Productivity...well, kind of. If the show is an hour long you get 45 minutes of madness with Mann and Dan talking almost incoherently but then you get 15 minutes of brilliance from Mann. I always walk away with some useful quip or anecdote about life or work.
i'd point out that he mentions two examples, the average the guild episode clocking in at 10 minutes, the average never not funny episode clocking in at 1h 30m.
For most shows, I record 60 to 90 minutes of conversation to get 20 to 40 minutes of edited content. I try to edit down to the bone, where there is nothing else I feel I can take out.
That might seem a bit extreme, but some of my guests are not native English speakers, so there is a lot to fix in post-production.
I suppose it's all because of the topic or the content itself. They try to use any technique to keep the view and to make it longer. They sometimes build miniseries from something that could be an hour max.
Structure is an "editing problem" but once you go beyond a fairly straight interview or talk show format, the amount of post-production work increases dramatically. With the help of some automation, I can edit a 20 minute interview in an hour so so. Structuring a 1 hour show from different clips and inserting various breaks etc. would probably add a good day to the whole process.
Why limit the complexity/interestingness of everything to always fit into a single hour? These seem to be aimed at people who have finished introductory material and are potentially looking for (semi-)/nontrivial material.
If you're married to the idea of ~1hr segments, you can always split them into parts of a series.
What I was getting at was more the fact that even if you record 3 hours of stuff, you don't need to put the unedited 3 hours out. It can be recorded on a potato microphone on a clay disk for all I care, just spend some time in the edit and cut it down to a manageable size.
There are very few podcasts that can stay on topic and interesting past the 1 - 1.5 hour mark.
The only exception to this rule are the Christopher McQuarrie Spoiler Special episodes of the Empire Podcast (now behind a firewall). The dude can keep spewing fascinating stuff about his movies longer than the movies' combined runtime =)
It's a cute remark, but why is 50 minutes the right cutoff? For a technical talk it seems long. For an entertaining keynote it seems short. Movies are 90+ minutes.
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