30. 10. 2025 Charles Callaway Documentation, Uncategorized

Tutorial Video Editing Technical Tips, Part 2: No Country for Boring Men (or Women)

If you’ve followed this thread for awhile, then I hope by now you’re making great videos. Let’s assume your content is instructive, interesting and well-written, all of your equipment is working the way you want, and you have a good on-camera presence.

It’s still possible though that you’re making boring videos.

The main reason is that we’re making tutorial videos, and turning anything educational into something exciting takes a lot more effort and resources than we’re realistically going to have available. But at the same time, it’s not like we can turn every educational video into a Hollywood movie.

So what can we do on the technical side to make videos more interesting, but with low-to-zero cost?

Principal Reasons for Boring Videos

Well, the biggest reason of course is bad writing, but above we said we wanted to assume you’ve gotten better at that.

The next reason after that has to be long periods of seeing someone talk without interruption, and that’s what we’ll focus on today.

No matter how interesting the writing is, with today’s short attention span you absolutely have to do something visual while talking. And the younger your audience is, the more often you’ll have to do that something.

That doesn’t mean your visual interventions have to be dramatic or technically difficult to accomplish.

Obvious Solutions

We’ve talked previously about what some of the obvious solutions are:

Adding graphics so that viewers can focus on something besides the speaker. The longer the time lasts, the more likely you should include multiple sets of graphics in sequence, or add animation to the graphics.
Inserting B-Roll which is a classic simple solution, although it’s not the best because you’ve likely already used it in the introduction as a way to support the content. And in the last year or so, as it’s become a go-to AI technique for quickly creating videos, it might make viewers think you’ve used AI to create everything.
Overlaying shaped portholes, which is a newer technique compared to film-over-film square overlays.
Formal transitions (cuts, wipes, dissolves, etc.) which started out as ways to cover up for mistakes, but can also be added “artistically” by planning ahead.

Final Words

So now you don’t have any more excuses for long, boring stretches of explanations in your videos, or for repeating the same small number of ways of breaking up those stretches.

You should build up a small library of techniques for “managing” viewer attention, adding to it when you can, and choosing the best one (or several) you can deploy to break up those monotonous stretches.