One of the main services I offered customers when I had a company was short form Youtube videos. This was in 2010 and Youtube had been around a few years but was still just catching on. I couldn’t get my clients to write blog posts but I could get them to sit still for a few minutes while I got them to say something helpful about their company.

It was hugely successful, not because the videos were super great but simply because the Youtube video would start ranking immediately for whatever keywords were in the transcript. So we cranked up the output to make as many videos as we could. I setup a simple studio in my home office and clients would stop by for an hour and we would get a ton of videos shot. One client even had me build a studio in one of his less used offices.

One important thing I learned was how to get quick with editing videos. For the most part these were pretty simple videos with one camera and no b-roll. I got started when Final Cut Pro X had come out and switching from iMovie to FCPX was easy. A lot of people like Adobe Premier as it reminds them of Final Cut Pro. If I were starting now I would consider Davinci Resolve cause its free and super powerful.

Currently I am sitting on 260GB of video I shot while on vacation to Mexico. There are 470 files in total. Most of them are 10 to 20 seconds long. My current trick for organizing a video is that I create a new Library in FCPX for the final video I want to make. This helps keep footage organized so that once a project is completed I can delete any system created files and archive things to an external drive. 4K video really eats up the disk space.

To be honest I gave up on video editing a few years ago. Video is really hard. You have to plan, organize, direct, shoot, edit, and create something people like. Taking photos is almost simple in comparison. I had gotten burnt out doing commercial work that I didn’t really enjoy or like.

Then this Mexico trip was organized and I started thinking about how fun it would be to have a video of the trip. With the new theater room at home I am enjoying watching home videos a lot more. Just a few second clip of Kate and the dogs from a few years ago is joyous to watch. For the trip video I want to make something five to ten minutes long that tells a story of the trip.

Now I just need to get it done.