- Creating and filming videos, especially as small creators
can be very daunting and no doubt,
you will make many many mistakes along the way.
- But that's okay because that is where editing comes in.
- So folks, are there any things
that really really annoy you when you are watching a video
and cause you to turn off instantly that aren't adverts?
- We have a number of mistakes we're gonna go through
but we're also gonna leave you with some tips and tricks,
things we've learned along the way
to try and remedy these problems
while you are doing your edit.
And we're gonna start I think today with audio
because as we like to say, audio is 50% of video.
And I think that's especially true for me.
I'm somebody who does a lot of my YouTube viewing
in the morning when I'm cooking breakfast.
So I have my phone or my tablet up,
and I have something playing in the background.
So I'm listening to it and I'm kind of glancing at it
every so often.
So if the audio on the video I'm watching
happens to not be good,
I personally notice that immediately.
- Yeah, sensors working very different ways don't Dan?
If you close your eyes, you turn off your visual sense
but you can't really close off your ears,
so they're very sensitive
to all of the audio coming through on a video.
So if you hear peeking, shouting, staccato noises,
that can all be very distracting for a viewer.
- Yeah it definitely can.
We recently have been looking at this a lot
because every Wednesday now
we've been testing out doing video reviews on the channel
where we actually go into people's videos.
And just this week we saw somebody make the classic mistake
of adding music to their video,
but they didn't quite balance the audio right,
and the music was almost as loud as them.
- I remember during that stream done,
I was doing this as I was watching the video.
I think where you just put your ear to the screen
as if that's gonna help you hear what's going on.
- With headphones. - With headphones.
- Yeah it doesn't help. It doesn't work.
My additional tip to this would also be
to listen to your video before you render it
with headphones and without headphones,
because users are gonna be using all kinds of different ways
to listen to your video.
- It could be that you have two or three different audios
playing at the same time,
your voice, your music, sound effects.
Usually your voice wants to be louder than the music,
sound effects probably a little louder than the music
but not as louder as your voice,
and that takes practice and experimentation
to get that sounding just perfect.
All right then the next one being too greedy
in the sense that you film a lot of stuff
and you wanna use all of that stuff in your videos.
- Yeah. There's a phrase I've actually heard quite a bit
in recent history and that is kill your darlings.
And this phrase comes from the idea that
yes you shot some like incredible stuff,
but sometimes your video is better
if you just choose not to include those things especially if
you've tried to fit everything in your timeline,
and you realize wow I have too much B-roll
because I'm just switching
from shot to shot to shot to shot to shot,
or wow I made my video 20 minutes long
and it was only supposed to be 10 minutes long.
- Yeah that's what we've found out as well
in our video audits.
From the intro, we can usually surmise the video as a whole
should be half as long as it is.
The next time you edit a video
and let's say it's eight minutes, try to be ruthless.
See if you can go get it down to six minutes,
even four minutes.
- This one's gonna be I would say very subjective
because music itself is very subjective
but I wanna talk about unsuitable music.
And I think this could mean a lot of different things
to a lot of different people.
- Yeah. Can you remember Dan a couple of weeks ago
when we were kinda reviewing each of his videos?
I was 20 seconds into a video that you editing,
and I started to hear this in the music.
(whistling)
And I was like the last thing I wanna hear from music
is whistling while I'm trying to listen to somebody talk.
And that also extends itself out to lyrics.
If somebody's singing in a song,
it doesn't tend to marry well with narration on a video.
- Yeah the whistling.
It almost doesn't matter how much you lower that song,
if you can hear the song, you can hear the whistling.
Speaking of that library of songs,
my library of songs was mostly curated
from the YouTube audio library.
And these days there's a lot of different services
you can get to that have music for you
that you can use in any of your videos and fully licensed.
And what I would recommend,
because another mistake I've found myself making
is spending hours and hours and hours
trying to pick the right songs for a video.
- Yeah it can be so frustrating.
Kinda like when you're like in the middle of an edit,
and then you think I need this type of song,
and then you spend an hour trying to find it. Infuriating.
- It's miserable. So it's really good to take
like a day or two,
and make that the day that you get all of your music
that you're pretty much gonna use
on your channel all the time,
and then every so often you can go and refresh that library.
But I think the last thing you wanna be doing
is making those decisions in the heat of the moment
when you have a video that needs to go out like tomorrow.
- And also consider the different styles, tones,
beats, speed, cadence of music.
The best editors are able to use multiple styles of music
within the same video to speed up the storytelling,
to slow it down and even stop the video dead
to emphasize a point.
And let's get into some more visual stuff.
Obviously when you're recording, you'll do multiple videos
and footage and you need some way to transition
from one to the other.
And this can be done very simply with a jump cut,
or you could slide to the left, slide to the right,
zoom in zoom out, but sometimes being a little over
enthusiastic with your transitions
can end up being very distracting.
- I think rookie editors fall prey to this a lot
because you get new editing software,
and you're learning how to use it,
and then you find the animation libraries,
with all the transitions and all the fun stuff.
I could do some things with this and some stuff.
And so you do.
It's really easy to go overboard once you start
to incorporate these things
and you're kinda still learning how to edit.
- We encourage that you should always include
unique aspects to your content.
Be it sound effects, graphics, transitions.
But you have to use them sparingly
because the more unique it is,
the more grating it becomes when you repeat it.
- I think we should talk about dead air.
- Oh, you mean that type of dead air?
- Yes. All types of dead air.
The dead air that people tend to
not remove from their videos.
And this can come in the form of pausing a lot,
thinking about what you're gonna say next.
Maybe you didn't script your video. So you stop a lot.
You can totally cut these out
by using jump cuts in your content.
- When you doing this through your editor
you should be able to see the sound waves
of when you start talking or stop talking.
And in my experience you wanna try and be as
up to the line as possible
like milliseconds before and after you start speaking
that's where you wanna try and do your cuts.
However, you can be a little too ruthless
with cutting out dead air
to the point where you don't allow the video to breathe
and have those natural pauses, that conversational style,
and everything is just very hot and fast.
This can be good for short-form content,
but for longer-form content,
you do want to allow that video
a little bit of breathing space.
- So one thing you can do, if you find yourself
with a lot of jump cuts and you're like this looks terrible,
it looks really choppy
is you can actually incorporate B-roll over the video.
So let's try something right now Rob,
I'm gonna talk really painfully slow.
What I want you to do while I do that
is just give our editor some footage
of you just kind of smiling and nodding at the camera.
Okay so here we go.
I think that video editing can be kinda cool.
What you probably heard was not painfully slow
because in post production we went in
and we cut all that down to one complete sentence
that didn't take me forever to say.
And then Rob was the one over that footage
giving us some B-roll of him smiling and nodding.
And when we say B-roll, that's what we mean.
I was giving Rob the A-roll there me talking,
and Rob was providing fabulous B-roll.
- And just to give you a little idea
of how much we are editing down this recording
we've currently recorded 40 minutes of footage
and the video is probably not gonna be
40 minutes in length total.
All right let's go a little bit more advanced
with this next editing mistake
and that is color grading.
This is where you manipulate the original footage
to make it brighter, darker,
you saturate certain colors.
And many of the advanced video editors can do that
but it does lead to potential problems for the viewer.
- I thought the next mistake was gonna be continuity errors.
So I like could have taken off my headphones
but I guess we can talk about color.
Color grading is something that
even I'm still like trying to refine.
I think it's a skill that just takes a long time to learn,
and if it's something you're interested in getting into,
you wanna watch some tutorials,
this is something you really wanna educate yourself on.
I really do think it's a skill you develop over time.
What I will say though is that
if let's say you have a video
and you really like the way it looks
on your computer monitor,
you don't know for sure if it's gonna look the same
when someone's watching on their phone or their TV.
The idea is you can use your editing software
once you're really good,
and start to understand the different scopes and tools
in your editing software,
to make sure that you are working with the true colors
that you think you're seeing on your screen.
- Another thing you can do is put yourself
in a viewers perspective.
Take that video that you've just finished edited,
color graded, and watch it through a mobile phone,
on a tablet, on a television.
How is that viewing experience going to look
for the average viewer?
- I thought we were doing continuity errors.
For this next one I would say
that if you've been watching vidIQ videos
for the past maybe like six months or so,
you've probably noticed us doing this a lot.
What we've been trying to do is find a more consistent style
with the graphics that you see on the channel.
- We do channel audits on Tuesdays
and we see this ad nauseum on thumbnails
where each one looks completely different.
So it doesn't have a branding consistency,
and that goes into your videos. We call this house style.
So you may want to spend a day deciding
on specific fonts that you're going to use on your videos,
a certain color palette.
If you're gonna download some flower thirds,
make sure that they all come from the same pack
so again you have that consistency.
We talk about consistency everywhere.
Titles, thumbnails, channel focus.
This is another opportunity to commit to consistency
with your graphics and your styling.
- Going back to the video reviews you mentioned earlier,
a mistake we see all the time
are people who haven't really gotten the hang
of using different varying shots yet.
They kind of just sit down in front of their camera
and they don't move.
And I can tell you I'm guilty of this.
I have a space that's not really great for recording
except for right here.
I don't use a lot of varying shots.
I sit the camera down, I stand in front of it,
or sit in front of it, and that's the whole shot,
that's the whole video.
- There's a couple of ways to solve this.
You can use what's called B-roll.
On top of that you can start to play about with this frame.
You can zoom in, zoom out,
I can go to the left, I can go to the right.
So it resets the viewers pattern interrupts
that we've talked about as well.
'Cause not every creator has multiple cameras
or they're not running and gunning
where the scene is constantly changing.
- Another rather technical aspect of video editing
is something that could take some practice
as you start to make your first videos,
is understanding the right formats that you can use
to render out a video.
- Yeah. Usually if you just render through
the defaults in your video editor, that's fine,
but you'll probably want to experiment at some point,
and just to give you an insight into
some of the technical aspects of YouTube videos.
You can now render up to eight K.
I do wonder how long it would take
to process one of those videos.
And in terms of frame rate,
you can go from 24 all the way up to 60.
So unless you're wanting to intentionally do
something weird with your content,
you wanted to mess around with the video speeds,
and have like weird frame rates,
make sure you keep it within those limits.
- Now those were just some of our editing mistakes
but there's a lot more mistakes we've seen YouTubers make,
and if you wanna solve those
you can start by going to this video right here.
- Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, I missed.