How We Produce an Episode

Below is the documentation on how our team produce each PyPodcats episode.

There are various stages involved to produce a PyPodcats episode:

Speaker invitation
Episode recording
Editing
Reviewing
Transcribing
Publishing

Detailed Documentation on How to publish an Episode of PyPodcats

Notes:

Links with the lock icon 🔐 are private and can only be accessed by PyPodcats team members.
If you are a PyPodcats team member and having trouble accessing the links, please reach out on Slack.

As a PyPodcats team member, you should have access to the following:

Our GitHub repository
PyPodcats Google Drive 🔐
PyPodcats Episodes on Google Drive 🔐
PyPodcats Speaker Info Form on the PyPodcats Google Drive 🔐
Veed.io
StreamYard
Buffer
Calendly

Credentials for the above are found on Notion.

Tools that are needed for the “Publishing” step:

Python
ffmpeg
ffprobe
Hugo static site generator

Detailed Steps

1. Speaker Invitation

Write an email inviting them to the podcast
- Send the email using meow at pypodcats dot live email address, hosted through Fastmail
Prepare a collaboration doc on Google Docs
Ask the speaker to fill in Speaker Information form
Schedule a prep call & tech check session: 30 minutes, schedule through Calendly
Schedule the episode recording: 1 hour, schedule through Calendly

2. Episode Recording

Create the StreamYard recording link
Share the StreamYard recording link with speaker
Include the StreamYard recording link on the Prep Notes for easy discovery

3. Editing

Download raw videos from StreamYard: the composite video, and individual local recordings
Create new folder on Google Drive under the PyPodcats > Episodes 🔐 folder
- Example folder name: “Ep 6 - Niharika Vadluri”
- Example folder path: PyPodcats > Episodes > Ep 6 - Niharika Vadluri
Upload the raw videos to this folder
Let Georgi know that the videos are ready for editing
Produce:
- trailer video
- full episode video
- artwork (using provided photo and information from the speaker info form)
- necessary promotional materials
Upload all assets to the Speaker folder on PyPodcats > Episodes > Speaker folder
Folder structure:
- PyPodcats
  - Episodes
    - Ep 1 - Speaker Name
      - Ep 1 - trailer
      - Ep 1 - full
      - Ep 1 - raw
    - Ep 2 - Speaker Name
      - Ep 2 - trailer
      - Ep 2 - full
      - Ep 2 - raw

4. Reviewing

Let other team members know that the episode is ready for review
Share the trailer and full episode with the speaker for review
Make any further editing based on feedback from other team members and speaker
Reupload any updates to the same folder

5. Transcribing

Once episode is approved, proceed to transcribe and subtitle using Veed.io
Go to veed.io, providing the pypodcats.live email address
The login info will be sent to the email address, click on it to login
On veed.io, Create a new project, upload the video/ trailer
Choose the “Subtitle” on the left. Options:
- Language: English
- Detect speakers: yes
- Click the “auto-subtitle” button
Review the generated subtitle, listen to the video, and make edits.
- fix any typos, especially speaker names
- Ensure proper capitalization, eg PyPodcats, Python, PSF, PyLadies, etc
- If necessary, clarify spellings with the speaker.
Ensure the subtitle is readable on the video
- The subtitle text should have black background
Once finished, Download the subtitle as .SRT file
Export the video. Options:
- Click “Done” button on the top right
- Burn Subtitles: yes
- Click the “Export Video” button
Once exported, download the video as both MP3 and MP4.
- MP4 is to be uploaded to YouTube
Repeat this for both the trailer and the full episode
Upload the subtitled videos, and the .SRT files to the Speaker Episode folder on Google Drive.
- Ensure to include “captioned” in the filename so that we can distinguish between the video with subtitle and without

6. Publishing

Internal team workflow

Gather all the videos, transcript (at this point, everything should have been on one folder on Google Drive)
Create the webpage for the episode/trailer
- Create a new branch under the psf/the-invisibles GitHub repository, e.g. add-ep-6-trailer
- Create new files (you can copy/look at content from previous episodes):
  - f"assets/images/ep{episode_number}-{speaker_name}.jpg": The cover image for the episode (png works too)
  - f"assets/images/{speakername}.jpg": The speaker photo (download from the Speaker Info Form. png works too)
  - f"content/english/episodes/ep{number}-trailer.md": write up about the trailer episode (more details below)
  - f"content/english/episodes/ep{number}.md": write up about the full episode (more details below)
  - f"content/english/speakers/{speaker_name}.md" : speaker bio page: photos, links, etc
  - f"static/audio/hidden-figures-ep{number}-trailer.mp3:": mp3 of the trailer
  - f"static/audio/hidden-figures-ep{number}.mp3:": mp3 of the full episode
  - f"static/audio/transcript/hidden-figures-of-pyhon-ep{number}-trailer.srt:": transcript of the trailer
  - f"static/audio/transcript/hidden-figures-of-pyhon-ep{number}.srt:": transcript of the full episode
- Commit, push, and create a pull request
- Example Pull request: https://github.com/psf/the-invisibles/pull/40
Preview the episode (check the Netlify Deploy Preview), share the preview with teammates and speaker
Validate the RSS feed format
- Once Netlify preview has been built, go to {netlify preview url}/episodes/index.xml. This is the RSS Feed url.
- Enter the RSS Feed url to https://www.castfeedvalidator.com/
- Ensure everything is green

YouTube workflow

Once videos, transcript, and writeups are done, share the Speaker Folder with The PSF (Marie Nordin)
- At this point: the artwork and writepups should also be on the Speaker Google Drive folder
- Provide the YouTube title and description via Google Docs (include the docs on Google Drive)
- DM her on The PSF Slack
Let her know that the episode is ready for publishing to YouTube
- Schedule it for publishing
- Usually we do it on 9 AM US Eastern timezone / 1 PM UTC
Once YouTube video has been uploaded, update the webpage with the YouTube ID in the frontmatter

Scheduling

Set the desired schedule dates into the webpage frontmatter
Ensure YouTube video ID is updated
Commit and merge the pull request
There is a scheduled GitHub action that rebuilds the site every hour. The content will eventually be published automatically
Promote on social media
- Draft the announcement on buffer. Credentials in Notion.

Publishing to Spotify/Apple Podcast etc

This happens automatically, so there is nothing else to do. They are configured to pick up changes from our RSS Feed at https://pypodcats.live/episodes/index.xml.

As long as our rss feed is valid, any new episodes will appear. That is why we need to always validate the RSS feed before merging.

More technical details on the Episode Write up

Episode/Trailer writeup should be created under the content/english/episodes/ directory as a new markdown file, e.g f"content/english/episodes/ep{number}-trailer.md"

Update the episode frontmatter with the correct information.

The information on this frontmatter is used to generate the RSS Feed for our podcast at /episodes/index.xml, which is consumed by podcast apps like Spotify, Apple Podcast, Overcast.fm, etc.

Therefore, it is important to have these info as accurate and correct as possible.

Example frontmatter for a full episode. (You can always copy from any previous episode)

title: "Episode 5: with Mona Obedoza"
meta_title: "Episode 5 with Mona Obedoza"
description: "Learn about Mona Obedoza from the Philippines to hear about her journey in technology. She started learning to code at five years old, and now she is teaching other kids to code."
date: 2024-07-24T05:00:00-07:00
host: [ "Georgi", "Tereza"]
draft: false
tags: ["python", "public speaking", "coding for kids", "youth", "Philippines", "mental health"]
publish_date: 2024-07-24T05:00:00-07:00
podcast_file: "/audio/hidden-figures-ep5.mp3"
podcast_duration: 2372.257959
episode_image: "images/ep5-mona.png"
podcast_bytes: "55887490" # the length of the episode in bytes
images: ["images/ep5-mona.png", "images/mona_obedoza.png"]
explicit: false 
type: 'episode'
episode: '5'
season: 1
transcript: '/transcript/hidden-figures-of-python-ep5.srt'
episode_type: full
layout: episode
youtube_id: SDipvSE21Es

The fields should be self-explanatory (hopefully), but here are some fields that might need special attention:

episode_type: It should be either episode or trailer
youtube_id: This is the ID from the YouTube video that got uploaded to The PSF’s YouTube channel The HTML template will pick this field up automatically to render the YouTube video in each episode
podcast_bytes and podcast_duration: This is generated using the print_metadata.py script.

Printing the metadata using Python

Create and activate a virtual environment.

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Install the dependencies:

pip install -U pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

From the root of this repository, run the script:

python print_metadata.py {path to the audio/video file}

Copy the values printed to the podcast_byes and podcast_duration in the frontmatter.

Other useful ffmpeg commands

Extracting audio from video

Use this to generate mp3 audio file from a video

ffmpeg -i filename.mp4 filename.mp3

Scale the video/audio down

Sometimes you may need to scale down the video/trailer before sharing on social media. It can be scaled down using ffmpeg.

To scale half size:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vf "scale=trunc(iw/4)*2:trunc(ih/4)*2" new_file_half_the_size.mkv

To scale one-quarter size:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vf "scale=trunc(iw/8)*2:trunc(ih/8)*2" new_file_quarter_the_size.mkv