This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today's listener question as we come to the end of a month, new month coming up tomorrow. Listener question is, how can I edit course videos efficiently on a budget? You've got some videos, you're making an online course and you don't wanna spend a lot of money, you wanna be as quick as possible. Well, those are two good things, right? Efficiency and saving money.
So let's see if we can help this online course creator level up her video editing skills on a budget. I'm gonna give you a couple of beginner friendly tools and hopefully some smart tips for producing polished videos without spending a ton of money. Isn't that what we said? That's a good goal, right? Don't spend a lot of money.
So this is Sophie, she's got a limited budget. She doesn't have a professional editor she can work with. What can she do? All right, detailed version of her question and my answer coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Hi, I'm Sophie and I'm creating an online course on basic sewing techniques.
While I'm confident in my sewing skills, video editing is where I'm struggling. I use free tools like iMovie, but it's still taking me hours to edit even simple videos, especially when adding captions or fixing lighting issues. I'm concerned that the quality of my videos isn't polished enough to compete with other online courses. Firing a professional editor isn't an option due to my budget. Are there beginner friendly tools or methods that can help me produce better videos more efficiently without compromising on quality?
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All right, well, the good news is you can spend a lot of money on video editing and you might wanna do that in some cases, but it just gets easier and easier every year. It gets cheaper and cheaper. There's free software you can use or very affordable software at least. And you spend a little bit of time using these things and you just get better at it. Not saying everybody wants to become a skilled video editor, but if you are making videos either for social media or for this online course, it's helpful to just kind of know a few things, even if you end up working with somebody else.
So CapCut is great. It's a very intuitive tool, CapCut, just one word. It has this super easy timeline editing process. It's got built-in effects, auto captions. You can probably watch a video yourself on YouTube of how to use CapCut in 15 minutes or less and be off to the races.
It was originally designed for TikTok, but it works well for longer videos as well. Another one is called Descript. Descript lets you edit videos as if you're editing text. So it's kind of another intuitive method. Uses auto captioning and screen recording tools.
Can be really good for course creators who need efficiency, which is what we're looking at. Now, here's an important tip before you edit. Improve lighting and audio. It's time-consuming in post-production to fix lighting and audio problems. The more you can improve in the beginning, it's gonna help you later.
So for lighting, use a ring light. They're cheap or two softbox lights to keep lighting even. Natural light is always great. You can film near a window during the day. And then audio, I always encourage people to buy a decent microphone.
There are a bunch of them. The Rode SmartLav is a really good one. It's like a clip-on microphone for the podcast. I'm using a Shure SM7B microphone. That's a few hundred bucks.
So it's a little bit more expensive, but still affordable. Great sound actually makes your videos look really, really good. One of my favorite video editor guys actually told me the audio is more important than the video. And that's coming from a video guy. So those small investments can definitely reduce the need for fixing things later.
And then just in terms of the editing process, simplify it as much as you can. Try to batch your work. Film multiple videos in one session. Edit them in a separate session. It just keeps your workflow more consistent and efficient.
Make some templates. Canva is really great with this. Canva has been our sponsor before in the past, just to note that, but they do a great job. And most people I know are using Canva in one way or another. It allows you to make animated text overlays that you can import into your edit software, or I think it also has auto captions.
Just a lot of great shortcuts and pre-built transitions. Hopefully that's gonna help you. Check out a couple of those tools and try as much as possible not to overthink it. Again, you're not trying to be a pro video editor here. You're just trying to learn a few things.
And thankfully these tools make life easier for all of us who don't want to go down the rabbit hole. Listeners, let me know what you think. If you have a recommendation, sidehustleschool.com. Of course, many episodes, more to come, new and everyday. In fact, it's always completely free.
I hope you will subscribe or follow. And I hope something in the show is helpful to you. That's our whole goal, is to be helpful to you. So let us know how we can continue to improve. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
