This isn’t strictly hacking related, but it’s some information I wanted to put out here nonetheless in case any of you reading are thinking of starting your own channels!
The latest TJoH video (see previous post) was my first video to be uploaded where I edited it after recording (using Davinci Resolve) instead of just uploading it “as live”. Here are some tips that I learned along the way and links to additional resources:
1. Of all the great editing tutorials on YouTube showing precise steps for certain techniques and also general advice, I wasn’t able to find any content that taught the process of editing a YouTube video end to end. That made getting started with editing pretty daunting for me, but in the end I went through the two editing training modules available for free from Blackmagic Design. That training focuses on editing a trailer for a traditional cinematic documentary, not YouTube content, but a lot of the concepts carry over and it gave me a functional understanding of the Edit page within Resolve.
2. Once you become functionally familiar with the basics of your chosen post production software, then you can just load up your video and get to work. If you’re thinking about uploading to a certain platform, I’m sure you’ve already watched quite a few hours of other people’s content there. You already have ideas for what your video should look like based on that experience. Any time you realize you don’t know precisely how to achieve a certain desired effect, just search for a tutorial online, for instance…
3. A “jump cut” is a great way to get rid of mistakes and massage the timeline of the video, but it’s going to look and sound bad if you just hack out a chunk and cram the two new sides together. The Blackmagic Design training showed how to smooth a jump cut using B-roll footage, but not how to smooth it “in place” using the same video roll. Doing so might be frowned upon in Hollywood, but you see it all the time on YouTube. Here are a couple videos to help: Learning Davinci Resolve J and L Cuts and How To JUMP CUT Like A PRO! 🎬. The second is showing the technique in Adobe Premiere, but once you get the idea of how to do it in Davinci Resolve you can easily adapt the concept.
4. If you want to be one of the cool kids, you’re going to have to get yourself a “like and subscribe” animation. You can pay for it if you want, or… you can get one for free. Check out Pixabay to download a green screen video of the animation and this video from Sweet Phil Media to learn how to smoothly incorporate it into your video.
At the end of the day I kept finding more and more things that could be better with my video, and I had to remind myself not to allow perfect to be the enemy of good. Still, at the point where I cut it off for upload I think it’s world’s ahead of the previous videos in the TJoH series! For my next video I’m going to try to get the video quality a bit better by matching my OBS Studio settings to my monitor resolution, and maybe smooth the audio volume a bit more throughout!