I want to know if you think I should start making messages with saw footage from the franchise on my socials to share more often.
Just because I’ve been on a binge marathon with the saw franchise, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably my hands-down favorite franchise of all time.
And there’s plenty of lessons that were made from each film as well as ones that I feel I could just share personally that would maybe parallel with it.
But I also just want to get a feel for my audience to see if they would be able to appreciate or if it would even be appropriate to go that route and start doing things like that.
I don’t want to end up being where I’m a stand account for Saw, but I definitely want to incorporate more of their visuals into some of my messages.
But I’d like to get a feel for whatever you think if you think I should.
Just give me some type of confirmation, maybe whether that’s like, share, comments, anything that just shows your support.
And I’m probably still gonna run with it either way, but we’re gonna see what goes from here.
This is my 1st attempt at reaching out.
My Thoughts On Video Editing
When I 1st started editing, one of the biggest mistakes, I kept making would be trying to learn too many things at once.
I got involved at a time when video editing software was just being made public and available for other independent creatives.
So I’m talking about Adobe premiere, Final Cut, and Sony Vegas Pro.
These were programs I personally was getting experience with in the early 2010s.
My biggest mistake was trying to learn how to do too many different things at once.
From green screens to random visual effects, I was too focused on “making things look cooler” and enhance it instead of a better final product.
That was probably one of my greatest issues.
I fixed it eventually once I got better with doing more screenwriting and figuring out how to make substance out of the message.
So having a stronger quality of message ended up playing a much better role for me instead of trying to do all the flashy stuff.
Most of what I was trying to do you would typically find people with high budget productions and 1000s of dollars worth of studio equipment would have access to.
Don’t get me wrong, I had actually some access to some of this stuff, but this is high school for me.
When I would wanna do it independently, this wouldn’t be anything that I’d own for the most part.
Most of what I’d do would have to get cleared through my school anyway.
Fast forward to when I started fixing things was cleaning up my editing habits.
My videos started looking more professional.
I stopped shooting scenes with the intention of trying to get everything done all at once, in one cut.
It’s a popular thing to be able to do things where you only had to shoot one time and that was it.
But I embraced the habit of reshooting and improving in areas that were okay. And what that did was take it to better heights.
Even if I only had stock footage to edit, I’d sometimes even make several cuts of the same video and just go with something that felt a lot closer to what I was shooting for anyway.
But being flexible in what my final product was, ended up making things a lot better because I felt better about it and it looked that way once I would finally present whatever quality video I would have available.
And I would decide what parts of the footage to cut out instead of keep based off of what I consider to be entertaining.
A lot of my shooting that was done was made out of my own entertainment and it was for something that either I would enjoy personally or I would have my friends enjoy too.
So I would end up getting an idea for what were the things that ended up entertaining us.
And I would pick apart things that I would feel is likely that they would want to see as well too.
Picking that out in general just usually goes with getting an idea for what intrigues your audience.
And the one skill in video editing that the beginner usually underestimates but could makes a huge difference is being able to organize your files.
It’s something that really takes a skill set to be able to do.
You might have something that has a bunch of different scenes and it can be really tough to keep up with everything that’s shot (or all the footage that you’re working with).
And finding the thing that you are comfortable with when it comes to doing your edits, whether that’s going off of a thumb drive or a cloud folder, anything that you feel comfortable with organizing your files with and being able to get access to it easily will help anybody at any level become a better editor.
When I’m editing for myself, I keep the pacing interesting just through having an intended message with each shot.
I shoot in terms of making sure if this was explained through a director’s commentary, I would have something to say for each scene that’s being presented and what it means to me.
It helps explain why the viewer themselves should care about it.
And doing this helps you feel you’re not stuffing a bunch of fluff in your video.
It doesn’t mean I always get it right, but when you keep that in the back of your mind, you will keep your pacing at a reasonable level because you’re going to look to condense and always keep things at a length that you and your viewer will be comfortable with.
And one of the best ways to practice editing, if you don’t have a lot of footage to work with yet, is doing what I did and go through a stock footage vault.
There’s plenty of different providers available, 2 of my favorite are between PixaBay and Pixels. Those 2 are solid.
You get high quality HD, 4K, visuals, and you can tell stories with them.
And take with caution that the sites I’m mentioning’s stock footage runs only 30 seconds to maybe a minute probably, and that’s if you’re on the luckier side of things.
You can still tell solid stories with them though.
And the best editing trick that saves me the most time (or future headaches) would most likely be just to not overdo it with layers.
There’s gonna be a lot of different filters and things you’re going to start appreciating and wanting to add into your videos that you edit overall.
Whether it’s audio, your favorite songs or, again, the filter, visual effects, pictures and whatnot— all that starts to add up.
Demanding on your program, you might only get so many different layers that you’re able to add into the final quality, but if you just get comfortable with working with a shorter, smaller amount of footage or layers in this case, it makes scaling a lot easier.
You’re not going to feel that you have to have a huge, extravagant video every time filled with a bunch of effects rather than just a solid quality video itself.
And it really didn’t take me long to start feeling confident with the things I edited.
It probably took all of maybe a month, and that was from starting day one.
Granted my experience was a little more urgent since it was actually required for me to learn for a passing grade in classes.
I had to figure it out anyway, but it helped being able to do it with teams.
That’s another thing that you might want to be able to keep yourself available and flexible with doing: where you can collaborate with other people and making a single video because you can offset some of the work that you would normally have to do in order to create a final product
And once you get comfortable working with others from doing it and learning what they had to do in order to help get what you created made, then you can eventually look into doing the same things that they did and picking up whatever their portion of work was and eventually do things completely yourself if that’s your goal.
These are all the things that I ended up picking up when it came to learning how to edit videos and doing it on my own.
RealTalkAJ 
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