Editors spend time re-trimming auto-clipped podcast segments

“That heads-up in the intro seems important alongside the timestamp. If I know where the story is and what else the episode covers, I'd be much less bothered by it only lasting five minutes. That feels different from listening to most of an episode wondering when the story I clicked for is finally coming. [re: Would you title an entire podcast episode around its best five minutes?]”

“I'd try editing the strongest five minutes before signing up to rescue the whole episode. If that little section works, maybe there's a shorter interview in there. If it's still a slog, that's useful to know before losing a weekend to it. And I'd tell the guest before they start telling people it's coming out. Being left waiting seems worse than a kind, clear no. [re: Withholding episode with guest]”

“When you compare caption tools for podcasts it's worth checking how much of the work each one still leaves you with. With Shorz AI you drop in a long episode and Clipping pulls out up to 8 clips with subtitles, then you can ask for changes in plain language. Biased because I help make it... it runs on Mac and Windows, and Auto Edit and Clipping are free for 4 videos a week with no watermark. shorz.ai [re: What are the best Submagic alternatives? Here are some I’m considering]”

“good point, and it’s the main reason I kept the episode id and the audio link the same when you re-cut. players see the same episode, so if you already downloaded it you keep that copy and your spot in it doesn’t move. where it can bite: if you’re streaming, or your player re-downloads after a re-cut, the timestamps shift by however much got added or removed. in practice I do all the cutting before I start listening, so I haven’t hit it much. but fair, I could warn when you change cuts on an epi”

“I can't for the life of me understand why people complain about a process that is fundamentally flawed from the start. Editing audio online is a recipe for frustration. Without local, real time access, it's never going to compare with editing in a real audio editor. [re: Descript is the absolute worst editing software. Except for all the others. Still nothing better for amateurs?]”

“I'm editing a 5-episode, audio-only series in Descript and going insane. Descript is just overflowing with bugs. I need to refresh the browser every few minutes because one thing or another stops working. The only problem is every other amateur editing platform seems worse? I stress amateur, because I am not an editor. I don't use Logic or Pro Tools or whatever else, I have no idea how to operate those rigs. Overall, Descript is *so close* to being great. It just feels as though they foc”

“I'd stop cutting clips for every episode this early. two weeks in, I'd rather spend that time making the next episode noticeably better. [re: What did you stop doing?]”

Bumping this bc pls

Make it small & fit it in naturally

“The system uses Claude to order the clips and it's built on frameworks to not give the payoff til the end. Starts with curiosity gap that plays in psychology, tells a story and then ends with the payoff to close the loop and trigger follows.”

“i'd test the 7 to 10 min cut with zero extra B-roll first, but give it a title/thumb that works without episode context. if CTR stays weak, more editing probably won't fix it.”

“The word-level timestamp transcript is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, that precision is usually what separates a clip that cuts mid-word from one that actually holds retention. If you ever want a faster way to get that clean transcript layer without building it yourself, riverside youtube transcript generator spits out word-level timestamped text you can feed straight into a pipeline like this. Disclaimer: I'm part of the Riverside team.”

“I want to listen to the Dutch hypnosis man but then I see these ai generated chapters and I go “I hate this fucking sucks why does this exist.” There is no reason for this people can just make their own chapters….”

“hooks matter way more than editing polish, sounds like you already found that out the hard way.”

“Exactly that caused massive memory leakage problems on two different MacBooks. Their support says it‘s an Adobe issue.”

“imo this is the right move, multitrack with hundreds of tiny cuts is just asking for trouble on long files”

“This comment below was really helpful. I'm so glad I found this because it's so frustrating when I'm editing. https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasting/s/u1h2f2pjPH”

“It’s been the #1 clipper for about 5 years now. It’s an amazing tool, but take the time to learn how to prompt for what you want for the best results”

“alexid95 has it right, and it is worth knowing why that works. These tools are scored on whether a segment stands on its own, so they reliably hand back the tidiest minute of the episode. Tidy and interesting are close to opposites in a clip. The moments you would pick yourself tend to start mid thought, right before a claim or a disagreement, and stop before the payoff fully lands, which looks like a defect to anything measuring completeness. If you do want to try something else: Klap picks not”

“For that many episodes, I'd definitely look for a flat-rate or batch transcription instead of paying per minute.”

“for 4,500 minutes, i'd compare cleanup time, not just price. run the same 90-minute episode through 2 options and time the name and speaker fixes because 5 extra minutes per episode can wipe out the cheaper rate.”

“Then the pain point worth building for is the one nobody in this thread named as a tool problem. Every auto-clip tool people keep trying does the trim well and the judgement badly, because it scores a transcript, and a transcript cannot know what surprised the room. The host knows, for about an hour after recording, and then it fades. The tool that wins captures that: a 30 second voice note or three timestamps at the end of the record, and then it does everything after, the in and out on silence”

“I guess it depends on how high your standards are on this point. I asked Claude Pro for a 30-60s promo/trailer clip splicing together top moments from a 5-episode miniseries, about 3 hours of audio in all, without much extra instructions. was pleasantly surprised that it was already 80% there as far as I was concerned (though I'm sure more knowledgeable folks could've done better manually, not sure I would've though without a LOT more time).”

“No, you aren't getting 5 decent clips out of an auto-pass because finding the spot is the hard part and the trimming isn't. Every tool listed here excels at the trim and sucks at the judgement, which is why you keep going back through the show yourself. What trims that manual pass though: Search transcripts for where one person starts a full claim, setup and claim/consequence, instead of searching keywords. Those are the scenes that make it out with legs after being yanked from context.”

“It's not actually "cutting", it's selection. trimming is effectively done by now. deciding on *which* 60s is worth watching and is worth putting online is the real hard one, and every single tool of this type is weakest precisely there. two things always help, no matter what you decide to use. ask for start/end times instead of a whole clip ready to put on line and choose amongst them yourself so you still make the judgment call but don't have to scrub. check where the cuts”

“So Kevin does not speak until three minutes in, closer to four with the ads. The wait you bought with 8000 pounds gets spent on twenty other stories: each of those 2 to 3 second clips is a hook for a different episode, so for 50 seconds the listener is being pulled somewhere else right when they want to stay put. If the reel is there for a first-time listener, it earns its place at the end, where it sends them to the next episode. If it is the sound of the show, it does that job at 15 seconds. W”

“Neither, honestly. I don't run a show and I don't cut for clients, I work on the tooling side of it. So I read transcripts a lot more than I listen, which is probably why your correction landed. Playing the twenty seconds wouldn't have occurred to me. Same for the guest laugh versus host laugh split, I'd have taken any reaction.”

“I think the framing is a little off, its not really "where do you cut" its "what's the minimum context needed for the payoff to land." sometimes thats one sentence, sometimes its 90 seconds. work backwards from the punchline and be ruthless about everything else”

“i'd test the headline on the worst face crop, not the cleanest frame. if 5 words survives that, i'd lock the cap there.”

“The shortlist saves the re-read, which is the part I would actually pay for. Where it and instinct split: the most quotable line on the page is usually the flattest on camera. The moments that clip for us tend to be unremarkable as text, a half sentence before a laugh, a pause where someone reconsiders, and they only read as clips once you watch the delivery. So I would treat the five it surfaces as an audition list to watch, not a ranking to trust. Does yours score off the transcript alone, or”

“what changed on the clips themselves then, completion rate? if that moved after the edit rule, i'd trust that way more than the episode views.”

“Worth correcting the first part, and that is on me for writing it loosely. Both numbers are the same metric. Four long form episodes, 842K views across them when we measured, 200K the median. Not clips, and not two separate claims. On causation you are right, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I cannot isolate it. Distribution, titles and thumbnails all moved inside the same window, so none of it is a clean experiment, and anyone pulling a single cause out of that is guessing. What I would”

“200K median long-form + 842K total clips are two different claims. with distribution, titles and thumbnails changing too, how are you isolating backwards cutting as causal?”

“Fair challenge. The average is carrying weight there, so here is the raw shape: 842K total across the period, on a show that had been doing 2-3K an episode. I do not have a median I would stand behind, so I am not going to invent one for you. And yes, a couple of clips carry most of that. That is normal and it is the part worth knowing. You are not lifting a floor, you are buying more chances at an outlier, so the thing to judge is how often one turns up, not the mean.”

To date I've just been relying on Apple to generate the transcripts. It was my experience that - up until fairly recently - they were posted pretty quickly. But I'm thinking I…

“This is such a real complaint. The AI clipping tools are genuinely bad at judgment calls. They optimize for stuff like pauses or volume spikes, not for what's actually the interesting or quotable moment. I've noticed the same thing testing a few of them, they'll cut a clip that's technically well formatted but completely misses the actual point of what was said. The caption issue is usually a separate problem too, most tools transcribe fine but don't know how to break lines f”

“do you mark those clean endings while recording, or only notice them once you're editing?”

“The amount of editing time that it will take to make this episode even salvageable is insane. WTF Happened? This would have been a few hours of editing. It is going to be dozens of hours to edit barely half of what was recorded. Imagine having amazing guests and having riverside FM fuck it all up. Up until this point, I have completely given them basic positive reviews after having a nightmare with Zencastr. Riverside has become the same disaster. I had three disasters with zencastr. I've ha”

“if the clean exit only exists after 40 seconds, i'd cut backwards from that line instead of forward from the hook.”

“Yes, this works and it is common. The thing that makes it feel fake is the energy mismatch: setup delivered at conversational level, payoff at laughing level, and the join sounds spliced. Cut on a breath, keep the room tone underneath continuous, and hold it to one jump. Two or more and people start feeling edited even if they cannot say why. On video a hard cut or a quick reframe hides the join better than a crossfade, which is the thing that really announces that something was moved.”

“i'd use a 3-second test: if the first sentence needs the episode title, skip it. the best clips create their own question before they answer it.”

“Clip hunting is weird because you're basically looking for moments that feel already clipped if that makes sense, like they have their own little beginning and end built in. The mid-sentence mind change is great example, also when someone accidentally reveals something they weren't planning to say. I scan transcript after and highlight anything that makes me react again in same way.”

“i send a 15 minute chunk, one that has some background noise, a host that rambles, and the kind of awkward pauses where you can hear the person thinking. if the editor just cuts the silence that's not enough, i want to see if they actually tighten the pacing without making it sound robotic the one time i got burned i paid half upfront and the guy basically just ran it through a noise reduction preset and called it done. since then i always ask for a 5 minute sample first, even if i have to p”

“You named the real cost. What changed my own loop was making the choice reviewable instead of automatic: transcribe the episode with word timestamps, then have a model propose candidate moments and return, for each one, the hook line and a short reason it works, scored separately for what happens and for how it feels to watch. You then review a short list with one sentence each instead of scrubbing an hour, and the per-platform angle becomes a second pass on the ones you kept rather than a separ”

“if it's emm, uhhs, and restarting or refarming, i'd cut it. and i dont consider it to be misrepresenting them really. you're trying to provide something worth hearing not a PR piece for the guest. you're not changing or twisting their words. if it was an actual stutter or lisp or verbal tic or tourette spasm and you cut it out, that's editing out part of them as a person.”

“I do all this myself. Right now we don't really do the clipping bit, but I take probably 3 hours to cut just dead air and find audio clips for my intro. It's definitely my most time consuming portion. I think I wouldn't mind outsourcing it, I just have a hard time letting any sort of creative control or other kind of control go.”

“For me the soundbite clipping is the part that eats the most time, and it's mostly because I used to treat the AI-suggested cut as finished. Tools are decent at finding candidate moments, but a human still has to pick the actual hook and check the 9:16 crop so the talking head isn't letterboxed and any on-screen visual doesn't shear. Order that saved me the most hours: level-match first (a single loudness pass on separate tracks beats hand-riding faders), then cut dead air/ums, then”

“if you plan for questions that will be clip worthy, it reduces the editing time down because you don't have to go hunting for the good parts, you already know where they are because you planned for it. e.g similar to like how Ludwig breaks 1 stream into sections.”

Exactly my experience with can descript.

“Your diagnosis is the important part: the tools optimise the step that was never the bottleneck. Cutting was never the expensive thing. Deciding was. Four things that actually move the number: Move selection into the recording. When something lands, say "clip that" out loud or clap. It costs you nothing in the moment and it deletes the single biggest time sink, because you're no longer searching an hour of audio for something you already knew was good when it happened. Work from th”

“I had a similar moment where I realized the editing wasn't the problem, it was the decision fatigue. like spending 20 minutes trying to figure out if a 37 second clip would work better with the punchline at the start or the end what helped me was separating the clip hunting from the actual editing. I listen to the episode at 1.5x speed while I'm doing dishes or folding laundry, just dropping markers whenever someone laughs or the energy shifts. then I come back later with fresh ears and”

“are you providing timestamps or is the clipper watching the full 2 hours and picking the moments themselves? that curation time is where a lot of the cost lives tbh”

“It depends on the podcast episode right? Perhaps an AI chatbot can figure it out, if not then might have to listen closely and note down timecodes”

“If you are a podcast clipper or know someone who is, what is a good rate for cutting a 2 hour long podcast to 12-15 clips?🤔🤔 submitted by /u/trinsic09 [link] [comments]”

“honestly it usually just comes down to editing bottlenecks. if one file is a mess to clean up, i'll just bump the next episode up so my feed doesn't go quiet.”

“We discussed quite a bit today and have decided to do exactly that. Shorter episodes makes editing shorter and everyone is right, no one wants to listen to 3 hours in one sitting. I would send you a link but we are pretty new still, only have 15 episodes released. In other words, we aren’t very good yet”

“yes, but that's because I use it to get an idea of what I want and fix it up”

“You can use Adobe Podcast to improve quality. I forgot to switch the mic source in Audacity, so I ended up recording a 40 min long voiceover through my laptop's mic, which sounded like shit, so I used Podcast to "fix" it and got 50k views on that video. Not a single negative comment about the audio quality.”

“I have around 50 hours of old episodes sitting on a drive. Every few months I try one of the auto-clip tools on them, and every time I get back thirty vertical videos where half of them stop in the middle of the sentence that made the moment worth clipping. The joke has the setup and then it just ends. The story builds and gets cut before it lands. So I open the editor and re-trim by hand, which is the exact job I was trying to skip. Meanwhile the rest of it stays untouched because going through”