Comedy Editing

Published on 4 February 2006 in , , , ,

Since getting my new PC, I’ve been taking stock and reviewing some of the stuff I’ve got on my hard drive – which is quite a lot actually. Old websites, copies of letters, and a bucket load of WAV files of goodness knows what.

But most of all, I’ve been trawling through the several gigs worth of radio comedies that I’ve recorded from BBC7 and BBC Radio 4 over the last few years, and still haven’t managed to listen to yet.

Amongst the piles of MP2s recorded from my Bug DAB radio, are countless episodes of Radio Active, The Very World of Milton Jones, The Huddson and Pepperdine Show and of course, the classic I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. There’s entire series of shows, and in some cases, the same episode five times. All of which need to be listened to, checked to make sure there are no flaws in the audio, and binned or kept as appropriate.

Those that are kept then need editing to remove stray bits of Dads Army (always Dads Army for some reason) if it’s from BBC7, or the news if it’s Radio 4.

It’s this last stage that was always particularly painful on my old PC binky. One simple piece of a half hour programme, and saving it out again would easily take 15 minutes, making it rather tortuous to do. Thankfully those days are now gone, and I’ve been racing through the files like no ones business! Now if I could just listen to and sort out the other 3 gigs worth of files that haven’t even been opened once since I recorded them, I might really get somewhere…