Good morning friends, it’s Thursday, August 7, 2025. It’s currently 87 degrees outside and sunny, and I am still at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

I had the good fortune of joining the Changelog podcast in Denver Colorado a couple weeks ago to film their first ever live podcast event at the Oriental Theater. I had a great time, and learned a few things along the way, so I thought I’d use my writing time this morning to share a few lessons.

1. Success is a result of repeated small efforts that compound over time

Overall, I’m happy with how the video I captured and edited turned out. I’m always looking for things to improve (and my list is long), but considering the limitations and the budget, I think I did a decent job of capturing the event and creating some good video for the Changelog audience and community to enjoy. All the skills I needed and knowledge to make specific decisions to get the end result were acquired over time, thanks in part to a lot of other people sharing their knowledge over the years.

For example, to capture the audio for the live show, I brought my Macbook, a USB-C adapter, and a USB-A to USB-B cable to plug into the venue’s soundboard and capture audio channels out into Logic Pro. I knew how to do this because it’s the same gear and process I use to record my band’s live shows. I knew how to mix, edit, and master the audio tracks because of the time I spent as a podcast editor, as well as the time I’ve spent mixing our live shows.

I also brought a formatted USB stick that was supposed to record the stereo track out of the soundboard, but something went wrong in that process and nothing was recorded to the stick. I still got all the audio tracks recorded to Logic Pro, which was what I preferred anyways, but the lesson there is to always have a backup recording going if you can, because you never know when one of your recording methods might fail.

2. Have a Plan A, and a Plan B (and be ready for whatever happens)

One of the more stressful parts of the whole experience was knowing that I was responsible for capturing good audio, video, and photos from the event. It’s not an impossible task, but it did weigh on me because I wanted to do a good job. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong when recording a live event, but I stayed focused on doing the best I knew how with the resources I had.

Another example of rolling with the punches / dealing with unforeseen circumstances: I shipped two tripods and a DJI RSC 2 gimbal to the hotel, and when I got the package unpacked at the venue the morning of the show (we got to the venue an hour before doors opened, which meant I had to move quickly to get everything setup), one of the heads of the tripods wouldn’t lock in place (rendering it unusable). Two of the tripod legs on the gimbal were also broken, meaning I could hold the gimbal but couldn’t set it on a flat surface to use it as a tripod. I didn’t anticipate any issues with the tripods, and there wasn’t enough time to locate a replacement.

Luckily one of the tripods still worked, so I set that up by the soundboard to use as my primary camera angle, and decided I would handhold the gimbal and record a secondary angle.

Thankfully I didn’t have any issues with my main cameras (two Sony A7C cameras that always work flawlessly), but my plan B for video was a GoPro that I mounted up in the balcony of the Oriental Theater. I didn’t end up liking the footage I got from the GoPro so I didn’t use it, and next time I know what I should do differently with a GoPro to get good footage (get it really close to the subjects).

For audio, my Plan A was to record audio tracks straight from the venue’s soundboard into Logic Pro on my Macbook, and that plan worked. Plan B was to record a stereo track from the soundboard into a USB stick, and that plan failed.

There’s so much more I could share about the experience and what I learned, but my 20 minute timer just went off, so I’ll save it for another day (maybe tomorrow). In the meantime, check out the video for yourself:

Changelog: LIVE from Denver with Nora Jones! | Nora’s journey from Jeli.io to PagerDuty

Thanks for reading,

Aaron

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