When a host tells me they want done for you podcast editing, what they usually mean, right, is that they want to stop thinking about the show the moment they stop talking, and I completely understand that, because most of the hosts who come to us have been doing the recording and the editing and the clips and the show notes themselves for months, and the show has slowly turned into a second job they never applied for.
The good news is that most of that second job can move to a team. The slightly less comfortable news is that some of it cannot, and the shows that go wrong with an editing service, right, are almost always the ones where nobody drew the line clearly at the start. So I want to draw that line properly here, from the inside, because I run Pixel Samy Podcast and this is the conversation we have with nearly every new show.
What does done for you podcast editing actually include?
It should include everything that happens after you upload the files, the sync, the cut, colour, the audio mix, graphics, sponsor reads, clips and show notes, with you only stepping back in to give one pass of notes.
Basically, the line sits at the upload. Your last job before the edit is getting the recordings into the shared folder we set up for you, every camera and every audio track at full size, and the moment that upload finishes the episode stops being your problem and becomes ours. On our side someone lines the angles up with the sound, a person sits with the whole conversation from the first minute to the last and makes the cuts, the colour gets balanced, the audio gets levelled and cleaned, your intro, outro, lower thirds and sponsor reads go in, and inside two days there is a cut waiting for you. You watch it once, put everything you want changed into a single message, and the corrected version is back a working day after that. The page on podcast post production goes through each of those stages in more detail, and the short version is that if you are opening an editing app after the upload, the service is not really done for you.
The part that stays with you, and why
Here is the thing, right, the conversation itself cannot be delegated, and I would be lying if I said otherwise. Nobody on my team can make a guest more interesting than they were in the room, and nobody can ask the follow up question you forgot to ask. The edit can protect a good conversation, tighten it, give it pace, but it cannot invent one. So the parts that stay with you are the ones that happen before and during the recording, which guests you book, what you ask them, how you set up the room and the cameras, and how you show up on the day.
The edit can make a good conversation feel great, but it cannot turn an empty one into a show.
The other thing that stays with you is the final say. We send a cut, you watch it once, you tell us what you want changed. That single pass is the one bit of post production I would never take away from a host, because it is your name on the episode.
Can clips and show notes be done for you too?
They can, and in a done for you setup they really should be, because both are add-ons the same editors handle, captioned vertical clips at 25 dollars a clip and show notes with chapters at 35 dollars an episode, written by people who have already heard every minute of it.
That last part matters more than people think, right, because a clip cut by someone who never watched the full episode tends to be the loudest thirty seconds instead of the best thirty seconds, and show notes written from an automatic transcript tend to read like a list of topics with no point to them. Because our editors have already been through the whole conversation, they know where the actual moment is, so the clip and the notes come from the same understanding as the cut. The shorts and clips page shows the formats, and the show notes and chapters page covers how we write them. If you want chapters to show up on YouTube itself, Google explains the format in its video chapters help article, and we write the timestamps to match.
What about publishing, is that done for you as well?
Publishing is where I would be careful with the phrase, because what lands in your folder is a finished file for YouTube, one for Spotify and an audio master for whichever podcast host you use, and the actual press of the publish button normally stays on your side.
The reason is simple, right, publishing involves your accounts, your schedule and your titles, and most hosts want to own those decisions or have someone in their own team own them. If you want your podcast feed to show up on YouTube, Google has a guide on how to deliver podcasts to YouTube with an RSS feed, and it is a one time setup more than a weekly task. If you really want the whole channel run for you, uploads, scheduling, the lot, that is a different job, and it sits with Pixel Samy Studio, which does YouTube management as a full content and distribution agency. To be very honest, most podcast hosts do not need that level of help, they just need the files ready to drop in on publish day.
How much of my time does done for you editing really save?
Most of the hours after the recording, because what is left for you is the upload and one review pass, and both of those are measured in minutes rather than evenings.
I will not put a number of hours on it, because it depends completely on how you were editing before. What I can tell you is what disappears from your week, the syncing, the cutting, the hunting for a good clip, the fiddling with audio levels, the writing of notes, the exporting in three formats. What remains is watching your own episode once, which you should be doing anyway, you see what I mean, right, and writing down what you want changed. If you want that single pass to stay short, my notes on the revision round that actually works show how to write it.
How do you keep the show sounding like me if I hand it over?
Before the first edit we study a few of the episodes you have already published and carry your opening, your name titles, your cutting rhythm and your colour across from them, so a listener who has been with you for a year hears the same show next week.
This is the biggest worry I hear, right, that handing the show over means it starts feeling like somebody else's show. In practice the opposite tends to happen, because a team that edits more than 400 podcast episodes a month gets very good at studying a host's rhythm, where you like the pauses, how long you let a laugh run, how fast you cut between angles on a multi-cam. On top of that, writing a one page style guide helps a lot, and the post on the podcast editing style guide shows what goes in it. Sponsor reads follow the same idea, they should sound like you talking, and the sponsor integration page covers how we place them.
What should you hand over with the files?
Hand over the raw camera files and audio, each guest's name and title spelled the way they want it, any sponsor scripts or links, and one line about anything that must not go out.
That is really all the context a team needs to finish the job without chasing you with questions. The name and title matter because a misspelled lower third is the one mistake a guest always notices, and the sponsor details matter because a read placed in the wrong spot or carrying an old link becomes a problem with the sponsor, not just with the episode. The do not publish line is the one people forget, a comment about a client, an unannounced product, a number that was said by mistake, and a single sentence in the upload folder saves a whole revision round later. If you record remotely, send each person's local recording as well as the call recording, because the local files are almost always cleaner. After that you are done until the first cut arrives.
What does done for you editing cost per episode?
For the typical solo host recording on one camera, the whole hand off costs 199 dollars an episode on our Starter plan for recordings up to sixty minutes, agreed before we start, and the multi-cam plan, the other lengths and the monthly discount are on the pricing section.
The way I would think about that number is not against other editors but against your own evenings, right. For instance, say editing an hour long episode yourself, with the clips and the notes and the exports, eats one full evening a week. Over a quarter that is twelve or thirteen evenings, and the real question is whether those evenings are worth more to you spent on guests, on your business or on your family than the per episode price, and for most hosts who are actually busy the answer arrives very quickly. The other thing hosts worry about with any service is getting stuck in it, and there is nothing to get stuck in here, because you pay episode by episode and can stop whenever the show changes direction. My honest advice is to hand over four episodes in a row before you judge it, because the first one is where the team learns your rhythm and the fourth is where you find out what your week actually feels like without the edit in it.
When is done for you the wrong choice?
If editing is the part of podcasting you genuinely enjoy and your show is small, keep doing it yourself, because a service makes sense when the edit is costing you time you would rather spend elsewhere.
That is one. Secondly, right, if your show needs a producer who books guests, writes questions and runs the recording, an editing service is not that, and a full production company is the better fit even though it costs much more. And the third case, if your recordings are not happening consistently, no editing team will fix that, the bottleneck is the calendar, not the cut. For the hosts who record regularly and just want everything after the upload to stop eating their evenings, I'm pretty sure a done for you edit is the easiest win in the whole show.
Getting started
The whole sequence, step by step, lives on the how it works page. If you would like a price, spend 15 minutes with me on a call, I go through what you have published so far and give you one, and samy@pixelsamy.com is there if you would rather write. If you want better material to hand over, the post on questions that produce clippable answers is a good thing to read before your next recording, because the conversation is still yours, right, and everything after it can be ours. So yeah. That's my way of saying it.