Welcome back to our ongoing series on creating online IT tutorial videos. The last two times we talked about speeding up your graphics, and how the entire workflow works from writing all the way to the final product.

Today let’s do a deep dive on just the Editing process: once you have your digital resources ready (graphics, audio and video) even if just in draft form, how do you put them together to arrive at a final video you can publish.

!! If you’re trying to go viral, this isn’t the tutorial for you.

Background

Let’s take a look at our assumptions and long term goals here.

I’ll assume we’ll want to use an iterative process, where we progress in concrete stages from a quickly-put-together prototype until the final version. Since we don’t typically want to spend more than 2-3 weeks on each video, and they should last anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes (which implies about 1 to 3 weeks of total work) on average iterating over 3-5 stages in 1-2 weeks.

Next, let’s assume that you’ve already written and recorded a draft script, and you’ve gathered some, but not all, of your screencasts, B-Roll, and 2D graphics and animations.

Third, we’ll need to assume something about your scene composition. Namely, that variability is important in both the types of resources and the patterns you use to display those resources.

More specifically, we’ll assume each scene will show (1) just video of you, (2) just a graphic, screencast or B-Roll, or (3) a mixture of the two where you’ll have to decide what to put on the left, center or right (I guess we’re also assuming a horizontal format, not a vertical Tik-Tok-like one).

If you’ve edited a few videos before, you’ll know that all the editing (not creating) work comes in type #3. Every resource will have an (x,y) to (w,z) position onscreen, their content may also have those positions, and every time you change one, you have to be sure you’re not covering up other objects. I mean, it’s probably better to see more than half of your face, right? If you put too many things on screen at once, you’re going to blow up the time needed to edit.

Finally, we also want to think about future improvements. In the past we’ve just assumed that “experience” will lead naturally to improvements in quality and efficiency. But a persistent, organized attempt at improvement can help just as much. So when we look at video editing below, we’ll also look at conscious methods to get better and faster over time.

So let’s get started then with the video editing workflow I use.

The First Prototype

Everything starts with the content, which for us means the script. Without a script that becomes the main voice-over, you’re not making a “tutorial” anything.

So the most important step in the first prototype is to record a video of you reading that script. You don’t have to even look at the camera, this is a throwaway video. Put it in the background of your video editor and break it up into “scenes” to make managing things easier.

If you have resources and you know generally where they should go, go ahead and throw them somewhere near the right place. The key point in the first prototype is raw speed.

If you don’t have the resources ready, put a placeholder where they should go. My go-to placeholder is just a text box that describes the content it should contain, and goes from about where it should start to about where it should end. Don’t worry about precision, everything will change.

One exception here is that if you know exactly what type of object you’ll eventually put there, use a template, or just copy a similar object from a previous video. Especially for 2D objects, you’ll probably change the content but not necessarily the colors and shapes. Also use a default entry/exit animation like Fade In and Fade Out. You may change it later, but if you use those 80% of the time, you’ll be much more efficient.

Finally, add a visual ID tag to each scene. I like to put a red box in a lower corner with a white label like “4C” for scene 4, third sentence. Put it on the top layer so it’s always visible, and just leave it there until the final iteration. Then whenever you watch the video export (especially if it’s faster than the in-editor viewer), you can pause at that point and immediately go to the right location in your video editor to fix it.

Now export your first iteration. It’s not the best quality of course, but it did only take about 15 to 30 minutes, and you’re ready to start the first iteration.

The First Iteration

This is the first real iteration, because we start by looking at a complete version of a video and finish with a better version of the video.

This iteration will probably take the most amount of time, because there’s so much detail to insert, and it’s typically easier to fix something than it is to add something.

We’re now ready to make the large scale choices for the composition or each scene: if we’re not using a full-screen graphic, B-Roll or A-Roll, we need to decide if we’re going to put the person (“us”) left, center or right, with the supplemental graphics going in the complementary places.

It’s also time to refine the content some more. The prototype video lets you think about what’s onscreen while you’re listening, so take notes (indexed by the tag you added).

If you already have an idea of what graphics should be at a particular place, you don’t have to stop and create it right away, it’s just as good to add more details to the text box placeholder.

But the most important part now is to critically listen to the audio, and decide what changes you need to make to the script for the next version. If you make more than just a few cosmetic changes, you should re-film the A-Roll and insert it before starting the next iteration.

Intermediate Iterations

As you proceed through the central set of iterations, your content should rapidly become fixed until you’re at the point where you’re only making cosmetic changes to the script.

Once it’s clear this is happening, you should also commit to a working version of all your graphics in that iteration. I.e., you should replace all the text box placeholders that you created in the first iteration.

Fleshing out graphics and animations is the most time consuming part of video editing. So any shortcuts you can find here will have the greatest impact on how long video editing takes.

The simplest solution is just to reuse graphics you’ve already used in another project, in whole or part. And I mean a bit beyond just a template, which is like distilled reuse: just copy and paste. The only downside is that repeat viewers may find it objectionable.

The next step is reusing (following copyright!) graphics, icons and B-Roll you find elsewhere. But if you need something that’s perfect, you’ll have to make it yourself, and that takes time.

Wherever you get these resources from, you’ll also have to worry about all their parameters: position, size, layout, color, shading, brightness, etc. If you do reuse, consider altering some of those parameters – it’s still much faster than creating from scratch.

It’s also the time you can create a pre-final A-Roll video. It’s important to insert this and re-synchronize the timing of your other video objects (graphics, animations, B-Roll, transitions, etc.), but not at a very fine degree of precision. Remember that when you insert the final A-Roll, EVERYTHING is going to have to be re-synched to it again anyway.

Once the content is 98% fixed, you’ll switch over to the improvement phase, where you clean up problems and add more details. And that’s where your scene tags come in.

Start by exporting 2-3 scenes at once (it greatly speeds up the process because it takes less time to export and because at the beginning you’ll have a huge number of things to fix just in the first few scenes).

Watch the exported video, pausing the moment you see something you want to fix. Then you can either fix it immediately, or make a list of things to fix (along with the tag) and tackle them all at once. I almost always use the exported video instead of the in-editor view because complex animations will either slow down the editor too much, or it will even skip over some effects.

You can then use the sliding window technique: Once you fix the problems in the first scene, switch to working on scenes 2-4, and so on, until you’ve finished an entire round of fixes. You don’t have to fix every single thing you find, though. When you get to the last scene, export the entire video, and start a new iteration.

Some other tips for the intermediate iterations (gradually as needed):

• When editing in a particular iteration, not every potential edit is equal: focus on a few big problems and lots of small problems, but ignore timing issues and leave some things for the next iteration
• For visual items it’s time to change the entrance and exit animations from our default fade in / fade to one that’s more appropriate
• Audio/volume adjustments: Add short audio effects that go with the graphics (there’s no hurry with background music though)
• Make sure external requirements like time limits are met

The Final Edit

The final iteration is the most straightforward: insert the final A-Roll, fix all the problems you see, and focus especially on the timing of animations so that they match the words of the final audio as they’re being spoken.

Trim or pause the A-Roll so that the audio has the right pace: no large pauses, and no audio clipped to close to preceding or following audio. If necessary you can cover up or cross-fade any cuts or discontinuities in the new video with extra B-Roll or full-screen graphics or screencasts.

Make sure the volume levels are similar across scenes. If you the audio is too high or low before you even insert it, adjust those audio levels to the entire A-Roll at once. Remove any breathing sounds or loud ambient noises.

And now’s the time to add your background audio. If you always use a very low volume level for your background audio, you can also probably get away with using the same background audio for all of your videos.

Make sure you remove all the scene tags. That’s how you truly know your video is ready: when there are no more edits to make and the tags are thus useless.

Thinking about the Next Video

Now that you’re done, it’s time to think about that next video you’ll want to do.

In other words, what lessons can you learn from editing this video that you can apply to the next one? For me at least, there’s more than one, so I keep a running list.

At the top of my list is always to update my templates. Every time I make a video I improve something, so I either have updates to my existing templates, completely new ones to add, or both.

Archiving is also important. You never know when you’ll want to copy over an old graphic or animation, so save your project files and make them easy to navigate through (and of course, back them up!)

You can also do “future archiving”. Create a new directory for the next project even if doesn’t exist yet. Put all your templates and template versions of your files like a blank script.

Finally, if you make a lot of videos regularly, consider collecting data on how much time you spend on each phase, in whatever granularity of detail is appropriate for your situation. And that goes not just for video editing, but planning, script writing, recording, etc.

Treat it like an Agile approach to programming: identify areas where you’re the least efficient, so you can improve how fast you can create a video. Conducting a quick review once you’ve finished is a great way to continuously improve.

All together, these tips should increase your efficiency for the next video, and all the videos after that one.

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