Summer Projects: Automation, Email, and Dictation

"95% of the way there." That is how John Voorhees describes his most ambitious summer project: a fully automated pipeline that takes a single Logic Pro audio edit and produces a finished Final Cut Pro video project complete with lower thirds, intro and outro music, and time-stamped transcripts with Apple Podcast URLs. The key enabler is a file format called AAF (Advanced Authoring Format), an XML-based industry standard that acts as a "roadmap of all the edits" made to an audio project. By exporting an AAF from Logic Pro and feeding it into a custom Mac app he built, John can apply the same precise audio edits—down to 20-millisecond cuts—to the video tracks automatically. The goal is to eliminate the need to edit audio and video separately, freeing up time for more careful video production or other creative work. He is currently stress-testing the system against a folder of past episodes, including those with advertiser breaks, and reports that the results are promising but not yet production-ready.

Email, Agents, and the Voice Mode Gap