#93 - How a Higher Ed Video Production Company Incorporates AI into Its Work
w/ John Azoni
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SHOW NOTES
In this episode, John Azoni discusses the integration of AI tools in video production, focusing on how they enhance workflow, improve collaboration, and streamline the creative process. He shares insights on using AI for transcriptions, casting, scripting, and audio cleanup, emphasizing the transformative impact of these technologies on content creation.
Key Takeaways:
AI accelerates video production workflows — Tools like ChatGPT streamline scripting, storyboarding, and editing by extracting insights from transcripts and organizing raw content efficiently.
Transcripts + AI = Actionable Insights — Transcribed client calls and interviews are used to generate creative briefs, map messaging pillars, and identify the strongest story arcs.
Custom GPTs enhance brand consistency — For recurring clients, tailored GPTs help maintain messaging tone and speed up ideation by “remembering” previous projects and goals.
Voice cloning and generative visuals save time — AI voiceovers (via 11 Labs) and tools like Google VO or Photoshop’s Generative Fill reduce production delays and increase flexibility without compromising quality.
Experimenting with AI leads to real production breakthroughs — From rethinking episode formats to saving damaged audio, testing AI tools has resulted in both creative and practical wins.
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Transcript (done with AI so only about 90% accurate):
00;00;00;03 - 00;00;18;06
John Azoni
All right. Hey, everyone, look, we're just going to dive right in because my wife and kids are going to be home in about 20 minutes. Let's try to get through this little mini episode. I wanted to do a follow up on my episode of Seth Odell a couple weeks ago because I, I geek out about talking about stuff, you know, with folks on the show.
00;00;18;06 - 00;00;38;27
John Azoni
And then I was like, man, I would really love to just kind of do a State of the Union address, state of the air address on what we're using unveiled for video in case it's helpful for anyone else that's doing video or content creation. So off we go. I'm just going to jump right into it. All right. First up on our list, well, Egypt is it's very prevalent on the list throughout this episode.
00;00;39;06 - 00;00;59;24
John Azoni
I'm going to tell you how I use it for speeding up production and editing. So use it really heavily, like very heavily. Our whole workflow lives in transcripts, basically meeting transcripts, interview transcripts with students, alumni, things like that. But in terms of like the pre-production, we record every discovery call, every kickoff call over Zoom, those are automatically transcribed.
00;00;59;24 - 00;01;25;12
John Azoni
That's one of the things I like about Zoom. It just auto records the whole meeting. I still take notes, but I like that It's also taking notes. Exact word for word notes, and then you can immediately download the transcription once we've got that raw material from the client and like the client has explained to us what their needs are and where their problems are, where the gaps are, we feed those transcripts into a catchy beat and say, Hey, right, it's a creative brief and you know, we'll give it some parameters.
00;01;25;18 - 00;01;43;14
John Azoni
You don't want to know what the what the issues are and what the client specifically was looking to do and things like that. So we're asking it basically to talk to other production people that are going to come into this project, help them quickly acclimate to the needs of the project. And so it does a really great job of that.
00;01;43;14 - 00;02;02;03
John Azoni
It does a really great job of distilling a meeting like that or multiple meetings into like, okay, here's the game plan. And then we take that and, you know, translate that into a more detailed production creative plan. But it just gives us something that we can hand off to editors, other collaborators to get them up to speed fast.
00;02;02;03 - 00;02;18;05
John Azoni
I'll be honest, writing creative briefs is something that I hate doing. I just, you know, I always just want people to download the ideas from my brain. You know, I wish people could just, you know, things could just live in my head. And then other people they could just live in other people said exactly how they're living in my head.
00;02;18;05 - 00;02;39;03
John Azoni
But since that tech doesn't exist yet, this is the next best thing because it's something I might otherwise procrastinate. It's like really documenting for everyone and very clearly handing off this project and communicating it in a way that everyone else needs to be communicated because they can't read my mind. So I need to get everything out of my mind and onto paper and chatbot.
00;02;39;03 - 00;02;56;24
John Azoni
It really helps that because all I have to do is have the conversation with the client and it takes my input, the client's input, and says, All right, here's what you all talked about. And so it's great for that. The next is casting. So at unveiled, we create custom casting portals for each college client that we work with.
00;02;56;24 - 00;03;16;00
John Azoni
They get a unique link along with a set of optimized action oriented email templates to send them to their students or alumni to get them to submit their stories. And so these invitees are then submit videos based on prompts, you know, asking things like you will prompt when you submit your story. This is what we're looking for. What challenge did you overcome?
00;03;16;00 - 00;03;37;24
John Azoni
Tell us about a professor who made a big impact on you, or what's something remarkable about your experience? Like anything that's like more than just, here's all the reasons I like to the school or here's what I majored in and why it's great. So we use a tool called Bongiorno, I think spelled b, o, and j0r. I'd be terrible at a spelling me because I can't spell like out of my head.
00;03;38;05 - 00;04;01;26
John Azoni
I just like write it down anyway, and so on. Zero. You know, you create a portal through bronzer, they send out a client, sends out a link, people click the link, submit a video themselves, it comes to us and it automatically makes transcripts. And so once we get those transcripts, we know the school's messaging pillars already. And so we can start tagging each submission to, you know, themes like, okay, capstone projects or student support or career outcomes, career development, all that stuff.
00;04;02;06 - 00;04;22;21
John Azoni
And then we pull all those transcripts into chats about loaded into a single chat thread and share that thread with our team and with the client. And now we're all collaborating with the same data set that it's digested, all the transcripts, all the casting. We don't have to watch through, you know, hours of people telling us their stories.
00;04;22;21 - 00;04;38;22
John Azoni
And, you know, 80% of them aren't really relevant to what we're trying to do. I mean, that's the point of doing casting, is we want to get to the needles in the haystack, but we can ask it things like, okay, who talked about scholarships or who has the most emotional story about like pivoting careers or who has the best story arc?
00;04;38;22 - 00;04;57;11
John Azoni
And we used that with a client recently school down in North Carolina. We did casting for them, and then we ran all those transcripts in the chat CBT and said like, okay, we have the best like story arcs about like just like personal transformation. Like they went from from A to Z because of this college and it did a great job.
00;04;57;11 - 00;05;18;14
John Azoni
I mean, we went right to those that it suggested and it was spot on. Like those were solid stories. And we ended up producing two of the stories that it suggested and all the rest weren't quite as good. I mean, we do watch through all of them, but when we're going back and making decisions, it's helpful to have Chachi B to understand all the casting submissions as well and we can ask questions.
00;05;19;07 - 00;05;43;16
John Azoni
And here's where that that came in handy on an actual project post casting. So we worked with a university, we filmed eight student interviews and they covered a lot of ground and the intention was to do eight separate profiles and, you know, cutting them into individual stories. But once we got into post, we realized a different format was going to work better, like breaking it up into topics instead of by person.
00;05;43;16 - 00;06;08;09
John Azoni
So bringing it up into to say, okay, capstone projects, here's the value of the capstone project. Here's three or four students that talked about that, but you just felt like the collection of their responses was more impactful than like any one story arc that they brought to their interview. So we pivoted and we use chat TV to help us, say, hours and hours, remapping those transcripts into like this pivoted new direction into categories.
00;06;08;09 - 00;06;28;07
John Azoni
So one of the categories it's important for this client is interpersonal skills. It's a data science school. So they're not just learning techie data science stuff. They're also learning how to interpret data and how to do data storytelling and how to big data language to leadership up the chain in a way that they're going to understand. So that's a big pillar of the messaging that they're trying to push.
00;06;28;19 - 00;06;46;25
John Azoni
So it helped us map all of their interview transcripts to like, okay, here's who all talked about interpersonal skills here. So you talked about leadership development or real world applications of data science. So here's who talked about pivoting careers. Like there were several students. That one was like in accounting. And then she pivoted to a career in data science.
00;06;46;25 - 00;07;12;10
John Azoni
Another was in biomedical engineering or something like that, like doing like cell research and like brain neuron stuff. And then she pivoted into data science. So we use chatbots to help us map all those interviews to those possible messaging pillars. And our editors used that throughout the entire project. We've been working on this for over a year now because there's a lot of content, a lot of supplemental content that we're doing, and a lot of animations and stuff that are going with this.
00;07;12;28 - 00;07;42;08
John Azoni
And that's been the one document that we keep going back to. And that would have taken us hours, if not days to go through all those transcripts and manually map those messaging pillars. But we had a spreadsheet, took probably 30 minutes and it was pretty accurate. Next would be custom GPUs for our long term clients. So we built a custom GPU, we built a custom GPU for clients that we work with pretty repeatedly, especially ones that have specific, more specific messaging.
00;07;42;08 - 00;08;06;17
John Azoni
So we have the organization called the Joseph Project, really great nonprofit, one of our few non higher ed clients. So they connect human trafficking survivors with pro-bono legal support to help them get their records expunged and tickets taken care of, things that they racked up charges while they were being victimized. They connect them with a pro-bono attorney that will advocate to the courts for them, say like, Hey, this person was a victim, not a criminal.
00;08;07;05 - 00;08;31;06
John Azoni
I mean, since I think we've worked with them since 2021, we've told so many stories, survivor stories, attorney stories, partner stories. So we fed those into a GPU and built a custom GPU based on the stories that we've done. So it understands the story arcs that we're going for and also the messaging pillar. Like what are the questions that we always ask every time?
00;08;31;06 - 00;08;51;20
John Azoni
Not the questions, because the questions differ from person to person, but like what are the messaging things that we're trying to get out of them every time? You know, for the attorneys stories, it's a lot of like, here's why this work matters. And, you know, here's the story of the need of these survivors that are coming out of that life with still these like shackles of like legal issues.
00;08;51;27 - 00;09;12;23
John Azoni
And here's why we need more attorneys. So it just kind of understands, like these are what the campaigns are going after year after year. And it just, you know, it notes their tone, goals, all that stuff. And so it's really like just having a collaborative, like a assistant creative director almost that knows the brand already inside and out based on data that we have manually produced.
00;09;12;23 - 00;09;33;03
John Azoni
Like we manually edited all these things. And to this day, even with the custom job, there has not been an edit that we fed an interview transcript into and just said like, make me a video script and tell me what buttons to push and tell me what so much but where it's not good at that. And maybe if I was better at prompting, you know, I could get it there and we could save them some money.
00;09;33;03 - 00;10;05;20
John Azoni
But it's a very, you know, manual storytelling process. But it's sped up a lot by having an essentially assistant creative director. And as Seth talked about in the past episode, like a subcontractor, essentially, that's helping us edit this thing and helping us pull insights from the transcripts. I mean, I can't edit without it anymore. I don't do very much editing, but we really encourage our editors to use creativity, load these transcripts in and ask it, you know, insights about, okay, what are all the things that this person said about this?
00;10;05;25 - 00;10;26;22
John Azoni
And we'll just be like, Here's all soundbites. We can just search those soundbites in the editing timeline and the play head will go right there and we can just pull that clip and boom and just, oh my gosh, I would think about like even getting like, jeez, five or six years ago we had to manually watch through everything and you'd have to take written notes, You'd make markers on the timeline, too.
00;10;26;22 - 00;10;49;19
John Azoni
But there's a big element of it where you just had to kind of remember who said what and who brought what vibes to the interview and where generally that existed in the interview. And we did a lot of scrubbing around trying to find a clip that I remember that person saying, I couldn't remember what exactly he said, and we didn't have the transcript ability to search a transcript and have it connect with the video and all this stuff.
00;10;49;19 - 00;11;29;05
John Azoni
So anyways, that has been just I hate the word game. I hate when people say things are game changers, but this is a game changer. We'll just say because I'm not playing a game. So it's like this is a business changer. This is a creative process changer. Next, Chatty Betty again, here we are when we're scripting, whether it's for a commercial campaign or something like we had this, one of our regular clients is a business school and they their marketing director emailed me and was like, Hey, we've got the president asking for us to take this like 75 page student orientation presentation.
00;11;29;05 - 00;11;47;20
John Azoni
It's basically like slide deck a PowerPoint and make it more creative. Like, can we make a training video like a Delta Airlines, like preflight video or something like that? You know, it's got some flair to it, some personality. I knew the budget wasn't going to be a, you know, half a million dollar, you know, to $1,000,000 Delta Airline budget.
00;11;47;26 - 00;12;14;07
John Azoni
And so we need to think of an idea that's going to be real. What can we realistically pull off without? And location fees and permits and an art department and props and wardrobe and makeup and talent like actors, all this stuff. What can we get away with that's just ready made? And so that was the challenge that we presented to chat about along with we fed in the orientation manual, basically said, Here's the vibe we're going for.
00;12;14;07 - 00;12;50;21
John Azoni
Here's the constraint, the budget constraint, here's the inspiration, the client, since, you know, we need a budget lean concept that we can pull off in one day, one location with like one main talent that doesn't have to be a paid actor and minimal extras and minimal like camera moves. Like the more we can just stay put and just work on the delivery of the person that's on camera rather than spending hours like picking up gear, tearing down, moving to another place, setting up, solving lighting problem, solving audio problems, getting set, tearing down, moving again, all that stuff just is expensive.
00;12;50;21 - 00;13;25;16
John Azoni
What eats up time in a production day? So anyway, that's those are the constraints. It spit out a bunch of ideas, 95% of them. I would say there's probably ten ideas. Nine out of ten of them were garbage. One of them was really interesting and I didn't use that one. I didn't pitch that one verbatim, but it actually made me think of a similar adjacent idea that was like, okay, that could within this budget, that could actually be kind of cool and like kind of engaging for a new student to watch without trying too hard, without trying to be too like cheeky or, you know, whatever.
00;13;25;16 - 00;13;56;21
John Azoni
So I mean, I was impressed. I mean, that's how my brain works. I need a creative partner to think with me. I am terrible at just pulling stuff out of thin air. I used to get so frustrated, you know, when I was learning art. So art is my background, painting and drawing and stuff. And when I was earlier in my artist's pursuits, I was really big fans of like these illustrators and like and people that Salvador Dali, who could just, like, come up with these fantastical scenes and paint them so beautifully and just out of thin air.
00;13;56;21 - 00;14;15;25
John Azoni
I mean, like he would just think and I would try to do stuff like that. I just couldn't do it. My brain cannot just create something out of nothing. I need some sort of structure, some sort of jumping off point to go for. And so I get so frustrated and then I eventually just moved into abstract painting because I'm like, okay, I can do this.
00;14;15;25 - 00;14;32;19
John Azoni
You know, I can kind of like, you know, I can move paint around and like kind of play with these different, you know, shapes and marks and things like that. And it doesn't have to be literal. I don't have to really think of this like on the nose concept or anything like that out of thin air. And so that's where I went.
00;14;32;19 - 00;14;50;07
John Azoni
And then I started the abstract painting in college, also portrait painting. I do like portrait painting, but again, you're painting something that's in front of you and you're interpreting that I'm not a realistic painter, but like, you know, interpreting that and putting different colors in the skin tones, in different chunks of paint and things like that. That's fun for me.
00;14;50;07 - 00;15;15;07
John Azoni
Starting with something that's already existing. Okay, So that's a big part of how I use it as a ideation partner. And you'll hear that everyone on LinkedIn dance like chanting and dance and ideation. So that's one that you probably could have predicted Seth talked about in his episode. And since that episode, I was inspired and I did use this on a animation project we're working on with the client, where we're doing a case study out on a project that they had.
00;15;15;07 - 00;15;45;24
John Azoni
One of their team of master students work on solving this, developing this cool like Aztec. So we didn't have the I need to get the storyboards, I needed to get my animator going on the storyboards and going on, you know, the animate. We need to give this process going. And I was like, Oh shoot, we never we got to do the casting for the voiceover, but that's kind of like a several day process, you know, You got to post the thing, you got to wait for submissions, come in, you got to cull through them, I mean, casting the whole thing and then you got to send to the client, blah blah.
00;15;45;25 - 00;16;08;20
John Azoni
Meanwhile, my animators like waiting to get started. So I was like, I'm Seth here and run this through 11 labs. I put my script into 11 labs and, you know, picked a voice tone. It was like a kind of a younger sort of like maybe thirties, age female. And after a couple of iterations, it was pretty solid. Like you could launch with that.
00;16;09;01 - 00;16;34;04
John Azoni
We're not going to there is an AI quality to the voiceover, but it's better than me just voicing this in a male voice when the client wants a female, you know, or, you know, whatever. So it was a huge I mean, I think I think I spent maybe 15 bucks on like a month subscription or something for 11 labs and got a quick voiceover and saved a few days of delay on this project.
00;16;34;04 - 00;16;57;26
John Azoni
So that was great. And then another time I've used this is for ADR as a video term stands for, I think it stands for additional dialog recording. I don't know much about like technical video stuff. Like I couldn't tell you what a bitrate is or like what a make a bit is. It's some amount of bits. I could tell you that a terabyte is a thousand gigs and a gig is a thousand megabytes.
00;16;57;26 - 00;17;18;12
John Azoni
Could I tell you what a byte is? No. Anyway, so but in ADR is where you're basically recording a overdub of dialog. And we were telling a story of this one woman and she was telling her story kind of in a roundabout way. I really just I needed to shorten the edit and I needed to get from point B to point C directly.
00;17;18;12 - 00;17;40;08
John Azoni
I needed like just one sentence that clarified where she was going without having to go on the super long tangent to make it make sense for the viewer. And then have them lose interest because it's a long tangent. So anyway, so I basically I, you know, with permission, cloned her voice in 11 labs from the interview that we did.
00;17;40;17 - 00;18;01;12
John Azoni
And then I scripted the exact line and then had it say that in her voice it sounded flawless. I mean, you cannot tell where this ADR spot is in the video. If you watched it, then we covered that little spot with B-roll, obviously, because we can't like, we're not going to map that to her voice or to it like to her saying it on camera.
00;18;01;16 - 00;18;22;01
John Azoni
So we cover that with B-roll. Boom lights saved a lot of probably drop off what would otherwise have been drop off from the viewer or having to do like a text, like a text slide there to explain it. So that was great. That's the thing that, you know, you want to get permission for that stuff because, you know, I don't think everyone likes the prospect of having their voice cloned.
00;18;22;01 - 00;18;45;20
John Azoni
So you should probably ask them before you do that. It might be something. You know, what I think would be interesting is in your media release forms, if you have a media release form, I don't know how ethical this would be to just like bury it in the sort of like admissions paperwork that they fill out that says basically like we're going to film you or take pictures of you and you don't have a say in that you're consenting to that.
00;18;45;20 - 00;19;00;05
John Azoni
I don't know if it'd be ethical to put it in there, but if you had like a media release form for like a certain project and you were like, Hey, that's how we're gonna use this, you give us permission. Also, you give us permission to clone your voice and use A.I. to just just to tweak what you're saying.
00;19;00;05 - 00;19;25;16
John Azoni
We're not putting words in your mouth. If there is a legal sensitive way to say that, that might be a smart thing to get signed off on. And that's something that we've been kind of thinking about in in our work is like maybe that's just a default permission that we want to get because the reality is it's if we need them to say something specific, we would have to recreate I mean, bring them into a studio to record the little thing or send them like an audio recorder.
00;19;25;16 - 00;19;48;06
John Azoni
And then audio is not going to sound right. And we have to like, match it with like IQ and all this stuff and it's just gonna save everyone headache. If I can just put it in 11 lab and say, Actually she said this, I want her to say this boom, boom, boom, boom. And then she just says it and I just plug it in and then I can keep rolling, you know, so and then, okay, now we're into generative video.
00;19;48;06 - 00;20;08;15
John Azoni
So now this, you know, this is tool we're testing is Google video. And that's the only it's the only AI tool that I have even gotten close to using for a real project. It's fun to play with a tool like Runaway. The last time I tried to play with it, it was about a year ago and it was terrible and it was slightly better than the year before that.
00;20;08;15 - 00;20;25;16
John Azoni
I tried to play with it. It's just, you know, there's been a lot of hype around A.I. video, and I just I haven't seen the use case for it, but for something like the Joseph Project, the I mentioned the human trafficking survivor stories where we're dealing with traumatic stories and we're not really filming reenactments, so we don't have the budget to hire.
00;20;25;16 - 00;20;43;29
John Azoni
If you watch like a Netflix docu series and you pay attention, so much of that B-roll is reenactments and they film it in a way that's kind of abstract. Like they'll kind of blur out faces or they'll they'll show you kind of like a close up of, like, hands doing something. So it's kind of like sells the vibe without being too on the nose and too literal, like stock footage.
00;20;44;14 - 00;21;05;09
John Azoni
And that's the approach we take with the Joseph Project, where it's like we're going to a stock footage site that has we use art. Gregorio And they have very cinematic footage. It's like a whole different tier of stock footage. It's it's not like your typical, like, stock photo, like cheesy stuff, but we are looking for something. It takes a while.
00;21;05;17 - 00;21;28;11
John Azoni
It takes a while to find a clip that could work that's kind of abstract enough to sell this sort of dark moment in this person's life without being too literal and without looking like stock footage too much. But Google video has opened the door at least to us being like, okay, this might be an option. With stock footage, you can only get so specific.
00;21;28;27 - 00;21;48;18
John Azoni
You can't get too detailed in what you're looking for. And because it just doesn't exist. But with something like Vimeo, you can tell it exactly what you want and work with it and it will come out with something usable. And I feel like for a reenactment where I think the viewer on some level knows that this is a reenactment, this isn't the real person.
00;21;48;19 - 00;22;09;18
John Azoni
We're not trying to say this is the actual person that we're interviewing. But when she was four years old or something like that, you know, we're not trying to say that. I think the viewer kind of gets it. I think there's a little bit more leeway in a setting like a video for the Joseph Project, where a Google video situation could could actually be useful and be believable.
00;22;09;18 - 00;22;30;21
John Azoni
So it's a powerful option for those moments when you don't have a specific B-roll clip. But you need to just you need something and you don't want to use cheesy stock footage worth playing around with. Then we talked about this episode of Seth Visual Cleanup with Generative Phil So Photoshop's Generative Phil is just awesome. I love it. It is very good.
00;22;30;22 - 00;22;52;16
John Azoni
Not always perfect, but it's good. So sometimes we'll get a photo, you know, from a client and it's almost good, but someone's, you know, someone's cut out or like, framed weird or it's like, framed too far away or it's framed too close. Here, it's vertical or we wanted a horizontal one. And, you know, we can take that into Photoshop and select the areas where we wish something was different.
00;22;52;16 - 00;23;14;10
John Azoni
And then it will fill in the photo as if it was taken that way. It's taking cues from the actual photo part and then expanding on that imagery and it's amazing. And we used it one time with with one of our clients as engineering student master student story we were telling and he was telling the story of the part of a story was giving a presentation at Austin.
00;23;14;10 - 00;23;32;29
John Azoni
So it was out in the STEM fields for it's like part of his story was he's part of the LGBTQ community and he found community at the school, at the university he was attending, and he found community in Austin and stuff like that. And so he sent me this picture of him giving this monumental presentation that was really important to him at Austin, but his arm was cut off.
00;23;33;18 - 00;23;56;10
John Azoni
So I'm like, okay, it's like I could have used it, you know, like that. But I was like, okay, this calls for some Photoshop generative fill and I put it in there, expanded the canvas on the side where his arm was cut off and filled it, and it looked perfect. I mean, you cannot tell me where the eye part was if I showed it to you from scratch and you didn't know that I did that.
00;23;56;10 - 00;24;15;19
John Azoni
So really impressive was able to use that. And then it just became, what would it be been kind of an awkward part of the video, like why is his arm cut off? Why is he way over on the side of the frame became now not distracting And that's that's half the job of editing is telling a story without you noticing distracting elements.
00;24;16;01 - 00;24;38;25
John Azoni
So that is a trick that we've used. And Premiere is coming out with some generative film type stuff and it's early days, but like if you're a videographer and you maybe wish someone like had held a pause a little bit longer in their interview or they like you had a little bit longer of a clip of them doing a certain action or whatever it is premiere.
00;24;38;25 - 00;24;56;12
John Azoni
Now you can sort of like expand a clip and it works in the same way as general film for Photoshop, but just for video. So I haven't played around with it too much, haven't really had much of a need for it. And admittedly, I wish I had more time to experiment. I really do. I used to have a day every week that I would like.
00;24;56;12 - 00;25;18;17
John Azoni
Every Friday. I wouldn't take meetings and I would just experiment. I'd either be in my art studio like painting or making stuff or just doing just doing things that creatively filled me up in a different way than than doing project based work. And I would experiment with like, stuff with like A.I. and things like that. And I've just gotten away from that as we've gotten busier.
00;25;18;17 - 00;25;43;01
John Azoni
We just slammed this year, which is a great problem to have. But I do miss just experimenting, so I wish I had more time. If I can get some time to experiment with that, I will report back. But next on the list, audio cleanup. We use DaVinci Resolve Studio and Adobe Premiere has audio cleanup tools. They're not nearly as good as DaVinci Resolve and Adobe has like a podcast enhancer.
00;25;43;02 - 00;26;05;26
John Azoni
Like I forget what it's called. If you search like Adobe Podcast audio cleanup or something like that. It's an online tool. You can upload your clip and it will do a great job. DaVinci Resolve is a color grading software, but they've done such a great job in the last several years of making it a really competent editing, like a solid competitor to Adobe Premiere.
00;26;06;10 - 00;26;28;10
John Azoni
And but one of the AI tools that they've employed is this voice isolator tool, and you have to have the studio version. You can get DaVinci Resolve for free, but you have to pay. It's not that expensive for the studio version, maybe like four or 500 bucks or something like that. Or if you buy a blackmagic camera, it comes with a subscription to the studio version because Blackmagic owns DaVinci.
00;26;28;10 - 00;26;50;16
John Azoni
So that's how I got mine. But The Voice Isolator, it has. One time I filmed this event for this corporate client and they flew their speaker in like their CEO from Germany, you know, And I was getting all kinds of interference in my wireless lab of Lior mikes. I think there's like a police station nearby. It was like something was like jamming the signal.
00;26;50;16 - 00;27;08;29
John Azoni
I could not get it to stop, like being I'll start, like, fuzzy. So I went to micro center on a lunch break before this CEO was up to speak and I bought a voice recorder and like, it's just a pocket one in a lab, Mike that he could plug in. And so I might team up with that because it wasn't wireless.
00;27;08;29 - 00;27;29;00
John Azoni
It'll just go hardware right into the recorder and then I could take that SD card and plug it in, sync it up with video. So and then I was like, just in case, let me put this other microphone connected to my camera. Let me put it over here, kind of in the corner under this desk, kind of where he's going to be trotting about, walking around, talking, probably won't use it, but just it just as a backup.
00;27;29;17 - 00;27;49;13
John Azoni
So the mic from the recorder that I bought came unplugged in his I don't know what it's not like he was doing jumping jacks but it just somehow like I don't know if he messed with it or something but it came unplugged. The audio was completely shot. I was freaking out and, you know, and so I brought it home like last ditch effort.
00;27;49;13 - 00;28;11;00
John Azoni
Let me just try this Da Vinci thing. My God, it sounded it wasn't perfect, but it sounded like he was miked up from this mic that was like 15 feet away from him. I mean, it was incredible. So, I mean, that like Da Vinci resolve, I no longer worry when there's like a refrigerator running or there's like a blower in the background or something like the AC on when we're doing an interview.
00;28;11;12 - 00;28;31;14
John Azoni
It's not ideal. We always try to fix those audio problems in-camera and not fix them in post. But there's sometimes you can't just shut off the AC to a big college building. You know, like the facilities guy is not just like hanging out on the shoot with us, but thankfully there's DaVinci Resolve. Studio's got this voice isolator and it works so good.
00;28;31;25 - 00;28;52;22
John Azoni
So I love it. It's great. And lastly, I used to do this entire episode and this was a groundbreaking moment for me because it changes the way that I can talk to you guys and do these episodes because I don't riff very well. Believe it or not, I'm reading off a script this this whole time. I'll just give you a little transparent behind the scenes.
00;28;53;05 - 00;29;10;23
John Azoni
I need a script and I can riff off off script and I've done a lot of that in this episode, but like I need something to like, keep coming back to and I happen to be able to can kind of read without it sounding totally like I'm ready to go. But so what I did last week, I had I was like, Shoot, I need an episode.
00;29;10;28 - 00;29;28;01
John Azoni
I didn't have a guest lined up for this week. So I'm like, Let me just sit in my car and like, pull out my voice recorder app and I'm just going to ramble into my phone. And this was something that Seth talked about in his episode a couple weeks ago is just rambling into you know, is like voice recorder thing.
00;29;28;01 - 00;29;44;15
John Azoni
He's got something, a whisper whisper flow or something like that. But you know, you can take a couple extra steps and just use your voice recorder app on your phone and then run it through some sort of trans scripting thing and then run it through Jackie Media. That's what I did. So I just started rambling about all the stuff that I'm using and why it's great.
00;29;44;15 - 00;30;10;28
John Azoni
I took that transcript. I ran it through CBT and said basically, keep the content and the flavor of this episode, but just clean it up. Like take all the ums out, make me make sense because I was just rambling and pausing a lot and not making sense, just talking all over the place on a million tangents and kind of figuring out what I was trying to say as I was going and chatted about it gave me a great script and I have read off of it for about 50% of this.
00;30;10;28 - 00;30;27;25
John Azoni
You know, it doesn't talk like me. I think there is one part in here where it told me to say that a particular tool was clutch, and I guess I forgot to prompt it that I am not 14 and I never said clutch unironically in my life. So we skipped that part of the script. We riffed around that one.
00;30;27;25 - 00;30;55;13
John Azoni
But so yeah, you're listening to age John but like a little bit of a Jon I mean, it's like. Jon But then it was like I, but then it's like Jon again. So anyway, as you can see, we're not using what we kind of are using age to replace people because like, it saves me cheese. I mean, how much would I have to pay for an assistant editor if I hired an in-house assistant editor, 40,000 minimum to like, you know, call through interviews and pull out insights and things like that and prep footage.
00;30;55;29 - 00;31;18;17
John Azoni
So I guess in a way we are saving hiring someone, but also we're saving a lot of time and we're able to speed through projects a lot faster and we're getting to the same place that we would if we did it manually. We're just getting there faster and faster is never bad for the client as long as the quality doesn't suffer.
00;31;18;17 - 00;31;37;05
John Azoni
And so that's important to me. I don't want to delay things. I want to finish the project and get it to you so you can get it out and you can move on to the next thing. So these tools have been great and I'm sure there's some tools for doing that, but those are the main ones. If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
00;31;37;05 - 00;31;59;27
John Azoni
Email me. John at Unveiled not to be unveiled on Honest Bill Joey Chan Fun fact You can tell how to spell a John John's name by if their actual name is Jonathan or John. If their actual name is just John, it's Joe. And if their actual name is Jonathan, more likely that it's John. Okay, So that's just a fun fact.
00;31;59;28 - 00;32;01;25
John Azoni
All right. Thanks for listening. Love you.
