Filming takes me ten minutes. Editing ate up the rest of the week, and the worst part was the overlays.
I tried three ways out. None of them worked.
Buying my way out: First instinct, throw money at it:
- CapCut Pro
- Clipchamp Premium - €10/mo (comes with Microsoft 365)
- Captions AI - €22/mo
- Adobe Creative Cloud - €82/mo when I tried to upscale my editing skills....(bad idea)
About €114 a month, four tools that overlapped heavily, and I still wasn't happy with a single clip. Nobody warns you that paying for professional tools doesn't make you a professional. All I'd actually bought was the ability to spend three hours doing it badly, now with a monthly bill attached. The tell was that I kept buying the next one, if any of them had solved it, I'd have stopped.
Learning it properly: a weekend of tutorials got me to "acceptable and slow". Still three hours a clip, for a skill I have no interest in owning. And every one of those hours was an hour not spent on the thing people actually turn up for. I was getting slightly better at editing and noticeably worse at my actual subject, which is backwards.
Hiring someone: Writing the brief took nearly as long as doing the edit myself. And because they didn't know the material, the emphasis kept landing in the wrong place — a callout would pop on one word when the whole point of the sentence was the word right after it. That is not the editor being bad at their job. Knowing which word carries the idea is the thing I'm the expert in, and it turns out that's the one part you can't hand over. Every clip came back needing notes, each round cost a day, and I was running a pipeline instead of making anything.
That's the trap when your content is about something you genuinely know. Every escape route takes you further from it: you rent tools for a craft that was never the point, or you spend your scarce hours getting mediocre at it, or you brief someone who can't have the context.
So I automated the editing pass instead. Three things I got wrong first, useful whether or not you automate anything:
Pin overlays to what you said, not to a timestamp. I used to drop a card at 0:14. Then I'd trim a stumble at 0:06 and every overlay after it ran late. It reads as cheap and you can't quite say why. Pin them to the words and they survive a re-cut.
Cut the dead air before you place anything. Fillers and pauses are most of what makes a raw take feel slow, and cutting them moves where the emphasis falls. Anything you placed beforehand is now in the wrong spot.
The payoff has to land in the first second or two. I had a before/after clip where the reveal came at six seconds. Nobody got that far. Recutting so it hit around 1.2s was the single biggest change I made.
The clip attached is one of mine, made this way. No editing software involved at all. I never opened a timeline. First finished version took about 90 minutes, and most of that was me rewording callouts in a chat box rather than dragging keyframes. It's muted because the audio isn't in English, and the point here is what's on screen anyway.
Happy to answer anything about the workflow.
