- What's up, everyone?
Joshua Kirk here with another video.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
Today, what we're gonna talk about
is optimizing our workflow as video editors.
Now, this is important because obviously,
time is a limited resource within our lives.
As human beings, we've only got,
say 70 to 80, maybe 90 years on this earth.
And we want to use this time to the best of our ability.
And many, many, many hours of my life
have been wasted within a dark editing room.
And I guess just throughout a career,
you want to be able to speed up certain processes
that are just simply wasting time
so that you can focus more
on the creative aspects of editing.
There are so many areas of video editing
that suck out time.
It could be slow computers, slow hard drives,
slow transfer speeds, slow renders, crashes,
all that sort of thing.
And as you progress as a video editor,
it's not just your skill of editing,
but it's also your skill of understanding
all of the hardware components
and how you can optimize your system
with the footage that you're shooting,
all the way through to rendering.
And how you can create an editing machine
that handles that workflow efficiently.
But simply for this conversation today,
I just want to pose one simple question and that is,
is there a faster way to do the thing that I'm doing?
And now if you asked this question
in every single aspect of the process.
Right from getting the footage off the DP,
ingesting it into a system, editing it, delivering it,
rendering it, uploading it.
If there is a faster way to do
all of those micro little steps along the way,
then I guarantee you
you'll be able to speed up your workflow.
I guess for me, there are so many times
where I've been frustrated in front of the computer
just waiting for something to happen.
Maybe it's Warp Stabilizer and Premiere Pro
finishing a stabilization on a clip,
or maybe it's the initial transfer
where I'm ingesting a whole bunch of SD cards,
and I'm ingesting it onto a really slow hard drive
and that is just taking forever.
Maybe it was working on an old computer in the early days,
and so I wasn't able to edit the the raw footage.
And so I had to trans code everything,
and that would take sometimes 12, 24 hours to trans code,
you know, five to six hours worth of raw footage.
And so there's all these processes
that you definitely learn from.
But again, just keep that in mind.
Is there a faster way to do this?
And if there is,
then I would encourage you to take those steps
in creating a faster way of doing that thing.
Now, when it comes to editing,
a massive part of speeding up our workflow
is our actual skill and mastery of the program,
and a huge part of this is keyboard shortcuts.
I'm gonna dedicate a whole video just to keyboard shortcuts
and external hardware such as
the Black Magic micro panel for color grading
and panels like the Stream Deck
for batching shortcuts together.
But you wanna ask yourself again as you're editing
and as you're doing stuff within the program
and moving your mouse around,
is there a faster way to do the thing that I just did?
You might be right clicking on a menu all the time
or you'll be going up to the top and file media manager.
Now, there's obviously a faster way
to do that single action,
and that's to create a shortcut for it.
And if you're doing that action over and over and over
and over again, maybe you're doing that single action
5,000 times a year.
Now for those 5,000 actions, if you shaved a second off
every single one of those actions,
then that's saving 5,000 seconds
which is a significant amount of time,
particularly when you're doing
hundreds and hundreds of those micro-actions
within the software.
There are so many shortcuts that you can map.
And I've found that I probably only use my mouse
or my pen tablet perhaps 10% of the time when I'm editing.
Most of the stuff, timeline, navigation, media browsing,
setting in and out points in the source monitor,
all of that good stuff can all be done from the keyboard,
and it certainly saves a lot of time the more you do it.
Now, one other thing to think about
for those of you who are shooting your own footage,
is how much time are you wasting every single video edit
fixing things that you could have fixed
within the camera or within the microphone within the room?
For example, for this video right now for YouTube,
I'm trying to minimize the amount of work
that I need to do in post for a video like this
because I wanna be able to churn out
so many more of these types of videos.
But if I'm getting bogged down by all the processing
that's needed for a video like this
just to fix the audio or the visual components,
because maybe I haven't lit it properly
or I've underexposed it,
then obviously that's gonna add up over time.
You basically just wanna try and eliminate
as much post-production work as you possibly can
when it comes to fixing things
that could have been fixed in camera before shooting.
And one final thing for this video to think about
when it comes to optimizing our workflow,
is the actual environment that we're editing in.
So I'm a big, big fan of curating our environment
and creating a safe space where we can edit
without distraction.
A massive problem in the 21st century is distraction
when it comes to social media
and notifications on your phone and your computer.
And so curating your environment
by turning off all those notifications,
controlling the light within the space,
bringing the ambient light down
so that you can really focus in on the screen
without any glare coming in,
all these things really help our efficiency as an editor.
So my hope of this conversation
is that it would simply just make you question
all of the processes within your own workflow.
And it's just a simple question of asking yourself,
is the thing that I've just done within my workflow,
is it possible to do that faster?
So I hope these thoughts were interesting for you.
If you liked the video,
please give it a thumbs up,
or drop a comment in the comment box below.
Hit the bell notification, and of course, subscribe.
Maybe you'll be the first subscriber to this channel.
There'll be heaps more of these videos coming up.
So stay tuned, and we'll see you in the next one.