5 easy ways to speed up your video editing process

Editing videos can be a pain, especially when it goes slowly. But when it takes you an entire day to edit a 5 minutes video, you probably need some help to speed up your process a little. This video from Jakob Ownes at TheBuffNerds talks us through five things we can do to help speed that process up.

In the video, the topic is music videos. But the tips relate to editing just about anything. Vlogs, tutorials, whatever. And they’re five things that all of us can easily implement into a workflow to help make things more efficient.

Edit the performance first

It doesn’t matter if it’s music, a vlog, or whatever, there is some kind of “performance”. Whether it be the song you want to play or the story you want to tell. The actual editing process might be a little different between genres, but you still want to cut this first. Forget about everything else and just cut it down to the coherent parts that tell the story you want to tell.

Collect your favourite b-roll shots.

As you’re editing your footage, when you see clips that would make good b-roll, mark in and out points, and set them off to one side. Jakob puts them on the far end of his timeline. I use a separate bin in Premiere Pro. This way, when you go through your video for the second time, looking for places to add b-roll, you’re not wasting time hunting through a bunch of useless clips or trying to find that one shot you saw amongst potentially hundreds of files.

Add colour and effects last

It’s really easy to try to make everything perfect as you go. Tweaking every second of every clip, getting your colour perfect on every shot, adding in little motion tracked doohickies and lens flares. But save it until the end or you’re just slowing yourself down.

Don’t throw off your rhythm

Separate each set of tasks out into its own process. Don’t keep bouncing back and forth between cutting your main footage, adding b-roll, tweaking timing, colour correction & grading, adding titles and effects. Do it production line style. Do all of one thing for your whole video before you move onto the next thing.

Cut off all distractions

Turn off your phone (or at least put it on silent) and don’t check it every two minutes. Also, close down that Facebook tab on your second monitor.

I’m guilty of some of these sometimes. For some videos, I don’t mind taking my time, but there are times when I need to get a video out far more quickly, and I don’t always do what Jakob mentions in the video when I should.

What tips can you suggest to help people speed up their editing workflow?

[via No Film School]