It really is simple. Start with the most expensive and unintuitive software program on the market (Final Cut Pro) and then spend hundreds of hours figuring out what all those little buttons and dials are for.
Video editing can be as simple as hitting the “upload to YouTube” button from your smartphone. On the other hand, you can spend years learning Final Cut Pro to get really good at it. Billionaire Internet marketer Frank Kern’s dumbest mistake was creating his own videos. He bought the most expensive equipment, the latest video editing software, and then realized he had no idea how to edit anything. He bought all these books to teach him how to do it and failed miserably.
There are several components to creating high-quality videos. First you have to take the video out of the camera and put it on the computer. You have to shape concise content that forces the viewer to pick up the phone and call you. Sounds easy right? I’ll tell you from experience, it isn’t.
Don’t let the marketing gurus tell you otherwise.
This is what you need to learn if you want to become a really good video editor. You will learn that it takes an enormous amount of time to “record and transfer” your videos from your camera to your computer. That means the computer must transcode the video from its native format to one that is understandable to your editing software. There are only a few video cameras on the market where you can actually click and drag video footage from the camera directly into your editing software. Those are high-end cameras that cost many thousands of dollars. The “check in and transfer” process takes a great deal of time and takes up tons of memory on your hard drive. If you spent an hour recording a video, it can take 2-3 hours to get all of that content onto your computer. Sometimes more.
Once you’ve transferred all the footage to your computer, you should now go through each and every scene to determine which ones you want to keep and which ones you want to delete. You may have 15 minutes of content that you will need to reduce to two minutes. The problem with most lawyers is that they love to talk, myself included.
Once you’ve edited the scenes that you think are relevant to your topic, your creative side should come to the fore. You should create some kind of introductory chart showing who you are and what you do; you must also create an output graph. You have to get royalty free music that you can use for your intro and outs. You have to insert transitions between each of the scenes. You need to color correct each scene and make sure the audio works well. Otherwise, you must modify the audio settings.
In most video editing programs, each time you make changes, you must “render” those changes and allow your program to process them for viewing on the screen. This means additional time spent looking at the computer screen, similar to watching paint dry on the wall. You are not done with the editing process yet. Once you have reached this point, you should now put your video into render mode and once again have all the video rendered. Then you need to export it to the correct format so that you can upload it to the video sharing sites. When you export it to a flash .flv file, quicktime .mp4 or .mov file, if you have a 2-3 minute video, it will usually take your computer half an hour to an hour and a half to process that video. . If you have an older computer and you haven’t upgraded your hardware, the editing process will take even longer.
Once that phase has been completed, it is not over yet. Why not? Now you will have a huge video file in the correct format, but no video sharing site will accept it. It’s too big. Now you need to compress the video file in the correct settings and keep your video in high definition and high quality at the same time. Only when you have reduced and compressed this video file with the correct high definition settings, are you ready to upload the video online.
So do you want to become a video editor? Cool. For every two-minute video clip you create, expect to spend at least 2-3 hours per clip editing it. Do you really have time to do all this? Do you think your family and children will appreciate that you sit in front of your computer for so many hours instead of telling a bedtime story or going out to the yard to fish? The choice, as always, is up to you.
