One Week to edit, polish, and ready a show for YouTube release

In my last challenge, I worked on becoming a freelance writer. It is a goal that I have been striving towards for some time and the act of putting it down on paper, or screen if you will, caused me to work toward the goal. There is a certain power in writing something down, a commitment to it that does not come with simply stating it. The spirit of the 1WC (1 Week Challenge for new folks) is to take something that I have been passively working towards and make it the focus of my attention. The challenge this week is the brainchild of my lovely partner Angelica. We have been working on a YouTube show for children that promotes imagination and play. Not only does it do good things, but it also is capable of generating a hefty passive income. A word about Angelica, she comes up with the storylines, does the filming, and keeps the production moving. Credit where its due friends, and she is the creator of this particular endeavor.

You may be asking, where do I come into play? Well, I am the designated video and audio editor for this enterprise, which means that I have recently taken a crash course in video editing.

I had edited video before, in high school, which was like an eon ago, to the point where we had to transfer the VHS onto a hard drive to edit it.

More recently I have worked with GarageBand to edit music, and I will say this process is not much different. But onto the challenge, a commitment on my part to have polished and readied all episodes for release. This 1WC will be on how to ready a show for release and set up a YouTube channel, which will involve:

Finalizing 10 episodes for release

Production began a while ago, so right now our uncreated channel is sitting on 10 episodes of material in various stages of production. Some episodes are closer to completion than others and there is need for a title and outdo to be completed. This is a huge factor in branding a channel on YouTube and needs to be just right. Needless to say, there is editing to be done and I have my work cut out for me. I will:

• Edit episodes in batches of 3 in order to polish them
• Finish episodes and have them fully compressed, ready for release
• There are certain factors that may be out of my control, but I will attack my controllables with vigor

When editing our videos we use LumaFusion on the iPad pro due to the fact that it allows for up to six tracks of video and audio to be edited. I have been very happy with its ability to produce more complex video overlays than anything iMovie can put out. That being said, it does not come with the high quality stock audio that iMovie brings to the table. In order to remedy that, I have a subscription at ProductionCrate which is affordable and offers a huge variety of graphics and sound.

Creating Thumbnails

This is essentially a billboard for your channel on YouTube. Bland, non-catchy, forgettable pictures need not apply. They are small, so it will require the right amount of visibility and creativity to get the right images. Angelica will be helping with this one and we will be aided by ComicLife 3, which offers a huge variety of fonts and font options along with the ability stretch font, which is great for creativity.

Setting up a YouTube channel

Having never set up a YouTube channel before, this will probably be the steepest learning curve. This will require registering the channel name along with starting some YouTube certification courses. These will help me gain a better understanding of how to get items viewed on the channel. At a bare minimum we should have the channel set up and ready to be occupied by videos at the end of the challenge.

On the other side of this 1WC should exit a polished show that is ready for release within two weeks afterwards. There may be an episode that is created in the midst, but this challenge factors for 10 episodes. As opposed to the usual synopsis that I like to throw at the end of a 1WC, I will be writing an article that dives more in depth in relation to both video editing and creating a channel. It will be a thorough approach in the hope that my successes and failures can help folks out.

Or I’m just shouting into the void of the internet.

Either way, I hope you enjoy it. If you ever want to reach out with questions or comments, please do.

Until next time,

Peter