How to edit a podcast: steps, software and when to hand it to an editor

How to edit a podcast, step by step

Whatever software you use, the order of work is almost always the same, and sticking to it saves hours.

First, back up and organise. Before touching anything, copy the original files to two places and name them with the episode number and the person. A lost file can't be rescued in the edit.

Second, sync. If there is one mic per person and several cameras, line up every track so they sound and look in time. That clap at the start of the recording exists for exactly this.

Third, the rough cut. Listen to the whole episode and remove what adds nothing: the chat before you start, a tangent that went nowhere, a question that didn't land. This is also where you decide how the episode opens, usually with its best minute.

Fourth, the fine cut: long silences, repeated sentences, stumbles. Leave some filler words in, because if you remove every one the conversation sounds robotic.

Fifth, the sound. Clean up noise, match the voices and keep the volume even from start to finish. Apple Podcasts recommends a level of around -16 LUFS, and other platforms ask for something similar.

Finally, intro, captions and export. On The Sage Steele Show, which we post-produce with our partner Dull Light, each episode arrives as two to three hours of raw footage, and this order is what lets us deliver it on time week after week.

Which software to use to edit a podcast

Software worries people a lot at the start and matters little later. What counts is that it handles several tracks at once and that you can use it fluently.

For an audio-only podcast, Audacity is free and runs on Windows and Mac, and GarageBand comes installed on every Mac. If you want more control for cleaning up voices, Adobe Audition is widely used by sound professionals.

For a video podcast you need a proper video editor. CapCut and Canva work for simple jobs and for cutting clips on your phone, but they fall short with three cameras and an hour of conversation. That's where Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve come in; Resolve has a very complete free version and brings editing, colour and sound together in one program. We edit our episodes in DaVinci Resolve.

What about editing on your phone? A short audio episode, yes, with patience. A multi-camera video episode isn't worth it: the screen is small and the phone struggles with files that heavy.

One practical tip: pick a program and stick with it. Every switch sends you back to square one, and what really speeds up editing is repeating the same workflow every week, with the same folders, the same intro and the same sound settings.

Editing a video podcast: what changes

In video, on top of the audio work there is one more layer: directing the edit. At every moment you have to decide which shot is on screen.

The basic rule is to cut to whoever is talking, but a good edit does more than that. It cuts to the guest's face when they hear something surprising, opens up to the two-shot when the conversation heats up and goes back to the close-up when someone shares something personal. That rhythm is what stops an hour-long interview from dragging. For there to be options, the recording has to be planned for it: one camera per person and a wide shot is usually enough.

Then comes colour. Every camera sees skin tones its own way, and if they aren't matched, viewers notice the jump at every cut even if they can't say why.

And then there is the show's identity. On Aladetres, a Spanish interview podcast on economics and society whose post-production we handle entirely, every episode opens with a 30 to 45 second intro with motion graphics and original music. On BioHack-It, a health podcast we post-produce with Dull Light, on-screen graphics explain the science so nobody gets lost. Neither comes from a template: they are designed for each show and repeated in every episode.

Can you edit a podcast with AI? And how long does it take?

Yes, and today AI saves a lot of heavy lifting. It transcribes the episode, lets you cut by deleting sentences from the text, removes filler words, cleans background noise and suggests moments for clips. For the first cut of an audio podcast, it genuinely helps.

What it doesn't do well is exactly what decides whether someone keeps watching. It doesn't know the best opening, can't tell a pause that should go from a silence that says a lot, and doesn't understand when to cut to the guest's reaction. Nor does it know which sentence could land the interviewee in trouble. That's why we use it as an assistant, to transcribe or find moments, and a person makes the decisions.

And for free? That's possible too: Audacity and the free version of DaVinci Resolve cover everything you need. What isn't free is the time.

That's the part almost nobody mentions. The first time you edit an episode it takes far longer than the episode itself, and much longer with several cameras. Practice and a fixed workflow bring it down, but it's still hours of work per episode. If you also want pieces for Instagram, TikTok and Shorts, add another round; we explain it in how to turn your podcast into short clips for social.

When it's worth handing the edit to an editor

Editing your own podcast makes sense at the start: you learn how your show sounds and what your conversations don't need. But there comes a point where it stops paying off. It usually shows in three ways: you spend more hours editing than preparing episodes, you start skipping weeks, or the show already has an audience and you want to grow on YouTube and social media with a finish you don't have time to give it.

What a podcast editor charges depends on the same things that make the job good: how many hours of raw footage, how many cameras, the level of colour and sound finishing, whether it includes an intro, thumbnails and clips, and how often an episode comes out. The sensible move is to ask for a per-episode plan with all of that spelled out and to test it with the first one.

That's how we work at Bostak Films. With Aladetres we have post-produced more than a hundred episodes, and the channel has grown from around 100,000 to more than 800,000 YouTube subscribers. And you don't need to record nearby: remote post-production works the same whether you record in Barcelona, London or across the Atlantic.

If you want to stop wrestling with the edit, book a free diagnosis: we look at one of your episodes and tell you how we would edit it. Everything we do is on our podcast production page.

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