Podcast editor: what they do, the software they use and how to hire a good one

What a podcast editor does

Search for "podcast editor" on Google and most of what comes up is software: Adobe Podcast, CapCut, Kapwing, Clipchamp. So it's worth clearing up the term, because it means two things. A podcast editor can be an app you edit with yourself, or a person you send the recording to and who returns the finished episode. This article is about the second one, although we also tell you when the first is enough.

That person's job has three parts. The first is technical: removing background noise, matching the volume of everyone speaking and giving the voice body without bumps or clicks. The second is editing proper: deciding what stays and what goes, cutting repetition, moving an answer earlier if it works better there and keeping the pace up. The third is judgment, and it's the least visible one: understanding where the good moment is in a two-hour conversation and getting the episode to it.

On The Sage Steele Show, an interview show with more than 220,000 subscribers on YouTube, we start from two or three hours of raw footage per episode. The hard part there is choosing, which is why the first thing we look at in an editor is how they decide.

What changes when the podcast is on video

An audio-only podcast can be edited by one person with a good pair of headphones. On video, the work multiplies, because the picture gets added to all of the above.

You have to sync cameras and sound, choose who is on screen at each moment, grade the color so that all the cameras look like they belong in the same room, and add captions, graphics or images when they help people understand something. On BioHack-It, a show about health and longevity, the graphics explain complicated scientific ideas, and that's as much a part of the edit as the cuts are.

Then there's everything that comes out of the episode: the intro, the thumbnails, the titles and the vertical clips. Albert Murillo, our creative director, sums it up with an idea he repeats a lot: the full episode builds loyalty and the clips bring in new people. If your editor only hands you the episode, you've got half the piece.

So when you hire, ask what the word "editing" actually includes. For some people it means cleaning up the audio and nothing else. For others it's everything we've just described. The full list is in what happens in podcast post-production.

Which editor can I use to make podcasts?

This is one of the questions that comes up most on Google, and the answer depends on what you want to do.

If you're starting out and recording audio with one or two voices, text-based editors are a good way in: they transcribe the recording and you delete sentences as if it were a document. Descript works like that, and Adobe Podcast cleans up voices quite well in the browser. For simple videos, CapCut or Clipchamp get a lot done without much learning.

If the show has several cameras and you want a polished finish, sooner or later you'll end up in a professional tool like DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro or Final Cut, with a much longer learning curve.

What about artificial intelligence? Today it's very good at the repetitive parts: removing silences, transcribing, generating subtitles, switching camera according to who's talking or suggesting clips. At Bostak we have our own system that turns a horizontal episode into a batch of vertical reels, so we're not saying this out of distrust. What AI still doesn't do well is decide: which moment should open the episode, which joke lands, when a silence says more than a sentence. That's why our team spends its time choosing, not trimming.

How a podcast gets edited, in short

Every editor has their habits, but the order is usually this.

First the material gets organized and everything is synced. Then the whole recording gets listened to, or its transcript read, because you can't cut well what you don't know. That leads to the first assembly, which sets what stays and in what order. Then comes the fine work: camera cuts, pacing, sound and the mix. After that, color and graphics. And finally the episode is exported and the pieces for social get prepared.

If you want to do it yourself, we have a step-by-step guide in how to edit a podcast.

What you can't see in that list is what takes most effort on a weekly show: having everything come out the same every week. On The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast we run a recurring pipeline of long episodes with several cameras, color, sound and clips, and the value lies as much in each piece as in the next one arriving on time with the same finish. A good editor takes a problem off your mind for years, and one who lets you down on a Tuesday hands it straight back.

How to hire a podcast editor

You have three routes: a freelancer, a specialist production company or agency, or someone on staff. A freelancer usually works well for a show with a simple format and a calm schedule. A production company makes sense when you want the episode, intro, thumbnails and clips made with the same judgment, or when you can't afford for one person's sick leave to stop the show. A staff editor pays off if you produce a lot, all year round.

Before you decide, run these checks. Ask for full episodes, because anyone can make a one-minute sample look good. See whether those shows are still publishing with that editor, which is the best sign the work holds up. Ask who reviews the episode before it reaches you and how many rounds of changes are included. Agree a fixed schedule: which day they get the material and which day they deliver. And do a paid trial with one episode before committing to a whole season.

And something many people forget: an editor works better if you tell them who the show is for. Give them two or three episodes or channels you like, tell them what you never want to see and note down the moments that felt good during the recording. Ten minutes of your time saves them hours and avoids rounds of changes.

How much does a podcast editor charge? We don't give figures, because too much depends on what's being asked for: length of the raw footage, number of cameras, whether there are graphics, how many pieces come out of each episode and the turnaround. What really adds work is what gets added along the way, and what affects the price of a video podcast breaks it down.

Why shows trust us with their edit

We handle the full post-production of Aladetres, a Spanish-language history and current affairs podcast with more than 170 episodes on YouTube. With Albert and his team, the channel went from around 100,000 subscribers to more than 800,000, and episode 145, with José Luis Cava, has passed 2.6 million views. The intros, 30 to 45 seconds with motion graphics and original music, are our signature.

In English, together with our partner Dull Light in Miami, we handle post-production for Jordan B. Peterson's Lectures, Sadia Khan's The Brutal Truth and Peter Crone's Finding Freedom, among others. The team works remotely from Spain for shows in several countries, so it doesn't matter where you record as long as the material reaches us properly.

If you're looking for an editor, or the one you have can't keep up any more, tell us about it. Our video podcast production page shows how we work, and if you'd rather go straight to it, book a free diagnosis: we look at your show or your idea over a video call and tell you honestly what we'd change and whether we're a good fit.

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