Editing video content can be a meticulous, time-consuming process. Tips for editing YouTube videos faster include planning your content in advance, using templates, learning keyboard shortcuts, and hiring a professional.
You can buy top end gear, write a compelling script, give a good performance, spend hours filming, and still produce a bad video. Somewhere in all that footage, there’s an amazing piece of content that will compel your audience and attract new followers, but not everyone has what it takes to craft that final product.
This is why it’s common for content creators and brands of all sizes to hire a YouTube video editing company to make sure their time and money are well-spent.
Why Speed Matters
Editing can be time-consuming. Say you’re making a five-minute video. Between setting up your equipment, getting the lighting right, and recording multiple times, you might spend an hour filming and have thirty minutes of footage.
Editing isn’t just a matter of picking the best take and cutting the rest. It requires trimming dead air, cutting out ‘umms,’ adding music, synching audio, choosing transitions, adding additional footage or graphics, sourcing sound effects, and deciding on the pace of the video.
A long time spent editing is fine if you’re a hobbyist making a couple videos a year, but brands are driven by productivity. When you’re trying to gain viewers and capture potential customers, you have to make a lot of content, and you have to make it consistently.
If every video takes you three full days to edit, you’ll never be able to reliably release a large volume of content. If you want to grow your audience, you should post a video on YouTube more than once a week. In order to do that, you need to edit quickly.
The Power of Pre-Production
The number one place you can save time in editing happens before you even press record. When you make a video, there are a few details you should plan in advance. These include:
- Video length
- Script
- What you want to emphasize
- Where you will cut to other footage
- Visuals that will be added later
- Storyboards
Once you have your script, time how long it takes to read it so you’re sure the final product will be the length you want. Storyboards are drawings of the frames of a video. These don’t have to be complex; even a rudimentary sketch will go a long way to facilitating the production and editing process.
Some beginner content creators have the impulse to film a lot of footage and figure it out later, but every minute of footage you can avoid shooting means ten times that amount of time saved in the editing room. And if you’re wondering how to fix boring YouTube videos, that starts in pre-production, as well.
Templates
While templates can be time-saving devices, they can also help establish branding, voice, and style. Some templates you can consider adding to your YouTube videos include:
- Intro and outro sequences
- Transitions
- Typography
- Color grading
- Lower-third graphics
If these details are the same for every video you produce, you can make your content instantly recognizable. They also reduce decision-making, making post-production faster.
Keyboard Shortcuts
A simple way to save time is to familiarize yourself with the hotkey systems of whatever editing software you use. You can edit video length on YouTube, Adobe, Final Cut, or a number of other programs. Whatever system you’re using, saving time by using a few keystrokes rather than clicking menus can add up when you’re producing multiple videos a week.
A Professional Touch
The faster you can edit YouTube videos, the faster you can get your content seen and grow your brand. Professional production houses like grouphugs can take that work off your hands so you can focus on your business and know that your high-quality videos will be produced and edited in no time!
