one must be humble when starting a podcast

my fiancé and i started a podcast last week. the idea has been bouncing around in our heads for about a year, and we finally took the leap and recorded an episode, at the behest of an eager twitter friend. 

i was quite pleased with how the recording went! then the technical difficulties began to roll in, and i realized i might have to be a bit less attached to any given recording, because at any point we could lose it forever. 

to be more specific: the recording was over an hour long and a whopping 24gb. it devoured the available storage on my phone, making it nearly impossible for the device to do anything with the file. at the time, i had no idea how any of this worked, so i impatiently went into the editing screen and starting trimming and splicing, not knowing that that meant the operating system would now have to reload the gargantuan file. it tried and failed to do so, so whenever i attempted playback of the video, an error message stopped me in my tracks. 

syncing to icloud also failed. importing to my mac via a cable also failed. airdrop also failed. i was running out of options, quickly. 

i decided to try apple support. before i could give the full context, the support agent insisted the file was corrupted and likely wouldn't be recoverable. i rolled my eyes and pulled the trigger on my single remaining strategy: "revert to original." 

et voilà, it was instantly restored. i couldn't believe my eyes. before i could nearly corrupt the file again, i connected it to my fiancé's mac with a cable and immediately transferred it over. my mind flashed back to purchasing our laptops, when i had said flippantly, "what would i need that many gigabytes for?" 

apparently podcasting needs a lot of gigabytes. 

and that wasn't all: our microphones had also malfunctioned, meaning the recording had much worse audio than we had intended. thankfully, we'd had the foresight to record back-up audio with another phone place closer to us. 

after importing both video and audio into imovie, i made yet another important discovery: something called "sync drift." i'm even less clear on the exact mechanics than the above file shenanigans, but apparently what happens is the video and audio are recorded at slightly different rates, and over the course of say, an hour long video, they drift apart so much it becomes completely unsynced. 

apparently standard units of measurement are not just a given, and each device might be ever so slightly off from the next. 

my head swam as i painstakingly fixed the audio sync by hand. the work wasn't actually so bad; i started to have some fun with it, but if i thought too hard about the explanation of what had happened, i got befuddled again. 

after an eternity, we managed to have workable video and audio, reasonably synced together in imovie. we even recorded a quick jingle and i slotted that in as well. and in less than 48 hours, we had recorded, edited, and published our first podcast episode!