It’s really 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 knobs and knobs are for.
Video editing can be as simple as pressing the ‘upload to YouTube’ button from your smartphone. On the other hand, you can spend years learning how to use Final Cut Pro to get really good at it. Millionaire 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 that he had no idea how to edit anything. He bought all these books to teach him how to do it, and he failed miserably.
There are multiple components to create great quality videos. First you have to get the video out of the camera and put it on the computer. You have to shape it into a concise piece of content that compels a viewer to pick up the phone and call you. Sounds easy right? I’ll tell you from experience, it’s not.
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’ll 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 by your editing software. There are only a few video cameras on the market where you can click and drag the video footage from the camera directly into your editing software. Those are high-end cameras that cost many thousands of dollars. The “register and transfer” process takes a great deal of time and takes up tons of memory on your hard drive. If you spent an hour shooting a video, it can take 2-3 hours to get all that content onto your computer. Sometimes more.
Once you’ve transferred all the footage to your computer, you now need to review each and every scene to determine which ones you want to keep and which ones you want to throw away. You may have 15 minutes of content that you’ll need to cut down to two minutes. The problem with most lawyers is that they love to talk, myself included.
Once you’ve edited out the scenes that you think are relevant to your topic, your creative side needs to come out. You must create some kind of introductory graphic that shows 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 outro. You have to insert transitions between each of the scenes. You need to correct the color of each scene and make sure the audio works well. If not, you need to modify the audio settings.
In most video editing programs, whenever you make changes, you must “render” those changes and allow your program to render those changes to see them on screen. This means additional time spent staring at a computer screen, similar to watching paint dry on a 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 the entire video rendered. You then need to export it to the correct format so you can upload it to video sharing sites. When you export to a flash .flv file, .mp4 file, or .mov quicktime file, if you have a 2-3 minute video, it will usually take your computer between half an hour and an hour and a half to process that video. . If you have an older computer and haven’t upgraded your hardware, the editing process will take even longer.
Once that phase is complete, it’s 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 at the correct settings and keep your video high definition and high quality all at the same time. Only when you have reduced and compressed this video file with the correct HD settings are you ready to upload the video online.
So do you want to become a video editor? That’s great. For every two-minute video clip you create, expect to spend at least 2-3 hours per clip to edit. 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 in the garden and fishing? The choice, as always, is up to you.
