Podcasts and interviews

Two people talking.
One long recording.
The rest is the work.

An interview is the easiest thing to record and the slowest thing to finish. Studio takes the whole session, keeps the conversation, removes the retakes and the dead pauses, and hands back the episode and the shorts cut from it.

Start free — 30 minutes included See what one episode costs

Two voices, handled as a conversation Shorts included, at no charge Every revision free

Nothing here is capped by how long you talked. What stops a file is the size limit on your plan, which is measured in gigabytes rather than minutes.

The arithmetic nobody shows you A 29.8-minute interview takes about 75 minutes end to end. Probe 30 seconds, transcribe 6 minutes, cut 25 minutes, render 43 minutes, check 5 minutes. Reading the file is instant, rendering is two thirds of the total, and none of it waits on a person.

What the charge is, in one line A 42-minute episode costs 42 credits. A credit is one minute of the footage you hand over, rounded up, charged once when the video reaches done. The shorts made from that episode cost nothing, and so does the sixth revision.

The real numbers

Where the seventy-five minutes actually go.

Stage times from a real 29.8-minute interview on the live server, not a benchmark run for this page. When the times move, this page moves with them.

30 s to read the uploads. Every file is measured — length, shape, whether there is a face in frame — before another step starts. stage: probe · studio/eta.py:13

6 min to hear every word, including the parts you will never use, because the unused parts are how retakes are found. stage: transcribe · studio/eta.py:13

25 min to cut the retakes and the pauses. The longest thinking step, and the one that changes the episode most. stage: cut · studio/eta.py:13

43 min to draw and render the video. Two thirds of the total, and why a long episode is an overnight job rather than a coffee break. stage: render · studio/eta.py:13

A two-hour podcast is fine. The limit is gigabytes, not minutes.

No length is refused for being long. What a plan caps is the size of one job: at roughly 80 MB a minute, an 8 GB job is about 100 minutes of footage on Creator, 20 GB is about four hours on Pro and 30 GB is about six hours on Studio Business. A two-hour recording is a normal Pro job.

What it does with two speakers

It keeps the speech. It removes the retakes and the dead air.

In an interview people repeat themselves on purpose. A rule that removes repetition is right for a monologue and wrong for a conversation, so the conversation is read as a conversation.

Only stutter restarts are cut — the false start abandoned after four words and said again properly. The repeat doing rhetorical work stays, because that is what a person sounds like thinking out loud. A run past twelve seconds is split at its natural break instead of looped over.

The two voices are followed as two halves of one exchange: a question and its answer score as a single story, which is why a short from an interview opens on the question rather than the answer.

Conversation behavior, question-and-answer scoring and the twelve-second split — docs/studio/genres/podcast-interview.md · docs/studio/genres/faq-qa.md

Two speakers, one pass

Kept Every answer that lands. The pauses left for effect. The laugh before the sentence that matters. The repeat that makes the point twice deliberately.

Removed The restart abandoned after four words. The dead air where somebody checked a note. The “sorry, can I start that again”. The twenty seconds of getting comfortable.

Nothing on screen that was not said

Every number and phrase planned for a card is checked against the transcript before anything is drawn. In a two-person interview that check matters more, not less.

Shorts from one episode

The moments that stand on their own, and nothing else.

Four rules decide, and they are the product's own rules rather than a description of them. A brilliant answer that only lands because of the question eight minutes earlier is not a short.

It stands on its own The clip has to make sense to somebody who never heard the rest of the episode. No setup, no context, no “as I was saying”. rule 1 · HOW-TO-USE.md:76

20 to 58 seconds Under twenty there is time for a claim or the evidence for it but not both. Over fifty-eight it stops behaving like a short wherever you post it. rule 2 · HOW-TO-USE.md:76

Opens on a question or a strong line In an interview the question is the hook, so the clip starts on the question as it was asked and the answer follows it. rule 3 · HOW-TO-USE.md:76

Ends when the thought ends The cut lands after the sentence that completes the idea. Nothing is trimmed mid-thought to hit a length. rule 4 · HOW-TO-USE.md:76

00:419:16

“What actually changed in year two?” Opens on the question · ends on the answer

00:289:16

“The 87% figure, explained” Stands alone · the number was said out loud

00:559:16

“What I got wrong for two years” Strong first line · clean ending

Each short is its own job with its own video file, so you can watch one, change one and download one without touching the episode it came from. Free gives you 3 per video, Creator 5, Pro and Studio Business 10.

Shorts cost 0 credits How shorts work

“revisions and shorts made from a paid video cost nothing” — studio/accounts.py:9 · 1 to 10 at a time, clamped on upload — studio/web.py:776

The credit maths, worked

One 42-minute episode, priced line by line.

This is the whole bill for a weekly interview on Creator. Nothing is rounded in our favor and nothing is charged twice.

The credits a 42-minute interview costs on the Creator tier
What happened	Credits	Why
The 42-minute episode	−42	Charged once, when the video reaches done
Three shorts cut from it	0	Made from footage you already paid for
Six revisions	0	A job is charged once, keyed to the job id
A job you stopped yourself	0	Nothing is charged unless the video finishes
Total for the episode	−42	Once, for the footage, however many changes you asked for

Against Creator, at 300 minutes a month

300 minutes ÷ 42 minutes an episode = seven full episodes a month, with 6 minutes left over. A weekly show with a spare episode in hand — and the shorts are not in the sum, because they are not charged at all.

294 of 300 minutes used7 episodes

42 credits for a 42-minute episode, charged on done — studio/accounts.py:258-273 · Creator is $10 for 300 minutes a month — PLANS-CREDITS-AND-PRICING.md §2

How credits work, and what happens when you run out

$0.033 a minute on Creator against $0.083 on the smallest top-up pack — the rate ladder.

What you should give it

One file is enough. Four files make it yours.

Only the recording is required. Everything after it is optional, and each one changes a specific thing rather than generally improving the video.

The recording required The call recording, one file per camera, or the camera file plus the separate audio. Retakes are cut for you, so an unedited session is the intended input. 13 video formats · 8 audio formats · up to 60 files in one job

Optional: your own cut A video of how you would have edited it. Studio cuts the episode its own way, then lays the two versions out beside each other so you can see where they disagree. “Compare with your own edit” · stage 8 of the pipeline

Optional: an example video One episode whose style you want copied. Its pace, captions, cut lengths, zooms, colors and loudness are measured and your episode is edited to match them. “Edit it like an example video” · Creator and above

Optional: the script Paste the script and names, brands and places are spelled your way. It fixes spelling only, never a claim — every card is still checked against what was said. ≤ 200,000 characters · studio/web.py:756

Honest status: one recording, and one kind of setup

The conversation path is described in the docs as proven on one real 30-minute call. A studio podcast filmed as one wide shot with two people at a table is not proven, and neither is anything with more than two speakers or more than one camera. There is no speaker detection, so the small face window follows one face rather than the person currently talking. If your setup is a wide two-shot, treat the first episode as the test — it is free, and it will tell you more than this page can.

Questions

The five things podcasters ask first.

Answered with the number that settles it, not with a promise.

Does it want the whole session, or a cut?

The whole session, unedited. It finds the retakes and the dead air itself, so pre-cutting costs you time and tells the Studio less about what your show sounds like. If you do have your own cut, upload it as a reference video rather than instead of the recording.

What happens to the two voices?

They are handled as a conversation rather than as two monologues. Only stutter restarts are cut, because in an interview people repeat themselves deliberately; a question and its answer are scored as one story, which is why shorts open on the question. The Studio does not detect which person is speaking, and on a wide two-shot that is the first thing you will notice.

How long can the recording be?

As long as you like — there is no length limit. A plan caps the size of one job: 2 GB on Free, 8 GB on Creator, 20 GB on Pro and 30 GB on Studio Business. At roughly 80 MB a minute, an 8 GB job is about 100 minutes of footage and a 30 GB job about six hours. A two-hour episode is a normal Pro job.

What do the shorts cost?

Nothing. Shorts cut from a video you have already paid for are free on every tier — the charge is for the footage you uploaded, and you already paid for it. Ten shorts from one episode cost the same as zero, and each is a separate job you can revise on its own.

And if the edit gets my show wrong?

Say so in plain words — “faster pace”, “fewer cards”, “keep the pauses” — and it is queued as a revision of the same job. Revisions are never charged and never re-charge the episode, because the charge is idempotent per job id. What you tell it is remembered for the next episode.

Bring one episode. That is 30 minutes free.

Enough for a real interview with room to spare, edited end to end, with as many revisions as you want and the shorts included. No card, no countdown, no watermark. If the first episode is not right, you have lost an afternoon and no money.

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Two people talking.One long recording.The rest is the work.