Outsourcing your podcast edit: a handover guide

You have decided to stop editing your own show. Good. The hard part is supposed to be over, and yet a surprising number of first months with a new editor go badly for reasons that have nothing to do with editing skill. The audio comes back fine. It just comes back late, or missing a guest, or with the wrong name in the show notes, and nobody can quite explain why.

Almost always the cause is the handover. Choosing an editor is a decision problem, and we covered it in how to choose a production company. Handing over is a logistics problem, and it is the one nobody writes a guide for. This is that guide, based on what actually turns up on our drives when a new show arrives.

What does a podcast editor actually need from you?

Three things, in this order of importance: every track you recorded, enough context to know who is talking, and a sense of what you want the show to sound like.

Every track, not the mix. If you recorded remotely, your platform almost certainly saved a separate high quality file for each speaker on each speaker's own machine, then made you a convenient combined version. Send both, but the separate ones matter far more. An editor working from separate tracks can fix one person's cough without touching the other person's sentence. An editor working from a single mixed file cannot, and every repair becomes a compromise.

Who is speaking. This sounds too obvious to state until you see what transcription software produces. Premiere's automatic transcription does not identify speakers by name at all: it labels every single line "Unknown". Any editor working from that transcript is inferring attribution from context, and that inference feeds straight into your chapter titles, your show notes and the caption on every clip. One line in your handover message ("host is on the left camera, guest is Dr Ana Reyes, she goes by Ana on air") prevents a category of error that is otherwise invisible until it is published.

References, not adjectives. "Punchy" and "professional" mean nothing. Two links to episodes of other shows you admire, with one sentence each about what you like, will shape a first edit more than a page of description. If you have an existing back catalogue, say which episode sounds most like the show you want to make.

Everything else is optional. Notes on sections to cut, timestamps you already love, a list of names and technical terms that will be spelled wrong otherwise: all genuinely useful, none of it worth delaying a handover for.

What does the first handover week look like?

Roughly this, assuming you send files on a Monday.

The first stage is transfer, and it is the stage everyone budgets zero time for. Podcast video files are enormous in a way that catches people out. On one multi-camera show we work with, the individual camera masters for a single episode run between roughly 10GB and 56GB each, and there are several angles per episode. A leaner three-camera setup on another show produces masters around 610 to 665MB per angle plus a pair of combined audio tracks at about 67MB. Audio-only handovers are trivial by comparison. Video handovers are a real logistical event, and a show that records on Friday and expects a first cut on Monday has usually forgotten that the files have to physically get somewhere first.

Then the edit. At Joycast that means the whole distance between the raw files and something you would publish: multi-camera angles synced and switched, voices cleaned and levelled, music and graphics stacked on top. We work in weekly cycles, so a review version comes back to you well inside the week and the finished episode, clips and artwork with it. Your editor's numbers may differ, and the number matters less than whether they will commit to one in writing.

Then review, and this is where a first cycle either builds trust or does not. Give timestamped notes rather than impressions. "At 14:20 the music is too loud under the answer" is actionable. "The middle drags" is a conversation. Both are legitimate, but only one gets fixed the same day.

Which handover mistakes make outsourcing disappointing?

These are the ones we see repeatedly, and none of them is about talent.

The missing guest track. On one remote-recorded interview show, the guest's answers were largely absent from the finished transcript. Not because the guest was quiet, but because each speaker had recorded to a separate file and the guest's file never made it into the package that came to the edit. The audio existed the whole time, sitting where it was recorded. This is the single most common quiet failure in remote handovers, and the tell is a transcript with long timestamped gaps and no words in them.

Folders named after something other than the show. In one archive, a show's folder carried the name of the agency that produced it rather than the podcast itself. In another, the folder was labelled with a first name that appears nowhere in any of the footage. Working out which project was which meant opening project files and reading the names of individual video clips. Every minute spent on that is a minute not spent editing, and you are paying for it either way.

Episode numbering that drifts. One archive numbered its third episode "EP3" while every file inside that folder was named "EP03". Trivial in isolation, genuinely expensive across sixty episodes and two years, especially when someone needs to find a specific moment quickly.

No agreement about where finished files land. Handover failures run in both directions. On one show, the only finished captioned vertical clip anywhere in the project turned up inside a captioning tool's render cache rather than in any delivery folder. It had been made properly. It had simply never been put anywhere the client would think to look.

Worth saying plainly: at Joycast we ask for none of this preparation. You drop raw files into the production portal, create a task, and that is your whole job. No trimming, no labelling, no cleanup. The reason to understand what a handover involves anyway is that it tells you what to ask a prospective editor, and it explains a pricing pattern worth noticing. An editor who requires elaborate preparation from you is charging you in your own time what they took off the invoice.

What should you agree before episode one?

Six things, ideally in writing, none of which should be awkward to ask.

1. The deliverables list. Exactly what arrives per episode: the episode file and its formats, how many clips, thumbnail, titles, show notes, chapter markers.
2. Who owns the files. You should, including the project files and the raws. Anything else is a leash.
3. Where finished work lands. A named folder or portal, with a naming convention you can search in two years.
4. The turnaround commitment. A number of days to first review, and a number to final.
5. How revisions work. Ours run until you are happy, with no counted rounds and no per-round fees. Whatever the policy is, get it stated before you need it.
6. How billing works. We bill per four-week cycle with no minimum term and no VAT, and our base edit is £280 per episode covering up to an hour of finished episode. Get the equivalent numbers from anyone you are considering, including what happens when you skip a week.

You can see the full itemised version of what we deliver and what each part costs on the editing service page, and you can spec a package and watch the total change on the configurator.

Where do you go from here?

Send one real episode, with everything you recorded, and see what comes back. One episode tells you more about an editor than any sales call, and it also tells you something about your own recording setup, which is usually the part that needs adjusting.

If you would like that episode to be with us, build your package on the configurator or book a 15-minute call. And if you are handing over to somebody else, take the checklist anyway. It works the same wherever the files are going.