Plosive is a multi award-winning production company based in London with an in-house podcast studio. Their podcasts include the likes of Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster and Single Ladies In Your Area with Amy Gledhill and Harriet Kemsley. As the requirements for the studio began to grow amidst their busy schedule they approached Yellow Technology to consult on various audio, video and studio infrastructure upgrades.
Discrete Workflows and Demand for Podcast video
The client has two primary modes of working in the studio:
With the producer in the live room, handling the podcast recording and headphone monitoring from a standalone podcast recording interface;
With a sound engineer in the adjacent control room, recording the podcast to a digital audio workstation (DAW); handling the monitoring and headphone mixes from their side.
Changing between approaches involved a large amount of unplugging and replugging and was resulting in the loss of valuable time, decreased reliability and some unsightly cabling routes!
They were also being asked more and more to record video with podcast audio; but temporary setups risked more mess and confusion. There was also the question of additional editing workload - was there a way for people to have relevant podcast video without hours and hours of video post-production?
Streamlined Wiring for Seamless Changeovers
Listening carefully to the client’s requirements, Yellow Technology came up with an audio wiring infrastructure to facilitate the necessary flexibility but without compromising reliability or aesthetics:
A discretely concealed mic splitting system that allowed for signals to be sent to both the standalone podcast interface and the control room DAW system;
A custom connector pattress that allowed the podcast table to be connected to the control room via one single low profile umbilical cable;
Podcast furniture modification to allow for the discrete connection of mics and headphones, as well as client laptop/phone chargers;
Installation of low profile miniature cameras and lighting mounted from the ceiling and walls;
Design and implementation of a video-follows-audio editing system that allows the default video mix to follow the podcaster who is talking.
2025 Update: Flexible Podcast Sets and Backdrops for Video
With video-first podcasting becoming an industry standard we returned to the studio in 2025 to revise the overall set with additional aims:
Improved lighting and camera flexibility;
Flexible, personalised backdrops to allow different podcasts to have radically different appearances to one another;
A move to lounge-style interview sets from the original podcast table setup.
Following revisions to the studio’s shape to accomodate the change of seating format, we installed a combination of variable colour backdrops, custom set joinery and flexible lighting controls. This enabled Plosive to set up the studio with unique on-brand aesthetics for different podcasts.