C Tolle Run - Kate Grace

Although we got off to a rough start with some technical difficulties, our Skype interview with Kate was a rousing success. For those who want a little more technical behind-the-scenes for how to record a video Skype call, we use Ecamm's excellent Call Recorder for Skype to record both streams to a single file.

We use an all-Apple Intermediate Codec workflow when editing our shows. We could keep the recorded Skype call in the same H.264-compressed MPEG-4 container, but two problems arise:

1) You can't watch the file in Safe RT; you have to roll with Unlimited RT. 2) The audio doesn't even render, making the whole thing useless anyway.

In order to just save headaches, I convert our MPEG-4 file to AIC with the infinitely-useful MPEG Streamclip. If you're a professional video editor using a Mac and don't have this as part of your tool chain, you're nuts.

Like I said before, Call Recorder for Skype places both streams side-by-side in a single file. That's pretty much what you see when both Carrie and Kate are on screen at the same time:

For those curious as to how we turn that into a single-clip, we just crop the video to the full width and height of Kate and drop it on a second track. In order to do the multi-track switching, I just cut the parts of Track 2 where I want to see both of them: