The Humbling Experience of Learning Content Creation
I’m truly just realizing there are levels to this content creation stuff. I give props to those who do content full-time for a job it’s way harder than it looks. Recording took over 4 hours for my first video, and it was only 8 minutes. Editing took about 10 hours as well, and I was sitting here thinking, “Hey, I’ll knock this all out in an hour” when I began.
Editing was where I ran into the most problems, just stumbling around learning how to clip. Editing software is a whole different ball game. I thought since I know how to code a bit and I’m a computer guy, this would be easy-peasy… oh, little did I know. The cool thing is you need to be a perfect mix of an artist and a techy person, and I lack a huge chunk of one of them. I don’t think I got an A in any of my art classes back in high school. It’s just never been my thing.
Since I thrive off challenge though, I went YouTube video after YouTube video after YouTube video figuring out how to edit and how to piece my video together. Eventually, I figured out my own way and framework. This took lots of banging my head on the desk because I realized how many mistakes I made during the recording phase. Just recording myself speaking on YouTube for the first time had my nerves through the roof, and I couldn’t help but stutter and lose my pace every few sentences.
The coolest thing about stepping into an unknown field is realizing how dumb you were the day before. Once you start to get a better insight on what you’re doing, you realize how much optimization can come to how you previously approached that domain.
I was talking earlier about how long I had to edit my video. The only reason why is because I had a 1-hour take bouncing around topics, redoing the intros in the middle of the video, doing some of the end of the video at the start of the video, and just thinking to myself, “Eh, this will be easy to edit and piece together.” I wasn’t thinking about how I’d have to sit there for a whole hour organizing each section, deleting the ones I dislike, sifting through which are the best takes. After a full 3 hours of going through this video (mind you, I didn’t really know how to use my editing software in the first place), I finally pieced together all the clips I liked and didn’t like.
Then came the next phase: visuals… B-roll and images, which took me another couple of hours. Learning how to add it to my videos, then finding the right images and B-roll, and at the end still not knowing if it looked good, if I did too little or did too much. I guess we’ll find out when I get to look at what people say when it’s finally out and posted.
Lastly, the thumbnail… Thankfully with AI, it’s a lot easier to make a thumbnail, but I didn’t know where to begin. How do people even come up with these ideas! Like I said, I can’t thank creators enough now after seeing how much work they do. It baffles me. I looked for about an hour at how other people structured theirs and engineered a prompt to create a good thumbnail for my video. After many takes, I can finally rest and upload my video to YouTube.
The beautiful thing is just this one video taught me so much. I know the next time I want to create a video, I’m gonna be 10x more efficient by planning how I want my video a lot more nuanced, recording with my noise cancellation turned off so I can have raw audio, taking my video clip by clip so I don’t have to sift through an unorganized mess, and overall learning how to use editing software, all the pitfalls and new jargon that has come to me.
Every time I watch a video now, it hits different. I see them from a creator lens: how they edit their videos, how their B-roll is, how they deliver their content. Overall, I observe to see what I can implement in my own content, but I also can’t help but witness the beauty and nuance of their editing tactics and delivery. Learning is a lifestyle I can just never give up probably why I love cybersecurity!
Check out the new YouTube video I’ll be dropping! My first letter sometime next week. I hoped to drop it this week, but I didn’t expect editing to take this long. The streak starts now!
Have a good rest of your week :)