- Time is the one thing
we're not gonna be able to really replace,
so the answer is to just get faster.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake of robertoblake.com
helping you create something awesome.
Today, I've got some video editing tips for you.
You guys know that I am an Adobe Premiere Pro editor.
I've put out over a thousand videos on YouTube alone,
and I actually have some quick tips for you guys
on faster video editing.
One of the things that lets me put out so much content
in different platforms is efficiency.
It is a focus and prioritization on speed
more than anything else.
A lot of people, I feel, get obsessed with quality.
Don't get me wrong, quality is important.
But there is a minimum threshold of acceptable quality
and after you've met that threshold,
I believe in prioritizing speed
because time is the asset you don't get back.
Quality is subjective, but speed, time, that's real.
There's time that you could be spending
either getting more work done, more content,
spending more time with your family or your friends,
or on personal cares.
So, I'm going to help you with five tips
for faster video editing that's gonna give you
all the time in the world.
Tip number one, organize everything.
Organizing your footage is gonna save you so much time
and frustration in the long run.
Just taking that extra bit of time to do this first
is going to actually set you up in the future
especially if you need to reuse any of these footage.
So labeling things is going to be the most important thing
that you can do.
Put them in the proper folders,
make sure you're organizing those things by date,
and also by context,
sometimes I even go so far as to organize things
by what camera they were shot on
and this becomes important when it comes time
to make presets and do color grading
and so I don't have to think about it as much.
So definitely make sure you're organizing your footage
and your assets, especially when you're bringing them
into Premier Pro or into Final Cut
or whatever your editor is,
I prefer to bring these things in
and to organize them in folders
according to what I think I'm going to need.
So, I would just make sure you're doing that.
A quick version of doing that,
make sure you have a folder that's specifically
for your audio files, your main camera files,
and then any of you B-roll footage,
and then your other assets.
If you're organizing in this way,
it would just make things less confusing
it will make it easier and you won't have to hunt for them.
Another quick tip in there,
if you're using Premiere Pro, you can use the search feature
in the asset bin to go ahead and find files.
A lot of times, I'll do this by typing in
the type of file extension
so if I'm looking for audio, I can grab an mp3,
If I'm looking for a quick adjustment layer,
I know I can just type that in.
So there's just so many things you can do with this.
Just get organized.
Tip number two, make custom presets
for things that you use over and over again.
Making custom presets,
if you do a footage under specific controlled conditions
like let's say the lighting that I use
typically in my YouTube setup.
You can make a color grading preset in Adobe Premiere
and in most of your other editing programs,
and so, you don't have to sit there
and do the color grading manually
over and over if it is similar conditions
and if it's the same camera.
Usually, I have a basic preset that I've made
for each of my cameras when I'm shooting indoors
in my home office.
And so, I apply those presets and I know which camera it is,
and it's just one click, and the basic color correction
and color grading is done for this setup.
I also make presets for other things
that I use on a regular basis.
I have a color keying preset that I use
when I need to knock the background out
of the recordings that I do for mobile apps using Reflector.
So that's something that I just have as a preset
which means that anytime I do a mobile app tutorial video,
it's just one click to knock that thing out
for the background and put it up here in the screen.
This is why I actually did in the Anchor video
when I was showing you guys how you can use that
to make a podcast.
So again, make your own custom presets,
they're going to make everything a lot easier.
Just go ahead and set these things up.
You can do it for color grading
and you can do it for a lot of other settings as well.
Tip number three,
use audio wave forms to be able to do quick,
rough-cut edits to your footage.
I use audio wave forms to be able to see
where I need to cut footage.
If I make a mistake and I mess up a word,
what I do is I snap three times,
I do that so that when I'm looking at the recording,
I'm looking at the wave form,
I can see exactly where I made a mistake
and I know to go there, prioritize that and edit it.
If I do this correctly,
and I'm making sure that when I'm recording,
that I'm giving myself those audio cues,
a lot of times, I don't have to sit there and agonize
and look through footage over and over and over again
to find things to cut to make sure
that everything's correct.
Tip number four, tip number four is probably one
of the more important things that I could tell you to do,
prioritize passive tasks.
What I mean by this is that there are things
that you don't have to babysit when you're working.
Primary example is when your footage is loading,
when you're dumping your files,
you don't have to sit there and babysit that.
You can go ahead and put that in place
and you can walk away and do something else.
Work on anything else when this is taking place.
Render times, a lot of people whine about render times,
Premier Pro versus Final Cut.
Render times are almost irrelevant to a certain degree
because you could be doing something else.
You could be editing another video,
you could be working on the thumbnail,
you could be doing any number of things
while that rendering is happening.
You can go take a shower, you can go make a sandwich.
You can do something else.
So prioritize and understand these passive tasks
and use them to your advantage to go get other work done.
Don't sit there and babysit things that are going to happen
in the background for five or 10 minutes.
It is a waste of time.
You can use that time more efficiently somewhere else.
Don't worry about it.
And tip number five, do things in batches,
whether it's the actual recording of videos,
whether it's the importing of files,
whether it's the loading things up,
whether it's the rendering,
do things in bulk whenever possible.
Do batch processes.
And that is going to make you wonderfully more efficient.
It's gonna save you so much time
and now you know how I can put out so much content.
Usually, what I do is I set aside an hour
and I film back-to-back content,
and then I, maybe, that day or another day,
I sit down for two hours and I edit back-to-back content,
and set things up to process into render in the background
while I go do something else with that time.
And ultimately, what that means is that
in the equivalent of an eight hour work day
spread out across two or three days,
I can produce about two weeks of content in that time.
And that might sound staggering to some of you,
but it's not even just about doing talking head stuff,
a lot of times, I am cutting in B-roll,
a lot of times, it is a tutorial video,
a lot of times, there might be some other things going on
and a lot of that just has to do with ways that I found
to do these things very efficient.
I can do something that looks pretty robust
and while a general video like this one
might only take me 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes tops
to edit and to turn around,
I could do a lot more to it efficiently
and still not spend more than an hour editing a video.
So you can do high-end, well-polished videos
but spend a minimum of time editing
if you're wonderfully efficient.
The other thing that helps is probably
a lot of good hardware.
I'm not gonna lie, my computer hardware probably saves me
the majority of the time because I like to edit
on a desktop, I have multiple SSDs in there,
I've got a robust graphics card,
so I do take advantage of those things.
I also use dual-monitors because it helps me with my setup.
If I wasn't though and I was back to editing on my laptop
like I did at the beginning of this channel,
I still prioritize being as efficient as possible.
And so I really think that a lot of you could save time
on your editing if you use these five tips.
If you'd like me to do a 10 tips video following up on this,
even more things you could do
to produce your content faster,
let me know in the comments section
and I'll try to get that video out for you.
If you still have questions about video editing
or video editing hardware or software,
leave those in the comment section too
and I'll try and see if I can help you out.
Like this video if you like it, don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome content on the channel,
there's over a thousand videos here.
As always you guys, thanks so very much for watching
and don't forget, create something awesome today,
hopefully, with less time
now that you you've watched this video.
Take care.
(funky beat)