“My life as a podcast producer would be much harder without Trint.”
Abigail Keel is a Senior Producer at podcasting company Stitcher, working on popular audio documentary series including Toxic: The Britney Spears Story and Rubirosa, about the real life diplomat who inspired the character of James Bond. Listened to by millions, their podcasts don’t just need to be packed with engaging content; they need to be perfectly edited and produced, too.
When Stitcher’s producers found out about Trint, they signed up for accounts out of their own pockets. Eventually they told the company, who were on board with the investment in time and productivity – as well as the tech.
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Before Trint, Stitcher’s producers would sit in the audio booth during recordings, live typing everything they heard manually. They had to type extremely fast, and it often wouldn't be a perfect transcription of the audio.
“Their goal was just to get enough of the conversation that they could use for their scripts. But during the interview, they were focused on typing and not listening,” Abigail says.
Abigail also works on weekly shows that require a new story or interviewee every episode – a much faster-paced process than limited documentary series. Her role covers everything from having podcasts and ideas pitched to her by outside collaborators, to collecting interviews and helping figure out the flow of how a story might be told across a ten episode series.
“We would set up an interview, tape it immediately, get the audio from that interview and put it into Trint to generate a transcript as fast as possible. Sometimes we will then have somebody on the team go back through and listen, correct the transcript or assign speakers, highlight the best moments, and leave comments,” she says.
Then another producer will reference the Trint to pull tape in the audio editing software, and the time codes are right there. So they can instantly find the highlighted clip by its timestamp, cut it out, and pull it all around the audio file to create the first draft of an episode.
“Keyword searching is a lifesaver.”
Later, if the episode is shared with an editor, they can listen and search for certain topics, for example if the guest talked about their childhood. “Keyword searching is a lifesaver,” Abigail says. “When I know this person talked about a certain topic, but it was a two-hour interview, all I have to do is search for the keywords and find where they spoke about it.”
With many employees now working remotely, Trint also helps Stitcher’s podcast teams to work together more smoothly.
Abigail says, “Before we would have to spend more time making a Google Doc that had this pseudo transcript. We would share that with the host, and they would highlight something and ask, “What did they say here?” And then I'd have to go back into the tape and listen again to properly transcribe it, or even spend more time in the front end actually transcribing all the tapes.”
“Trint makes my life easy.”
With Trint Abigail’s team can have a transcript that's almost exactly correct and is connected to the tape, almost instantly. So if there is an error, anybody can just jump in, hear exactly what the tape says and correct the transcript.
“I interned for many podcast shows and did freelance work for podcasts all through my early twenties, and all the jobs I had were transcribing other people's interviews. It used to be so much more time consuming,” Abigail says.
If a show was hiring interns to transcribe their interviews, then the whole production would be on their timeline, essentially only able to work as fast as an intern could type things up. Now, they can just put it in Trint and have their transcript in seconds.
“10 years ago, finding the information we needed could take a whole day.”
Stitcher also uses stories in Trint to speed up the process of finding all the recordings they have on a certain topic.
“Being able to pull lots of content into one place from different interviews, or one long interview, helps our editors structure the bigger story without even having to go into the audio editing software. They just pull selections from the Trint into the Story, and all pieces that we think are the best for the episode are in one place.”
Stitcher uses timecodes to help different teams and remote workers identify voices, topics, and important information in their transcripts.
“It's just so helpful,” Abigail says. “It speeds things up, and you can go in and find any piece of tape you're looking for and you know exactly where to find it in your audio.
“Having extremely accurate time codes is amazing.”
“The time that timecoding saves, especially if you're working on a show that might have multiple voices in one episode, is invaluable. And it’s so easy to collaborate on because you can hand it off to another producer and say, ‘Hey, here's the clips and you know exactly what the times are, so go and pull them.’”
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