Dive into this episode of The PBP.fm Show as we explore project management for podcast post-production. Learn how to streamline your workflow with effective checklists, task assignments, and automated tools. We break down the steps to ensure consistency and efficiency, from file preparation to scheduling content. 

Whether doing it all yourself or looking to delegate tasks, this episode provides valuable insights to optimize your podcasting process. 

Listen now and take control of your production!

You have systems, you have workflows, you have processes, you have steps and those kinds of things. Those are all like words that people use to describe them. and so generally what I look at is I like the word workflow to describe a process. That starts with something and it moves through a series of.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, podcaster, expert, or thought leader, you'll discover creative ways to leverage your digital content from blogs to video, from YouTube to Tik TOK and everything in between. We'll show you how to stand out from the noise so you can directly connect with potential customers, build strategic partnerships, and drive leads into your business.

Get ready for actionable tips and tangible takeaways on improving your digital presence across the board. With that, let's dive into this week's episode of pbp. fm.

Hello and welcome back to pbp. fm. I'm Richard Matthews and I've got Kevin Rundle back on the line. Kevin, are you there?

Kevin Rundle: I am here, Richard, and we're, we're on the other side of a

building an actual project management system to take care of keeping track of your post production for your podcasts. Is that what you uh, you remember as well?

Kevin Rundle: Yeah, that, that's where we're at. I mostly remember because I started trying everywhere in my life to to silo each of the tasks. So I was only doing the task and lots of things that makes everything better.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So what I want to start off with is just a brief description of what project management is um, what product management tools are for those of you who may not know and how they are helpful and useful for people. And then we can dive into an actual example from ours. So you can see how we silo our stuff for our team and how we manage it at a.

high level. I think you'll be surprised how simple it actually is. And then we'll talk a little bit about tools that you can use to do the same thing and build the same kind of checklists. And then what we'll do is with this episode, we'll include a copy of our checklists. So you can build them into whatever project management system you would like.

You have systems, you have workflows, you have processes, you have steps and those kinds of things. Those are all like words that people use to describe them. And so generally what I look at is I like the word workflow to describe a process. That starts with something and it moves through a series of.

individual processes. And then those individual processes end up with your outcomes. So what a project management system does is it just allows you to build that workflow in with checklists. So your checklists just let you know, Hey, this is what needs to happen. And if you were anything like we are, you're trying to grow your company using your podcast.

be able to assign it out when you get to that point. That makes sense.

Kevin Rundle: 100 sense. Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So,

Kevin Rundle: It makes sense to me.

Richard Matthews: so the benefits that I see of using a project management system, one is it keeps you on track. So you can put in due dates, you can put in your checklist and you can make sure that you're doing the same things over and over again. You can have that consistency.

And. I like to make sure that like all of my tasks and my whole business are on, like on some sort of a process board. So I know what, what is assigned to me and what's assigned to other staff members. And so we can just see everything. So project management systems can really help grow with your company.

And it would be, we could do a whole course just on using project management systems. So this is going to be just a brief overview of how we use it. what I want to do is hop into a screen share with our project management system. So I'm going to go ahead and hit this screen share thing and hopefully It'll work.

So we're gonna share the entire screen here and you get to see the infinite loop of all of that

Kevin Rundle: If

it doesn't work, we have faith in you, Richard.

Kevin Rundle: I see it. I see it. I have to look way down. Oh,

Richard Matthews: do I need to like zoom it in? Maybe I don't.

Kevin Rundle: my setup is a little different now. So my computer isn't, I used to have my computer at the same height as the camera.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Kevin Rundle: it down, so I'm like, I don't need to stare at the computer, I need to stare at the camera. Now you just went, tricked me!

Richard Matthews: So project management systems come in lots of different flavors. This one here that we're looking at is ClickUp. ClickUp is an advanced project management system for designed for larger companies. But this, the processes that we're going to show in here, you could build into any project management system.

You could build it into Trello, you could build it into Jira. You could build it into a sauna. You could build it in a Monday. You could build it into some of your self hosted project management systems. You could even put it onto your own you know, on your iPhone, you could use the reminders thing and build your project management system in there just for yourself.

It doesn't really matter. What matters is the activity.

Richard Matthews: What actually matters is

Kevin Rundle: me about Jira. Plus my trauma response.

Richard Matthews: from working in the tech space there before JIRA is a big

Kevin Rundle: working in the text base. Jira. Hey, I don't like to see the Alta San login. Don't do it.

Richard Matthews: So there's a couple of things that I want to show you here. This is so in, ClickUp, we have essentially we track an item. Whatever that item is, you want to track the item from start to completion. So, that's just like a project management baseline. So I'm going to go over some baseline stuff for making use of a project management system.

So whatever it is that you're going to track in our case, we're talking about tracking the episode, right? So the episode of your show needs to be tracked from start to completion. Right. And start to completion for your episode means that you get the raw files. You're going to take those raw files and get them all put into the right place.

And that's what any, you're going to do with any project management system. And where people struggle is they don't pick out the thing that they're going to track through the movement. Right. And so for podcasts, the thing that you want to track through your movement, track through the process is your episode.

And so that's the piece that we're going to build off of is the episode. So you can see, I've got a test episode one here, and if we were to come in and add a task, it would be a test episode number two, right? Test episode. 2 and that would be our, the thing that we're going to track through.

So the next sort of process there is to figure out what are the steps that you want to move your episode through. And that's where our siloing that comes in that we talked about last time. And so I have on here, I have a set of subtasks and these are our actual subtasks, the tasks that we use inside our company to manage this process.

So the main episode task that's here at the top, that one is assigned to our project manager is Brooke. You see your name on here. I'm actually going to click Robert cause she doesn't need to be assigned to a test task. So look at it and be like, Oh, why am I being assigned to test tasks? So our project manager manages the assignments and the due dates for the task. And it also manages the communication in our case with the customer. So if you're doing this yourself, you probably don't need to worry about assigning these things or making sure there's customer communication aspects. But I will show it to you. So you can see on our details. You know, I did this in the test task.

It's not on. This isn't a good example, but the will generally have a checklist in here. That'll have like email one to customer.

Kevin Rundle: are your checklists?

Richard Matthews: No, I'm going to show you all of those here in just a second. So this one doesn't have the customer communications on it cause it's a test task, but we'll, the project manager will have a set of customer communications.

And you can see the subtasks that are below that. If you're using another project management system like Trello it'll actually switch views to be like a board view where you would have a actually, I think I can probably do that. If we go to a board view looks like this, right. And the episode would be sitting on a card.

It's like episode one. And it'd be sitting in a the first one, which is like, needs to be done. Right. Or to do and then it would move into, you know, the first sub aspect. And then it would move on to step number two, which is you know, phase two, phase one prep and do full cut, and then it would create written assets.

And each of those each of these lists essentially would be your next item. So it would be, they would, they'd just be vertical instead of horizontal, I guess, if that makes sense for Trello. That is the project management. And then when we get into the task, you have the subtasks, right?

So you asked how detailed the checklists are This is what the actual checklist looks like for one of our clients and so this is the file prep task and this is done by we have one person on our team who handles all the file prep tasks for all of our clients And so the first step is they're going to download the files from the recording software and then, so we've got SquadCast, Riverside, Zencastr and Zoom are the primary places where our clients record.

And I don't have the links to these right now, but we actually have. A how to download files for each one of these that they can click on and actually see like how to do that If they don't know how all right, so that's the first step is to download the files and this last little tag here says using mac mini in the cloud.

Kevin Rundle: a virtual private server.

Richard Matthews: virtual. It's actual, it's a whole box. It's ours. We own the whole computer. And we just pay for the connection to the internet.

Kevin Rundle: Actually, yeah. So you have an actual cloud, cloud server that you have bare metal.

Richard Matthews: Yes, we have bare metal. We own the machine. If we stop paying them, they send us the machine back, that kind of thing. So it's actually our machine it's connected to the direct backbone of the internet. What's useful about that for us is these files can sometimes be really big, right? Like this squad cast interview that you and I are recording will probably end up being about six gigabytes.

So like three gigabytes for your side and three gigabits for my side. That's a lot of data to transfer back and forth. Especially depending on your team members, they might be in other countries or have weaker internet connections, or we travel all the time. So sometimes our internet's great.

And wait two or three hours for that? It would be unsustainable for us to do that at scale. So we have a survey

Kevin Rundle: That's also the server that you do the conversion on.

Richard Matthews: that we do what on?

Kevin Rundle: You do you, I can't think of the word. You compress it. You,

Richard Matthews: Oh, yeah.

Kevin Rundle: you change Kodak.

Richard Matthews: So we were doing the codec changing that would actually, it was on our checklist here. It was you know,

Kevin Rundle: Transcode. That's the word I was looking

Richard Matthews: And we're actually not doing that anymore because we've decided we have enough space and we're paying for enough things. We're actually not shrinking the files, but if you want to shrink the files, you can use handbrake or something to transcode the files as well.

And that would be the first step is to transcode them to be smaller. And so, and we just use one of handbrakes built in like presets. It's like set it to. Apple TV or whatever, which is generally good enough to for what we're looking for. And it'll cut the files in half or something without losing the quality.

And we were doing that with our staff, but we've recently stopped doing that because we're paying so much money to Google Drive and Descript that we have obscene amounts of hard drive space with them. So our next step is to create the Google folder, Google Drive folder, and we just do a backup of everything.

So we create a raw files folder we upload all the files, and then we update the Google Drive folder link in the parent task. And. So what I want to do real quick is just show you what that looks like. So we'll come over here and we'll open up Google Drive. And I'll just show you what some live client stuff looks like when we get in here is we use shared drives.

Raw files. Something like that. And we just upload and keep a backup of all of the raw footage on our Google Drive. So we have originals if we ever need them. And that's what we do. But this is we have we keep backups of everything that's for ourselves for our clients. If you ever want the raw footage in the future for other things, there's lots of good ways that you can use those assets in the future.

So it's a good idea to keep them and not delete them. You know, a lot of people will do that. They'll delete the original files and then they'll regret that later. So we always recommend keeping a backup of your raw files. And if you're going to do that, definitely transcode them first. If you're a if you're worried about the space that so that transcode step on handbrake is useful.

And then the last step there is we keep track of the Google Drive folder link, right? So this is the episode zero or whatever, we'll take this folder, the link for that folder, and we keep track of it on the parent tasks. So here's the parent task, and you'll see like, you have your custom fields, you can have custom fields on any of your project management systems, we keep track of that on here.

So they can just copy the URL or they can just click on it to open it instead of having to log into Google Drive, locate the hard drive that the client's folder is in, find the particular episode that they're in, and then go to the folders that they need. It's just a direct link and it speeds everything up.

And so all of these little things, they've been thought about because we do this regularly, if that makes sense. So, That's the the first one is to get the Google drive folder link. And then the next one is to create our project file in Descript, which is our video editing software.

So, if you're doing this all yourself, you don't need to use something like Descript, but Descript is really useful. So our set there is, you know, we add the files to it. We're going to create the sequences, what a sequence is, and Descript is just, it's taking uh, in this case, we'll have three video files.

We'll have the video file of me, we'll have the video file of you, and then we'll have the video file of our screen share. And what a sequence does is it just creates it puts all three of those together and lines them up, right? So like when you talk, you're talking at the right time and whatnot. So it's they're stacked, if that makes sense, instead of being like in a line.

So it turns them into a an actual video file. And that's our first step. And we have our file prep person do all of this. So when the video editor gets to it it's just ready for them. And they don't have to do any of the the management process. They can just do video editing, if that makes sense.

And the assignment over here is for our video editor. All of the things that they need are already there. They've got a link directly to the project. They've got a link directly to the Google drive and they don't need any other pieces on there. So that is the file prep task there is to get the Descript files.

And then the last couple of things here that we have on our checklist is we delete the recording from the recording software. So if they're in SquadCast, Riverside and Zencastr we remove it from the software. Cause now at this point we have backups in Google Drive and we have the project files in our video editing software.

So we don't need to have them. Taking up space. Essentially in the recording software, a lot of the recording softwares will have limits to how much you can store or how much the clients can store. And so we'll remove those out of the recording software. So it's not taking up their space. Does that make sense?

Kevin Rundle: makes total sense.

And so, the reason why this one doesn't just notify the next person is because the file prep task is our what would you call it? It is the task that kicks off the kicks everything off. And so the rest of the team hasn't generally been assigned yet and hasn't been given due dates. So the show manager comes in and they assign the pieces and the assigned due dates for when this show is.

supposed to be done, so they'll go through and be like, Hey, this episode needs to be done in two weeks. So we have to have this done by this day, this done by this day, this somebody's day and this somebody that day, right? All right. So we assign the due dates and the tasks and the show manager does that.

So whoever the next person on your team is even if it's you. You always want to have a step in the process that is to notify that person, let them know. So there's communication happening and the communication is actually part of the checklist to complete. So that's the first step is the file prep tasks done by one person and it's just in this case It's just moving the files around and making sure they're all in the right place and we have backups of everything and we got links all in the right spot.

Makes sense so far.

Kevin Rundle: total sense.

Richard Matthews: Yeah,

Richard Matthews: That's fun. Maybe we should use the video game. The video game one. That'd be more fun. Call them a showrunner You

Kevin Rundle: a show director.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, you're show director, that'd be fun.

Kevin Rundle: Yeah, so they use the director title in video games because the length of development is so long. So I've been reading a bunch about this for stupid personal reasons. But so, the composer that tends to add thoughts talks about it from the beginning. Perspective of both video games and movie and television and they talk about how basically the showrunner is Like you think of the director because they have their name and face associated with the movie or a TV sometimes but the showrunner is really the person who like grinds the gears and make sure all of the Dates are missed and the budgets are followed and

where they can Click on the buttons and download the things and move stuff from here to there. So you're looking for someone who's detail oriented. You're looking for.

Kevin Rundle: Yeah, and the checklist was pretty granular. Download the videos.

Richard Matthews: download videos, do this, do that, do the next thing, move them on. And as long as you have someone who can do that, it's not, this isn't a time intensive task unless you have terrible internet and you have to download files, whatnot.

So, that's where the Mac mini comes in and helps that out. It makes it a faster task for them. And so that's what you're looking for there. And then you'll see this one where it says phase one and phase two. Those, the reason it says phase one and phase two is because these are done by the same person.

And so the order for that, the reason why we do this prep and do the full video cut is the full video cut. is what our written assets team is going to need in order to come through and do all the written assets for it, because they'll have it. We have found it is easier to have the full cut video done first, rather than trying to do the written assets from the raw transcript from the raw the raw video, because there might be like, Edits and cuts that are moved out or sections that are removed from the thing.

Or what, some things happen where having the full cut video done first allows the creative, the written assets team to be a lot cleaner and faster. So that's why we do it. And

Kevin Rundle: make it much more concise. Makes sense to

Richard Matthews: yeah, it's more, more concise. So like, it'll have the tip and tail done. It'll have all the ums and ahs removed. It'll have a lot of things done already.

Let me see if I can if I can pull that out, but the, I'll have to add it to the checklist. I'm not sure why our checklist didn't show up. But the checklist on here is fairly simple. So I'll just go ahead and and just add it in here while we're talking. So the checklist on the prep and do full video cut is we do with something that's called a tip and tail, right?

So tip and tail, the video and tip and tail, the video means, you know, when you, whenever you get on a recording and you start recording, you generally have the couple of seconds where you're like, Hey, are we live? Can you hear each other? Yes. No, that kind of thing. At the end of the thing, you hit the stop recording.

And now you have. You have some dead space generally at the beginning of the video and you have some dead space at the end of the video and we cut those off, right? So that's called tip and tailing your video. And the next step for the video editor is going to be adding the scenes. And what adding scenes means is they're going to go through and There are places in the video, especially if it's a interview video like you and I are doing right now.

And they just go through and they decide where they're going to put those scenes in. Right. And so at the beginning, when you and I were talking back and forth, We might have one scene where you and I are talking. We're both on the screen, right? Cause we're having a conversation. And then the next scene might've been earlier, early in the video where I started talking and you started listening where my face might be big and your face might go down to the bottom and be smaller, right?

Does that make sense? So that might be a second scene. And then we switched into the screen share where like the screen might be the big thing and then you and I might be small on the lower left. That might be a third scene. And so they're going to go through the video and they're going to add the scenes.

Right? And they're not going to do any video editing to them. They're just going to mark where the scenes should be. Does that make sense?

Kevin Rundle: Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

As Generally wrong if I'm doing it live on video. That's how it goes. So we go through and we apply the scene templates and the scene templates

Kevin Rundle: as you follow the rules of the English language, it should be clear how it's spelled, right?

Richard Matthews: If only that's the way it worked. I got the several children that are learning English at the moment, you know at different states

Kevin Rundle: So all my kids are in French immersion here,

Richard Matthews: Oh, yeah.

Kevin Rundle: and so everything is literally spelled the way it sounds in French.

Richard Matthews: I mean, that's awfully nice.

Kevin Rundle: You know, it's right, like we, it's got that weird sound. It's going to start with O U

Richard Matthews: Yeah every

Kevin Rundle: but then we go, we've been teaching them. So was, so is the bird O U at, but then in English you're like, well, let's go through this even though you don't want to write that down and read it.

Kevin Rundle: like English,

Richard Matthews: sorry, I I cut into you there, but the scene templates are essentially the video edits, right? So, you know, the scene where we're saying, hey, we want to have, you know, me big and you small, or we want to have the screen share big and both of us small Descript allows us to have those scenes predefined, and our video editors, like, we'll pay a high end video editor to develop those templates for us.

So this video editor can just come in and say, like, here's all of our scenes, and then apply this template to the scenes. And so their video editing, the actual, like, style, is pretty quick and simple. And then it'll go through and it'll just be like adjust the templates, right?

So the templates are not always fantastic. Meaning like sometimes you'll say, Hey, like apply this template and then it'll put the wrong, like the wrong name on there. So they'll adjust the templates and make sure that like, Hey, Kevin's name is spelled right. And Richard's name is spelled right. And the captions are pulling up, right.

So they'll run the AI audio enhancements. It's called, in Descript, it's called Studio Sound. If you're using Final Cut Pro, it's just called Audio Auto, and you click the Auto button, and it runs the AI audio enhancements in Final Cut Pro. So depending on which video editing software, there'll generally be some sort of audio enhancements that you can run.

If you want to do it all manually, you can look this kind of stuff up. There is it's called leveling and compression and there's something else I can't remember, but they're all called denoising. And so we run a lot of those audio enhancements to make the audio sound good. And at that point you have essentially done all the things, right?

Kevin Rundle: this point, the video has been watched twice.

Richard Matthews: For the, well, at this point, the only person who's watched the video would be the video editor as they go through it.

Kevin Rundle: Just a video. Oh, okay. So the guy who makes scenes doesn't actually watch it?

Richard Matthews: So yeah, well, I mean, this person here that's doing the scenes, they'll probably go through and watch portions of it, and they're looking for like, hey when did the scenes change, and when does it make sense to put things where they may or may not watch the whole video unless they want to,

Kevin Rundle: okay, fair.

Richard Matthews: *To watch everything and so our subtasks to create written* assets, that's our next step. And this is where they're going to come through and look, I actually had the checklist on this one for you. The create written assets person, this is our writer. And so our writer is going to do a couple of things.

So the first thing they're going to do is they're going to edit the transcripts and they're going to make sure that the transcript that goes along with the video is clean. Right? And so the AI will do most of the transcript work 80 to 90 of it. And so they're actually going to watch the video generally at one and a half or two X speed.

The SRT files, that is a caption file that they use for hard of hearing stuff. We need to have that SRT file so we can upload it to YouTube and we can upload it with the the podcast on the podcast networks. And in the United States, at least if you are a business you have to make accommodations for hard of hearing.

It is part of Oh man, I'm going to get this wrong. Yeah it's part of the accessibility rules. And so it's actually a requirement.

Kevin Rundle: It's the American disabilities act. They,

Richard Matthews: Yeah, the ADA.

Kevin Rundle: that is exactly.

Richard Matthews: and so it's actually a requirement to have the SRT files. So we make sure we provide those for all of those. It's a and that's a, if you're not, selling any services to the marketplace. It's not a requirement, but most of our clients are. So since these are marketing materials generally speaking, we have to have the transcripts and that's part of the process.

So as they're listening, the process essentially is they choose those six short clips and they just highlight them in the transcript. Right, so they highlight the piece and be like, oh, that's a good one. And they pull those out. And then they're going to, they're going to edit

Kevin Rundle: you use uh, do you use any AI software to do that at all yet?

Richard Matthews: You, like, to make sure

Kevin Rundle: you tried?

Richard Matthews: to pick the short clips.

Kevin Rundle: Yeah

Richard Matthews: we've tried a number of them. The problem with all of the AI versions of picking the transcript clips is they don't tend to have the contextual understanding of the whole episode. Or like cultural understanding or other things and like they just they're not great so we use a human being to

Kevin Rundle: I know. I asked because I've tried a couple now and I uh, normally if they make you 10 clips, two of them are usable.

Right. And so it's, a, we get a much better quality when we have a human being select them. And then what they're going to do was, is in those actual individual clips is they're going to edit the transcript in detail which we're not going to do for the whole episode. Cause it doesn't make sense to do that.

But you'll hear like, while we're talking, I said things. Like, and sometimes you repeat something where it's like, I, or something like that where you are trying to talk and in an audio conversation that makes perfect sense. Right? And it's the way that we communicate and it's fine.

But on the short clips, when you only have 30 seconds or you only have 45 seconds to get a point across we'll go through and we'll edit those sections in detail, where they will come in and they will cut out any, you know, Duplicate words will cut out any unnecessary words. Or if an idea was like spread across a couple of sentences We might actually remove a couple of sentences in the middle.

And they don't do any of the video editing because that's where the phase two comes in. And it's just, that's part of the language work that the written asset person is doing. Does that make sense? And so they're going to move on

Kevin Rundle: perfect sense.

Richard Matthews: and then they're going to do the show notes. And so I know this is not this is not a very detailed part of the checklist.

But we have every show has a template for their show notes. And so the template has several aspects of the show. It'll have like what's the show description, the episode title. It'll have like what the show has talked about, what items were talked about on the show, any resources that were mentioned.

So whatever I told you now would be wrong in a few weeks. So whichever model is currently, like, doing the best work, we will pass the whole transcript into them. And we will give them our whole show notes template. And if you, do that well and you prompt them well, you can actually have the, you know, 80, 80 to 85 of the show notes templates written from the transcript.

And then the writer takes all of those and cleans it all up and finishes it. So the template so the uh, finished show notes actually look really good. And so that's the show notes portion. So they'll write the show notes and then they're going to write episode titles and they're going to write short clip titles for all the short clips they selected up here.

And they're going to write any of the captions. And so the caption is probably not the clearest word we could use there. But this, these are social media post text that are going to go with each of the short clips. And so they'll have,

Kevin Rundle: sense. It wasn't what I was thinking when you used the word caption, but now that you've said it, that makes perfect sense, because it's a caption that goes with the image or

And so they'll, use that and then they'll

Kevin Rundle: Yeah that's pretty good. I have some good prompting to take a single caption, a single social media text post. and change it contextually for six different platforms.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So that's,

Kevin Rundle: at one point I was like, when I post on, when I post on Facebook, I want it to be personal. When I post it on LinkedIn, I want it to be more professional.

So like how many emojis are you allowed to use? How many

Richard Matthews: yeah.

Kevin Rundle: It should there be a link or no link?

Richard Matthews: so that's what we're doing here

Kevin Rundle: really uses that well.

Richard Matthews: Is we have them write all of those and those all go into the same document. So the show notes will be in one, in the document that you showed the episode title will be in the document. Each of the short clips with their titles will be in that one document and all of the short clip captions.

And so they're going to finish all that up. And then when they're done. Again, notify the video editor and the thumbnail designer on the parent task comments that they're done, that they can move on to the next steps. And so that's the written assets. And now the written assets, the thumbnail designer can come through and make the the thumbnails.

And so the thumbnails I don't actually have any checklists for the thumbnails because Well, I don't know how to write a checklist for a designer at this point, but the they basically have two tasks and it is YouTube thumbnail. I didn't do the checklist part checklist. So YouTube thumbnail, and we have a podcast thumbnail.

Kevin Rundle: The right size.

And so generally it's going to have the host and the guest and the headline that the writer came up with for it. And like the episode number that kind of stuff that just make for a good. Podcast headline or a good podcast image. And so we do those for both the YouTube and the podcasting and the graphic designer does all of that.

And they need to have they need to have the written assets done in order to do that. Cause they'll have, that's where they're going to get the headline from and anything else. So that's the thumbnail design task. It's fairly quick and simple. Which is why, if you notice on this list here, it was notify the video editor and the thumbnail designer.

Because they can both start working at the same time. Cause the this person doesn't need the thumbnail designs done before they can do the video edits. And that's where we get to phase two phase two of the via the video editors work is now that all the written assets are done they're going to come through and finish off their tasks and their tasks to finish everything off.

We can, we're going to export a high quality uh, generally an MP3 file for the podcast networks. And then all of those the short clips that were edited and whatnot, we'll apply the templates to those and export them. And then we'll export the SRT files. And then all of that gets uploaded back over to the Google drive folder for backup.

And so instead of the raw footage file, there'll be a written assets folder. And that's where the any of the written stuff will be for the team. And there'll be a final audio and video. files folder, and there's also going to be one we do, we call it derivative content. And the derivative content, it's a financial term, but derivative just means, you know, a smaller piece of a larger thing essentially, or something was created from something else.

Uh, Need help with your spelling or I spelled derivative wrong earlier and now I know because I see yours which

yeah, no, you know, actually, I actually spelled it right. I could type something proper today on the video, but this is what, like, the Google Drive folder will look like when we're done and then every single episode will look exactly the same and have the same folder structure. So no matter.

Client we're looking at or which episode we're looking at. They'll always have these files with these things and all the backups of everything that we need, which makes it really easy for in the future. You know, I want to go back through and say like, Hey, go back through all of our last 15 episodes and find all of the transcripts.

For instance, all the transcripts will be in the written assets folder and pull out all of, you know, X, Y, Z or whatever. We want to turn those into a book, right? It's really easy to find everything. If you keep track of your files and folders like this.

Kevin Rundle: Yeah, we want more shorts, they know the raw footage is there

Richard Matthews: Yeah, you know, the raw footage is there.

And I would,

Kevin Rundle: your short clip, this is a question. I've thought about several times talking to you richard the suggestion is to That this is one of those things where it's like part of why post production sucks So bad is to actually format them slightly different for each of the platforms You So, like, when you do TikTok, the text is in this format on the bottom of it.

And when you do YouTube, the text for a vertical video might not exist or might be less and in this format. And when you do, do you guys do different versions for different platforms? Or

Richard Matthews: So when we're doing the short clips,

Kevin Rundle: and that's

Richard Matthews: so we will sometimes we were doing this in the past and we don't always do it anymore, but we, where we would like have the short clips and we would make portrait versions of them and we'd make square versions of them and we'd make the wide versions of them.

So we actually use the vertical videos. So they ask the asset, the video that you're attaching to it is the same. And then the only thing that changes is the caption that goes along with it. So like it'll, you know, You can have, you have more space to write on LinkedIn than you do on Twitter, for instance.

And so we'll have, when they're doing the written assets, they'll have different versions of them and that's all in that written assets folder. So when they get to scheduling, we use this.

Kevin Rundle: you don't have a separate video file bridge.

Richard Matthews: No, we don't. We use the same video file that makes life easy for us. And it makes life easy for our clients. And so we're not creating as much of separate things.

Kevin Rundle: Yeah, so, so the reason I asked that question so the guy who talked about it the most was Alex Tomosi talks about doing a different one for YouTube shorts than he does for TikTok, even if it's technically the same piece of video. They formatted it a little bit different.

They have a different template or whatever.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So you can do that.

Kevin Rundle: One that I watch pretty frequently that does business stuff and talks about that. And he also recommends you, like, you don't use the same exact video for TikTok that you use for YouTube Short.

Richard Matthews: yeah, you can

Kevin Rundle: just curious if you guys did that or not.

Richard Matthews: You can do different ones if you want. We don't and

Kevin Rundle: I don't see a reason, like, for me, TikTok and YouTube Shorts feel the same, except TikTok's longer,

If you use their built in captions versus putting them on the video file, they'll give you better distribution. Or, like, we'll make sure that when we upload to TikTok, we'll, like, use a trending sound and turn the volume down because you'll get some extra bump from the trending sound and things like that.

But those are all things that you can manage in your social media scheduling software. And so what our team will do is they'll schedule, it's like this is episode one, and they'll take, you know, the final video gets scheduled as a premiere on YouTube and the final audio gets scheduled on to Captivate or, you know, Podbean or whatever the podcast network is, and for that time and then all the short clips will be scheduled in the social media software for the next several days on the clips.

And that's it. Once they're, once all this is done, then the episode is done, we can move on to the next one. And because we use scheduling and we schedule all this stuff, you can actually get ahead a few weeks or as far as you have content recorded. And that's that's the whole process. That's all the checklist things that we work on.

Kevin Rundle: yeah, nice.

Like, I think, yeah, you can tell your process is pretty, pretty tight. You've obviously played with it over time and

Kevin Rundle: few things and,

Richard Matthews: we've gotten through it.

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They don't always call them task templates. They have different names for them, depending on the platform that you're using ClickUp uses task templates. And so like here's test episode two um, and we click on it. I'm gonna go to templates and browse templates. There is a, here's all of our post production templates.

And you can see for each of our clients, we have a post production template. And so depending on, you know, sometimes the show might be slightly different. So they'll have different checklists with them. But if I click on one of these and click use template it'll apply that template and apply all of the uh, all things.

You can see the tasks just sort of populated. And now this one has all of those all those subtasks are on there. So file prep, data management, written assets, thumbnail design is all added on there. So that's like one thing you can do is you can have task templates And then the other thing that you can do is sometimes you can depending on the platform.

And we'll say what do I want? Templates, duplicated tasks. Let's just select all for now. So, but anyways, you can say, like, when you want the task created, and then what you want to do is you want to apply a template and you can select the the template. And so like, here's that template. We want to use this one.

And so we click create on that. And now that automation is on, and now we've got the automation. What happens is when I put in test episode 003 instead of having to click on the thing and add the things, it'll take a couple of seconds, but you'll notice it'll start populating The the task template on there.

And so all of the checklists and everything got added to your task. And it's ready to go. And so like, you'll see him, it was like populating live while we were looking at it. It was adding on the checklists. And so. Those are some things that make your life easier is when you can add automations into that and keep track of like, Hey, every time I have a new episode, these are the things that I want to have added to it.

So by seven days it'll be done. We found that doesn't generally work too well

To

us

Kevin Rundle: Yeah, I presume it must exist there because it exists in Trello,

and

ClickUp tends to have better features than Trello, from my experience.

Not that there's anything wrong with Trello, but, like,

so there's.

I, I found the click up was more refined.

your system work better for you and it'll make work better for your team if you have your team members. And then the other one that is really useful to note, which this is not doing a good example of, is it's really useful to use to use verbs in the description of your task. So, like this says file prep tasks but it should probably say, you know, prep all the files for the episode, right?

So it's actually in a verb form tends to work better than just, saying, you know, I don't want you to call these are passive. So if you can put your task words in active inactive, like verb form, it actually tends to,

Kevin Rundle: Active voice? Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Voice, it works better. So like, if I come in here and take a look at my onboarding template, we've gone through and done a lot of that work already.

And so like those are all, that's all the verbs set up, assign and then engineer show assets. It's like, you know, create the show written assets, create the voiceover, create the graphic assets, create the video assets. So this is all verb driven. So if you uh, we're still in the process of refining that post production template one, but if you can, it works better if you have active voice, verb driven task setups.

And so that is that'll make your post production templates work a lot better. If you're using verb driven stuff, you have assignees on everything, you have due dates. And when you can tie in the automations to make your life simpler. So I know that's like, you know, drinking from the fire hose for project management stuff for the day, but that is that's how we manage it at scale, right?

So that's how we manage, you know, we're doing 300 plus pieces of post production every single week. So, you know, that means we're doing almost a thousand pieces of content a week. And that's the process you just looked at it. That's, those are the exact templates that we use to manage that kind of process.

And that's like a really high end version of how you do all of that. What we'll do here in this video is I'll include those checklists. I'll make sure that the phase one and two, their checklists aren't missing. Because I had to write those as we were going on my, test board. It didn't have the right automation to pull them in.

But the other thing that's really useful about that, is if you can on your checklists you can put links to your process documentation. And so links to your process documentation in your checklists is useful for two things. So one of them is you can hire a new person. And if you hire a new person when they get their checklist, you can assign the task to them and it'll have the checklist on there.

And then with the checklist, there's a link to the process document. So the actual assignment of the task can

Kevin Rundle: Oh, that's why I asked you how granular it was.

Richard Matthews: yeah. And so, I don't, I didn't have any

Kevin Rundle: depending on how granular it is, it can be used as training material also, almost.

These are the things that like, these are the essentials. If you don't check these things, you might die. Right? Like, so it's like, you know, you have to have your six clips done. You have to have your transcripts done, but you notice the checklist doesn't describe how to do the transcription, right? It doesn't describe how to select the clips.

It just says, make sure you get the six clips, right? And that's like, so the reason that's useful is because Not all of your people are going to be new all the time, right? And so you'll have a lot of senior people who have been working on this stuff for a long time, and all they need is the gut check of like, Yep, did that, yep, did that, yep, did the next thing.

So they can just check off, I did all the things. And, but if you have a new person, they have each of those items, and they have the training for it and like, okay, I need to do the descript the descript transcription process and they can click the document link that's there.

And so I might have one that I can show you, but essentially we just put a, we just put a checklist next to the checklist. Like, Hey, here's the SOP that goes along with this checklist. And so if you have that, now you have both your senior people can click on it. If they need refreshers or stuff like that and your new people, you can actually use the task assignment as a way to train them.

So they're getting trained like live in the application of your tasks. So, that's project management from a uh, high level.

Kevin Rundle: I guess I owe you a beer. You managed to do it in less than 60 minutes, even with me going off on tangents.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. So. So that's all there is to that. I know that was, it was a lot of just samples and stuff like that. What I said, what we'll do is we'll put our checklists in the resources below this episode. So you can have them probably put them as like a PDF, and then you can build those into whatever project management system you want to use our recommendations.

If, as you're just getting started, use Trello, Trello is cheap and it's, I think it's free actually to start and you can get, you can build one workflow that just follows those things.

Kevin Rundle: it's free to start, actually.

Richard Matthews: Free to start. And then, you

Richard Matthews: Yeah,

Kevin Rundle: And what you're really missing is like straight up automations, but until you're working with several people, the automations don't matter quite as much

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So,

Kevin Rundle: you're going to still use the templates,

Richard Matthews: you can still just apply them. And that's where it's like, you can create the template and just apply the template manually each time. So, Trello's a great place to

start.

Kevin Rundle: right? Yeah, you can still create the template and you just can't make it happen that magically

Richard Matthews: So that's

Kevin Rundle: we built, we ended up starting to pay because we built front end systems for creating all our cards where there was actually a form that people filled out on a web page and it produced the cards.

do.

We built, we assigned all the due dates

Richard Matthews: Yeah. so what we'll do from here is we'll move on. Now we've got, you know, you've got, you know, this whole beginning of the process is, you know, now you've got your mini studio in place and you've got a content library in place and you've got you know how to outline content and now you know how to do the post production of the content.

And again, thank you so much for coming on and having this conversation with me, Kevin.

Kevin Rundle: You're very welcome. Richard.

Richard Matthews: Thanks for joining us this week on PBP.Fm. Make sure to visit our website PBP.fm where you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or via RSS so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it, if you found value in the show, we'd appreciate a rating on Apple Podcasts. Or if you'd simply tell a friend about the show, that would help us out too.