Case study · BILF Podcast
Six episodes recorded in a day. Six first cuts and thirty clips on the review site by 5.30 the next morning.
How the BILF Podcast booked and recorded a six-episode block at The Dean Street Podcast Studio, and woke up to every episode edited, cleaned, subtitled and ready to review, edit and download.
At a glance
- 6episodes recorded in one studio day
- 4h 09mof conversation captured on three cameras
- 30vertical social clips, titled and captioned
- 05:21all six episodes on the review site, next morning
- 0hours in an editing suite
The challenge
The smart way to record a show is the painful way to post-produce one.
Six guests, one day, one host flying in from Florida. BILF Podcast, Mara Dorne's long-form interview show, booked a full day at Dean Street to bank a block of six episodes in one visit. Efficient to record. Expensive to finish: six sessions of three-camera video and multitrack audio landing on a desk at once.
For an efficient, well-tooled team, the work between "we've stopped recording" and "an editor can start making real decisions" is a solid half-day per episode. Ingest, audio clean-up and levelling, three-camera sync, transcription, a first speaker-following cut, mastering, then the social clips on top. Six episodes is three working days of that before anyone makes a creative choice, and it happens when an editor has a slot.
The host was in London for days, not weeks.
The studio day, Tuesday 22 September 2026
Six guests, back to back, from mid-morning to just after five. Two close cameras and a wide, one microphone per voice into the studio's multitrack recorder, and an engineer on the desk throughout.
Vanessa Xuereb
Chief Membership Officer, Soho House
Tony and Max McGee
Photographer and filmmaker; actor and filmmaker, McGee Films
Lemon Fuller
Founder and CEO, Lemonade Dolls
Patrick Alan
Singer and performer
Nate James
Soul singer-songwriter, two MOBO nominations
Alex Reid
Former MMA fighter
While the next guest was in the chair
Each session's audio was assembled, transcribed and mined for clips before the next one wrapped.
- Audio assembled and checked. Every microphone track gated, level-matched and written out as a broadcast master with timecode. The recorder is the clock everything else syncs to.
- Transcribed and speaker-labelled. In-house, on the studio's own machines. Nothing left the building.
- Social moments picked. The five strongest stand-alone moments per episode, each with a working title and clean in and out points. For four of the six, within 40 minutes of the guest leaving the chair.
Overnight, unattended
The camera cards were offloaded at 19:35. Then the studio was empty.
- Audio cleaned and mastered. Plosives, mic knocks and taps removed, the mix denoised, every episode mastered to the loudness the platforms publish, by measurement.
- Three cameras synchronised to the recorder. Each camera matched to the audio master by waveform, offset and clock drift measured and corrected. All 18 cameras cleared the confidence threshold first pass. No human touched a sync.
- A first cut assembled. A speaker-following multicam edit to broadcast interview grammar: close on whoever is speaking, wide for the opening and relief, reactions where the other face earns it. 1,931 camera cuts across six episodes.
- Social clips rendered. Thirty vertical clips, five per episode, punched in from the close cameras with captions.
- Delivered to The Producer. Each episode uploaded with its clips, transcript, subtitles, audio master and an editable timeline.
On the review site: Vanessa Xuereb 22:55 Tuesday. Lemon Fuller 00:08 Wednesday. Nate James 01:26. Alex Reid 02:42. Patrick Alan 04:13. Tony and Max McGee 05:21.
Under ten hours of machine time for six episodes, with no one watching it.
Thirty clips, five per episode
One from each episode: The accident that erased her memory. Deciding at nine to be a photographer. Gen Z won't work. The moonwalk myth. Signed and dropped by Warner. Shame was the weapon against me.
Each clip is found from the transcript, titled, framed from the close camera of whoever is speaking and captioned. The producer can ask for more from any episode, at any time, from the review page.
The results
Reviewable the same evening. All six before breakfast.
- 6first-cut episodes, mastered video and audio, each with transcript, subtitles and an editable timeline
- 30social clips, titled, captioned and ready to review
- 22:55first episode on the review site, the same evening
- Under 12 hoursfrom the last session wrapping to all six being reviewable
The first cut is a first cut: a competent, watchable draft built to be changed. The judgement about story, pacing and what gets killed sits where it always has, with the people who make the show. They just did not spend three days earning the right to start.
What they said
"I flew in to record six episodes and I expected to fly home with six hard drives' worth of homework. Instead I woke up to six edited episodes and thirty clips sitting on a page, ready to watch. I've never had a studio hand me the show."
Mara Dorne, Host, BILFPOD
"We sell speed to the first cut. We don't sell the removal of your editor. Mara's team can take every one of those timelines into Resolve and do what they like with them. They're just starting from Wednesday morning instead of the week after."
Rob Chandler, Founder, The Dean Street Podcast Studio
What The Producer can do
A private page per episode. No software to install, no files to courier.
- Edit in the browser. Trim, cut a section, mute a word, choose a camera at any moment, fix a caption. Nothing is destructive and the episode genuinely re-renders to order.
- Circulate for comments. Share the episode with contributors and stakeholders. Every note is timestamped and carries its author.
- Render more social clips. Ask for more clips from any moment in the transcript, cut, framed and captioned the same way.
- Ask the tool to edit the whole podcast. Describe the episode you want and the system produces a new cut for review.
- Download everything. From the ingested camera and audio media, through the cleaned and mastered audio, to the finished episode and clips.
- Hand the timeline to an editor. Every camera laid underneath in sync, mastered audio attached, transcript aligned. DaVinci Resolve today; Premiere Pro in beta.
Book the studio
Record today. Your first cut and clips back by the next working day, often the same evening.
One episode or a whole series in a day. Every session comes with The Producer: the first cut, the social clips, the transcript and the downloads on a private page, with the tools to change any of it yourself and a synced timeline for your editor when you want human polish.