346 – This simple skill can make you and save you a ton of money: Tom talks Simple Video Editing

Episode 346 – Simple Video Editing
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody. It's Tom here with episode three hundred and forty six of Screw the Commute podcast. We're going to talk about simple video editing today. Now, this is part of my quest of continuous improvement. I believe the Japanese. I think they call that kaizen.

[00:00:44] This flies in the face of all the so-called efficiency experts who tell you to delegate everything, well, my idea that's worked for me for now. Now, let's say forty four years, OK? And business is to increase your skills, which knocks down your costs. Now, I'm going to get back to that idea in a few minutes. Hope you didn't miss Episode 345 veteran Erika Hatfield's a professional photographer. She's a mom, a homeschooler, does it all. And she has a really cute episode for you on how to get all this stuff done.

[00:01:28] All right, how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or giving you ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit, screwthecommute.com, look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail mail, click on it, talk into your phone or computer and tell me how the show has helped you. And also put your website in there so I can give you a big shout out in your own voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute.

[00:01:58] All right. Make sure you grab a copy of our automation ebook. This has saved me millions of keystrokes and helped me handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and 40000 customers without pulling my hair out pretty much runs the lifeblood of my business makes me go lightning fast to take care of people, reduces my workload, all kinds of stuff. We sell this book for 27 bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the show. Check it out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of my podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app where you can put it on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right. I know everybody's still freaking out with this pandemic.

[00:02:46] Schools are open, schools are closed. They open for a little bit and they close. I mean, it's just crazy out there. I can't imagine what your parents are going through. But here's the deal, folks. If you can get yourself and your kids to learn how to sell online, you're not affected by these crazy things that are happening in the world. I'm not I've been sitting here, the whole pandemic and people saying, hey, you OK? And yeah, why? What's the difference?

[00:03:14] I was sitting here selling stuff all around the world like I have been for twenty six years online. All right. So so you can learn how to do that. I've got two ways to teach you. One, I'll tell you a little bit about later. It's my mentor program, but the one that would be one of the best things you could ever do for the young people in your life and for you, if you have a business or want to start a business, is learn how to sell online.

[00:03:41] And I have a school is the only licensed, dedicated Internet marketing school in the country certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia. It's a distance learning school. We've got people making money in the first month. One girl is making six thousand dollars a month after four months hasn't even graduated.

[00:04:05] So yes, this is a real deal of hard core skills that are in great demand. See, every business on earth needs website and email marketing and shopping carts and text and chat bots and all the stuff. That's what we teach. So you're not going for years running up enormous debt and then competing for jobs at Starbucks. So check it out at IMTCVA.org, and I'll tell you how you can get a complete scholarship to that school. If you're in my mentor program, I'll tell you about that a little later.

[00:04:38] All right. Let's get to the main event, simple video editing. I mean, in the opening, I said learning this and other skills can save you money.

[00:04:47] See, learning a skill saves you money and more than one way.

[00:04:52] Not only do you not have to pay to have that particular work done, but now you know what's involved. So when you do farm out the work, you don't overpay. One of the best lines I ever heard on negotiating prices to have work done, and I can't remember where I heard this, but here's the line. This should be easy for someone who knows what they're doing. This is a great line. Let me repeat that. This should be easy for someone who knows what they're doing. See, this implies that, you know how long and how much it should cost so the person can't give you a line of B.S. and then jack the price way up. I mean, if you don't know what you're doing, whatever they say, you say, oh, OK. I guess that's how much it should cost. Well, no, it's not. It's the fact they know you don't know what you're doing and they can tell you anything and you'd believe it. So when one of these experts tells you to delegate everything, right, tell them you are delegating the task to Tom, Antion to find a new expert. OK, so so I don't want those people directing your career. They're going to run. They'll delegate you into the poorhouse. All right, so let's get back to simple video editing, I emphasize the word simple because I don't want you to try to play Steven Spielberg here. All right. I mean, there's an art to really great video editing. And even though you may learn how to use the video editing software, that doesn't mean you can use it to be artistic.

[00:06:38] In fact, most of you listening couldn't be artistic with it. It's just not in your blood. That's not the point of this episode. The point of this episode is to save you money and time so you get simple videos out quickly at zero cost. Now, here's an example. Let's say I capture some footage on a Friday and it's just great. And I want to get it out immediately to my followers.

[00:07:05] Well, my video guy, Marc, who's been with me, I think is more than 12 years. I can't really remember he's got a family, he might be going camping this weekend and he's packing the van and getting ready to head out. Well, the earliest he'd be able to even look at my footage would be Monday afternoon, because he's got Monday morning. He's got all the you know, he also great stuff in my school and and takes care of students and all that stuff. So we got to take care of them.

[00:07:40] So the earliest he'd be able to even look at my footage would be Monday afternoon.

[00:07:45] So let's say he looks at it Monday afternoon, starts making the edits I write up for him and starts rendering it before leaving work. Now, rendering means getting that already as a finished product. So don't worry about the details of that.

[00:08:02] And Tuesday morning, he sends it to me on Tuesday morning. I'm busy with students and and mentees and I can't look at it till Tuesday afternoon. And then I find he didn't understand one of my instructions, not his fault. It's just hard to to convey video stuff by, you know, text and email. So let me take a sidebar here.

[00:08:25] When I sent the video to Marc, I also had to write out instructions of what was in my head and what I wanted changed on the video. Well, this is time consuming and as you just heard, difficult to convey in writing.

[00:08:41] So he had to make the edits. And then rendered the video, you know, he fixed up the edits that I didn't like and re render the video Tuesday afternoon, so he gets it to me Wednesday morning and I check it out and.

[00:08:58] All right, it's fine. It's good. But guess what? I already had a promotion planned for Wednesday, so I had to wait till Thursday to send this out. I mean, look at all that wasted time. Had I been able to do simple edits, I would have saved six days of time and all that writing to describe my vision of the edits. Plus maybe the video wasn't as relevant. Six days later as it would have been had I got it out that Friday when I shot it.

[00:09:31] See, so I lost six days of that video possibly making money because I refused to learn some simple wedding techniques. Well, I didn't refuse. I've been doing this for a long time.

[00:09:43] But I'm telling you, if you learn this, you can speed things up like crazy and get your workout and take advantage of things right now instead of wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's why many people lose their businesses. They delegate everything and they have to wait and they overpay for anything. So right. There is a massive opportunity lost and a massive drain on your business that you may be just starting up and you need that cash flow and you can't afford delays of a week at a time for simple stuff. Say so. Learn some things.

[00:10:24] All right. Let me take another sidebar here. When we're really doing a serious video project, I sit right next to Marc and we work at lightning speed because we're both looking at the same screen.

[00:10:37] And I might say something like cut to this other scene two seconds earlier.

[00:10:42] So then he does it and then we look at it and both of us immediately say, no, no, no, let's try one second. That two seconds was too much and then we do one second.

[00:10:52] He edits it right there. Perfect. And we move to the next edit. Many videos don't want you sitting there. And if you're a jerk and don't know what you're doing, I don't blame him. But I do know what I'm doing. And projects go way faster if we work together rather than trying to write edits back and forth to something that's visual. All right. Let's talk a little bit about software. Here's here's my overriding tip. Find someone reliable to tutor you and then use whatever they're using as software. OK, even if it costs you more, it will save you enormous amounts of time and frustration. This is by far the fastest method to learn. I mean, you could really knock this out in a week, this whole thing I'm talking about. And it would carry you forever the rest of your career. Now, the reason I'm using Adobe premiere is because the highly skilled and creative video guy, Austin Smith uses it.

[00:11:55] He came to my house when he lived in Virginia Beach, and he's now making his splash in Hollywood. The guy is crazy, fantastic. Check out his Tick-Tock channel and just he does amazing things with video.

[00:12:08] So he tutored me, he pretty much is responsible for my Roku TV channel, which is a whole bunch of my public speaking videos.

[00:12:18] Anyway, I wrote out a list of things I wanted to learn how to do, and he cut right to the chase and taught them to me, now, if later there's something else I want to do, I send them some paper money and he tells me how to do it.

[00:12:34] Now, Adobe premiere is a super professional program and will do a hundred times what I'll ever learn how to do, but it doesn't matter. With his help, I learn to do what I need to do for simple editing. Now, other options, if you have a Mac, iMovie comes on it, it's a simple program, much simpler than Adobe premiere, and it's right there already on your Mac. Now, the equivalent to Adobe premiere is Final Cut Pro, that's for Mac. I don't know if they have it for PC or not now on PC. The Vegas is a popular cheaper program and you can rent Adobe premiere. You don't have to pay. The full price is very expensive. But Adobe has these programs where you can just pay monthly for different software packages. So that's what we do. Let's see, really, the first thing, like I said, is to find someone who will tutor you and then get what they got because they'll, ah, they won't have to study some other program to figure stuff out. They work with it all the time. Now, there's also apps that you can edit right on your cell phone or tablet. I tend to like laptops and desktops.

[00:13:50] Better for this because you can see better with the larger screens. But if you're OK with a smaller screen, go for an app. I mean, they're free or cheap. I mean, 10, 15 bucks or something. And you can have enormous capabilities right on your cell phone and tablet. Like I said, it's just harder to see another thing.

[00:14:11] Before I bother Auston, I usually go to YouTube to see if there's a tutorial on how to do what I want to do. Then I do it and then I update the cheat sheet I'm going to tell you about shortly. So what are some of the things you got to learn how to do? Well, we're not talking about shooting here. Remember, just editing. I got other episodes on shooting. So the first thing is how to get the darn video off your cell phone to wherever you're going to edit it, if you're using an app on your phone, or you can skip this step. But if you're using a laptop or desktop, you have to get the raw video over there to edit it. And your tutor will tell you the easiest way for you to do this. Sometimes you hook up a cord, sometimes you send it the like iCloud and then download it. So whatever makes sense for you is fine with me. Next, you have to understand file formats a little bit like .MOV and .MP4. Your final product, currently the standard is .MP4, but there are different qualities of .MP4 and different file sizes. So you you've got to learn what's appropriate for whatever purpose you're going to use the video for. And you can once you finish editing it, you can put it out in multiple formats for different places. No problem. Now, a big overriding principle, again, is called non-destructive editing. Back when I first started this, we had tapes that you had to copy a piece of a one tape onto another tape.

[00:15:49] If you messed up, you had to start all over again. Well, with this digital editing, you can move stuff all over the place. But if you learn how to protect your original footage, you'll always have it to fall back on in case you make some big mistake while working on your video project. So it's nondestructive. It's not killing off your original raw footage. So you're just, you know, editing is what you're doing. You're moving it around and doing different stuff with it for a final product. Now, each video shot you take with your camera or your cell phone will be called a clip. You collect all these clips and import them to your video editing software where you can move them all around and on what's called the time line. So it's a place where you drag these clips and you can see the time of your total length of your video across the top. That's called the timeline. Now, another thing, you can always shorten a clip, but you can't lengthen it. I mean, I guess you could go into slow motion, right? But in normal circumstances, you can only shorten a clip. For example, this is when you see someone at the end of their video walk toward the camera and reach up to turn it off. Well, this could be easily cut out. You know, shorten that part right to the end of what you were talking about. And it makes a nicer ending. Very easy to do that.

[00:17:19] You need to learn to transition between clips. See when one clip ends and another immediately starts. That's called a cut. If one scene fades away as another fades in, that's called a dissolve. The most video editing software have tons of cool ways to transition between clips, wipes, flashes, spins, checkerboards.

[00:17:47] But see, now we're getting fancy into the art of editing. I mean, just because you can do crazy stuff like that with the editing software doesn't mean you should. It'll probably look stupid.

[00:17:58] Now you have to learn to raise or lower the audio, put text and graphics on. And all of it's easy. If someone just pointed it out to you, then you have to be able to output output your finished product and uploaded to YouTube or put it wherever you want. All right. Now, besides the standard stuff I just mentioned, I'm going to go over the cheat sheet I created so so I can remember how to do things that I don't do often. See, a regular video editor does this stuff every day, but I don't. So when I need to do something on the video, I refer to my cheat sheet.

[00:18:36] I don't want to call Austin or Marc my video guy for stuff that, you know, I'm doing all the time. They'll just think I'm an idiot and wasting their time, which I'm paying for. So I want to make a cheat sheet so I have something when they're not around. And I can and I haven't thought about it for a while. So, for instance, I don't think I've had to put text on a video for about a month.

[00:19:00] There's no way I even remember how to do it, but as soon as I look at my step by step cheat sheet. Text is on the screen and the proper size and place.

[00:19:11] All right, now, before I tell you about the things on my cheat sheet, I want to tell you about my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique program of its kind in Internet marketing anywhere ever. You can give me any big name, person, any new person. I don't care. I triple dog dare you to compare my program to anybody's. It gives the I'm a fanatic, folks, if you can tell I'm a fanatic, I do this day and night, seven days a week. You know, I'm just crazy interested in helping small business people. I'll do things nobody else will do. I take calls on evenings, weekends, holidays. I mean, I accidentally threw a class on Thanksgiving when that's how pitiful I am. I didn't notice it was Thanksgiving made. Thirty eight hundred bucks on it. So. So that makes your stuffing go down a little easier. Which I probably got from 7-Eleven wasn't home cooked. But anyway I a fanatic. Well fanatics are great for you if you get a person that could care less whether you're successful or not. Well you know, why would you want to pay them when you could pay a fanatic that's crazy interested in your success? And why am I interested in your success? And how is that proof positive that it's a success? Well, I turned the Internet world on.

[00:20:37] It's held on its head twenty years ago because guys like me were charging 50 or 100 thousand bucks up front to teach you this stuff. And a lot of these people were rip offs. They could care less about you once they got their money. Heck with you. So I said, that's not fair. It's not right. So I made them all mad by charging a relatively small entry fee to my program made significant because, I mean, I'd have people lined up from here to the sun if I just let them in for free. But you pay an entry fee and then for me to get my fifty thousand, you have to net two hundred thousand while people love this and seventeen hundred students later, it's still going strong and it's unique. It's got all kinds of unique features where you spend an immersion weekend. Of course after the pandemic in my big estate here at home you actually live in the house with me. You're not in a hotel somewhere.

[00:21:33] We've got a TV studio next door. We shoot videos for you. Some of these videos are going for 700 to fifteen hundred dollars apiece.

[00:21:42] And we had one guy shoot twenty five the other day and a couple came in and shot fifty two one time, each of them worth about 700 bucks apiece. If you had went on the open market. So just tons of things and everything is one on one tutoring teach you how to do this stuff. It's crazy, crazy, crazy. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And also if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to my school that you can gift to somebody or use yourself. It's one of the best legacy gifts you could ever give to a young person in today's atmosphere, let me tell you that. So anyway, check it all out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:22:30] All right. Let's get back to the main event talking about simple video editing. And I want to tell you about the things that are on my cheat sheet.

[00:22:37] All right. I want to these are just going to read these off. They're not in any particular order. It's just as I learned them, I put them on my cheat sheet. I need to learn how to make a new project and keep all the files together for that project. I need to learn how to copy a clip. Let's say I took a clip and I want to use it again somewhere in the video. Well, and you see that all the time. So how to copy a clip, how to group clips together. So let's say I've edited several clips together and I don't want to mess with that section anymore. I group them together. In other words, I lock them together. So so that's a finished part of the whole video, the Ken Burns effect. This is something where you can have like let's say you were written up in a newspaper, you could put the newspaper down, shoot it with your video camera. But then when you put to Ken Burns effect on it, it makes it looks like the camera's moving or that the the the newspaper articles moving just a beautiful effect. Pippy, that's called picture in picture, so how can I put a little picture up on the side of my big picture? Or how do I put a picture on the whole screen?

[00:23:52] All these are my cheat sheet, how to ripple delete. What does that mean? Well, if if you cut something out of the middle of your timeline, you got a big hole there and then you have to slide each clip over one at a time.

[00:24:07] That's that's to the right or to the end of the video or ripple delete means if you cut something out, everything moves over to take the place of that. That saves enormous amounts of time.

[00:24:20] How to rotate a vertical video or vice versa, you know, we shoot that we used to never shoot vertical videos, but now you can because of Instagram.

[00:24:29] So so how to rotate your videos? How to make a slate. That's like the screen is just one color or a gradient of colors or something like that. And why would you do that? Well, you might want to put text on top of it. So I got she cheats on how to put text on a slate or text over a video. We talked about transitions, oh, how to adjust spot volume, so maybe one section of the videos, the volume is either too high or too low. Well, if you just try to raise the whole timeline, you're raising at all and it's still goofy. So you might want to pick one clip and raise or lower its video to match the other video. So how to do that? I can't remember. I haven't had to do it for a long time, but if I had to do it today, it would be done in no time because I go to my teaching how to zoom in on a part of the video. So let's say I wanted to show something closer and I didn't shoot a close up of it. Well, I can zoom in with electronics in the editing to do it. So.

[00:25:37] So really, folks, this is a project you could knock out in a week if you put your mind to it and this would improve your business from now to eternity, save you enormous amounts of money, get you a speed to market that's unheard of just by taking the time, locate a tutor, where would you find that you could maybe find somebody on Craigslist or just ask around some of these young kids that you're never your neighbors or your own kids? I might already know how to do this and they're great at it. So find a tutor, get the software and then learn these simple things. Because video, I mean, I can't say video is exploding. It exploded years ago to help your business. So if you're not on the bandwagon, you missed the show. OK, sorry, you know, you need to get this and get it fast and cheap so that you can get a massive Web presence and video and you will thank me for this episode.

[00:26:37] I'll tell you if you actually do it. All right, folks, that's it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.
 
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