
Loudness Auto-Match: A tool that automatically levels out inconsistent volume across multiple clips to a consistent loudness target.
Auto Ducking: Automatically lowering music volume whenever dialogue is present, then raising it back up when dialogue stops.
Repair: Essential Sound tools that remove specific audio problems, hum, reverb, background noise, without a full manual EQ pass.
Remix: Automatically adjusting a music track’s length and arrangement to fit a target duration.
Conforming: Matching an audio file’s format/sample rate to your project’s settings so it plays back correctly.
Fade Handles: The draggable corner controls on an audio clip that create a fade in or fade out.
Mono / Stereo Tracks: Mono audio is a single channel; stereo audio is two channels (left/right) that together create a sense of space.
Syncing Audio: Aligning a separately recorded audio track to match its corresponding video footage exactly.