Video editing is one of those things that you either love or you hate. For some people, it’s the most enjoyable part of the whole filmmaking process. For others, it’s just a means to an end and a bit of a chore. Either way, though, speeding up certain parts of the workflow to be able to get to the things you enjoy the most is definitely a bonus.
In this video, Film Riot walks us through 10 great tips to help us speed up our video editing workflows. It covers a range of topics from organising your files and your timeline for more efficiency on the actual edit to optimising your files so your system can zip through them more quickly.
Technically, there are eleven tips in the video, because they snuck a little bonus one in there, but here are all the timestamps for each of the different tips.
- 0:40 – Tip 1: Organize
- 2:08 – Tip 2: Use Thumbnails
- 2:31 – Tip 3: Hot Keys
- 4:46 – Tip 4: Nesting
- 5:25 – Tip 5: Pancake
- 5:51 – Tip 6: Proxies
- 6:36 – Bonus Tip
- 6:52 – Tip 7: Audio Track Effects
- 7:27 – Tip 8: Adjustment Layers
- 8:42 – Tip 9: Stock Assets
- 9:32 – Tip 10: SFX App
One big thing that speeds up my workflow no matter what software I’m using, whether it’s editing video in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, photos in Lightroom or Photoshop or even doing 3D stuff in Blender or Fusion 360 is learning the shortcut keys. This is probably the biggest timesaver out there for general workflow in pretty much any software.
Like the team at Film Riot, though, I also use the Loupedeck CT, which makes life so much easier because you don’t actually have to remember any of the keyboard shortcuts. You just have to read them, plug them into the Loupedeck CT software (assuming a profile doesn’t already exist) and assign them to something. Then, all of its buttons and dials tell you exactly what they do because it’s got a bunch of little OLED displays in it.
It’s a super handy piece of kit. Especially if you want to get to grips with a new piece of software quickly.
What’s your top time-saving editing workflow tip?
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