Honing My Video Editing Skills
So I kicked off my new YouTube Channel / video podcast, One for the Books, last month! I’m hoping to keep a schedule of one video every two weeks for now. That’s not enough to grow a channel quickly, but it’s about all I can do with my current skills and obligations. I have three videos up now and two more currently in the works. My most recently completed video (which is not up on the channel yet), is an interview with the executive director of the International Book Project. I was super excited to do this video because I got a behind-the-scenes tour of a nonprofit I adore and I learned a lot about them. But editing that video was a whole different beast.
I have spent an ungodly amount of time editing each of these videos so far. I’m using a very professional video editing software called Adobe Premiere Pro. And while it is very impressive, it is quite the opposite of intuitive, and my learning curve has been steep. Luckily, enough people use this software that I can pretty much just type any question I have into Google, and a YouTube video pops up that can address my exact problem, and show me which buttons to click to do it.
I am enjoying the video editing, but it is tedious. As an example, my interview with the International Book Project took an hour and three minutes in real time. I edited it down to a 48 minute video. That sounds simple enough, but I was never cutting a minute of content out at a time. Often I was cutting out half a second here, a third of a second there. Cutting out all the vocal pauses, repetition, or stumbling over words. It makes the viewing experience for a video way more engaging, because every second the viewer is watching, something is happening or being said that’s relevant to the conversation. And especially for very long videos like my interviews, that can make the difference between someone only watching 5 minutes of the video versus watching 30 minutes of it. And yes, YouTube shares those analytics with their content creators.
Right now, I’m doing everything the hard way (most likely) because I haven’t yet discovered the hacks and shortcuts that will make it easy. But the only way to learn how to make it easier is to stumble through the long way round, and watch more tutorials.
For my first three videos, I spent about 8 hours each editing them, writing up the video descriptions, creating an engaging thumbnail, posting them on social media, and so on. That doesn’t even touch the time doing the interviews themselves, coming up with interview questions, and going back and forth with the potential interviewee beforehand. (Or the download and upload times, which I often set to happen overnight so I don’t have to sit around and wait.) That’s insane, right? I’ve basically picked up a new part-time job that doesn’t pay. But I’m having a blast with it, so that’s all fine for now (as long as I get better at it, lol).
But this last video, with the International Book Project, was a total nightmare. The interview went great, of course, and my interviewee was wonderful. But when it came time to edit, something was off. I use a special virtual interview software called Riverside.fm, which is a lot better and more fully featured for this kind of stuff than more familiar face-time apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet. And unfortunately, I didn’t notice the problem until I had already been editing for two hours. I spent another two hours trying to troubleshoot and fix the problem on my end. There was a lag. The timing lined up at the beginning, but the further you went into the video, the more off it became. My portion of the video and my interviewee’s portion weren’t matching. There was a delay that was happening between one person’s comment and the next person’s response. And it got worse and worse throughout until by halfway through the video we were talking overtop of each other. I couldn’t fix it.
I threw in the towel and reached out to Riverside’s customer support. It was a Saturday morning, so there wasn’t a real live chat feature. It was more like - Send email. Wait for a response. Get response, answer questions, wait for a response again. The back and forth took up most of my Saturday, after having wasted my entire Friday night editing a video that was un-editable. It’s not like I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs while I was waiting for responses on Saturday. I had plenty of other things to do around the house and a great book to read, but still…
Luckily, despite the delays, I found Riverside’s customer support to be helpful, and they diagnosed the problem, reprocessed my video, and sent me a new raw version without the lag. Then, queue the eight-hour editing process. In all I’d say, I spent about 20 hours on this one 48-minute video, between the editing, processing, diagnosing, etc. Certainly, if they were all like that, my YouTube career would be very short-lived.
In the meantime, my networking for my channel is growing, my subscribers are growing, and I’m super excited about continuing to create bookish content in video form. Hopefully, in a few more months, these sorts of headaches will be behind me and I can cut this down to a more reasonable amount of time. You know, like a normal hobby, and not a part-time job.
