Whether you’re a student, instructor or staff member, you likely know you can use Adobe Creative Cloud to work with PDFs in class or edit photos for your organization. You might not realize how much more you can create with the Adobe suite that ITS provides campus.
Fourth-year Carolina student Lorelai Sykes knows. She’s putting Adobe to good use. Sykes is a work-study student for the Parr Center for Ethics, which is housed within UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Philosophy, and is co-executive and editor of Chapel Phil, the Parr Center student-run podcast.
Creating Chapel Phil
After Chapel Phil records its podcast in the Undergraduate Library’s Media Lab, the project lands in Sykes’ hands. She uses Adobe Audition to edit the show.
First, Sykes listens through the recording to get a feel for the conversation.
“Of course, there are parts where people misspeak or a lot of ums to cut, or times we go off on tangents or someone knocks on the door,” she said.
Sykes makes those big cuts in Audition before refining with smaller edits. From there, she exports the podcast into Anchor, a program that uploads it onto platforms like Spotify.
Audition across campus
The Parr Center isn’t the only place Sykes uses Adobe Creative Cloud. She uses the applications nearly every day in her classes at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Sykes was able to teach herself the basics of Audition through video tutorials before taking MEJO 252, Audio Journalism, where she furthered her skills.
Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, she took MEJO classes where she worked on Carolina student radio show Carolina Connection. Reporters for Carolina Connection, including Sykes, edit their segments of the show in Audition before the show’s technical director produces the full show.
“When we’re working on our stories,” Sykes said, “we’re putting in multiple tracks at once of ambient noise, where we are outside, different voice clips. We’re mixing together three different interviews to sound like one piece. That class really helped me learn how to take clips of voices and make it sound like a coherent piece.”
Making something that matters
These skills help her as she continues her work at the Parr Center. Sykes values Chapel Phil because a podcast format makes ethics more accessible.
Often when people think of philosophy, they think of a guy “with a really long beard up in his tower,” Sykes quipped. But the conversations between students on Chapel Phil are as fun as they are insightful. “Ethics involves everyone,” she said.
Sykes’ endeavors in Audition involve academic departments, but students aren’t limited to on-campus projects when they use Adobe Creative Cloud. “It’s free, and you should use it,” she said.
Whether students, faculty or staff want to make their own podcast with Adobe Audition, design a personal website with Adobe XD or edit their Instagram photos in Adobe Lightroom, the possibilities of what they can create are endless.
Students and instructional staff can request a free license through ITS Software Distribution. Non-instructional staff can request a license, for a greatly discounted rate, through their department.