Editing vlogs is easy when you do it like THIS

0:00If you have vlog footage sitting on your hard drive right now because you're feeling too overwhelmed to edit, this video is for you. Vlog editing does not have to be scary or overwhelming when you use my easy workflow. First things first, we're going to organize our files. Of course, it's overwhelming when you have a million video clips in no

0:18discernible order, so let's fix that. Step one, get all of your footage onto your computer. I recommend eventually investing in an external hard drive like this SSD from [music] Samsung, but if you don't have one yet, you can just start by creating a dedicated folder on your computer. Step two, either [music] get the files off of the SD card from your camera or AirDrop them from your phone to your computer. Step three, create a folder for each scene in your vlog. Starting with your intro and then going chronologically through what you did in your day. For example, you might have a folder like 01 morning routine,

0:5102 working, 03 lunchtime. Obviously, you're going to create yours based on what you actually did, but I really recommend adding the number order to the front of your folder title, cuz this means when you organize them by name, they're actually going to show up in chronological order. For a vlog to be interesting and engaging, each scene

1:07should have some A-roll and some B-roll. If you realize after the fact that you filmed an entire scene and never talked to the camera, aka captured any A-roll, then you might consider recording a voiceover to go with that scene. Or you could consider using it as a transition montage, but if that's the case, you're going to want to keep it short. I find a lot of beginners lean too far into long B-roll montages that just don't tend to be that interesting. Step four, put all

1:32of those clips into your scene folders. And when you're finished, make two more folders. One of them you're going to title _music and the other one you're going to title _extras. This is where you're going to store any background music, any sound effects, maybe any graphics or photos or things you want to overlay in your video. Also, adding the underscore to the front of these folder titles will mean that they float to the top when you sort everything by name as

1:55well, which will make them easy to find. With all of that done, we're pretty much ready to start the edit. By the way, I know you can get like Claude co-work and stuff to go through all of your files and rename them and sort them into folders, and I get that there may be a time and place for that, but personally, I see the organization as the footage as the foundation of the storytelling process. In order for you to organize all of your clips [music] into scenes, you need to know what clips you have in the first place. Going through all of your files and organizing them into

2:25scenes [music] by folder helps jog your memory of what you captured and gets you started on the creative process of thinking about how you want to cut it together in your video. Step two, import your footage into DaVinci Resolve. Okay, first up, as soon as you open Resolve, you're going to want to make sure you're

2:39on the edit tab rather than the cut tab. Then, you're going to look for the media pool, which is on the left-hand side of the screen. Open up your finder window, and you're going to select all of your scene folders and drag them into the master column of the media pool. This is really important because if you just drag them into this big box here, you'll see that it actually just imports all of the video files and doesn't keep any of the folder structure that you just worked so hard to create. So, now you've got all your clips organized into scenes and in chronological order over here on

3:07the left-hand side. Quick extra bonus tip for you, you're going to want to make that extra assets folder now, even though you don't think you need it yet. Resolve has this really great feature where once you have dragged a folder into your media pool, all you have to do is right click and select resync media files to pull in any additional files that you added to that folder after you brought it into Resolve. This is so nice because it means you don't have to keep clicking and dragging files into your program. Once you got the folder in there, you can just resync it when you download new stuff. Speaking of those

3:36additional assets, if you find yourself needing more visuals or sound effects or background music when you're in the editing [music] process, my favorite place to grab those is from Storyblocks. I've been using Storyblocks for years to help tell more interesting stories in my videos. It's a massive online stock library of media assets that you have permission to use in your content across social media. It's royalty-free, pre-licensed, and you never have to worry about copyright strikes, or getting demonetized, or anything like that. The other day, I needed some b-roll of the sun glistening on the

4:09water for an idea I had in my video. However, the day that I went to the [music] beach to shoot my content, it was really cloudy and overcast, so there was just no chance of me being able to capture that. However, I was able to find it on Storyblocks, and it patched in together nicely with the rest of my clips. If you need a time lapse, or drone footage, or an establishing shot of a location, Storyblocks is a great place to check. And the cool thing is, Storyblocks is offering you guys 15% off any annual plan, but just for a limited time. So, if you want to check that out,

4:38make sure you go to storyblocks.com/katie, or check out the link in the description. And of course, thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring today's video. Step three, build the structure. Okay, now that your footage is all organized and loaded into Resolve, it's time to start building out the structure of your vlog. First, let's just make sure our sorting is correct. So, you're going to go into your first bin. Let's just go into the intro folder here, and you're going to go up to this little

5:00down arrow next to the horizontal lines. That's our sort button. We'll click on that, and we'll make sure that it's set to date created. That means that all of our files are going to be in order of when you actually filmed them, which is going to be a lot easier. Now, this is kind of a bonus step, but I like to go ahead and color code each folder. This means that our scenes in the timeline are going to be color coded as well. So, you can do this by just clicking on one of your files here, and then hitting command A on your keyboard to select

5:28them all. Then, right click, go down to clip color, and then just pick whatever one you like. So, I'm going to go through each folder and do that. I find this helpful because later on, it's going to be really easy to distinguish where one scene starts and the next begins in your timeline. Okay, so next up, we're going to open our first scene, and start bringing our a-roll into the timeline. Actually, I'm just going to use my morning folder as an example here because all of my intro is A-roll, but when you're looking for A-roll, typically what I like to do is just look for my selfie clip. So, anytime that my

5:58face is in it, I'm like, "Oh, yep. This, I'm pretty sure is A-roll. You know, this is definitely A-roll." And so, I will just go ahead and click [music] and drag those into the timeline. If you're having trouble finding what you're looking for up at the top here, if you click on the little drop-down next to the thumbnail icon, you can actually change the size of your thumbnails. So, you can make them bigger and that is going to be much easier to go through

6:23and pick [music] out your A-roll clips. Another quick tip for making this faster, I can actually go ahead and select these all at once by just holding command as I scroll through. And when I find a clip where I know [music] I'm talking to the camera, I will select it and you can see [music] I'm like slowly getting more of my A-roll clips added to my list. And once I have them all selected, all highlighted in red, I'm going to click [music] and drag them into the timeline where they will be in the order that I selected them. I'm going to repeat this for all of my scenes leaving short

6:57breaks on the timeline between each scene chunk because it's just going to give me a little bit more breathing room to shuffle things around later. With this complete, you've got the basic chronological structure of your vlog already in place. And by the way, I just wanted to say I love sharing my video editing tips for free here on my channel, you ever feel overwhelmed or you want to get some extra help with your content, I actually have a team of video editors that would love to work with you. We're a small agency, it's called Creatorly Media. It's an all-women video editor team and we edit

7:26videos for YouTubers, content creators. We just recently started editing short-form videos as well. So, if that sounds like it would be helpful for you, you can check out all the details in the description. Step four, automatically remove your awkward pauses. Okay, this is the stage where things really speed up cuz we're going to do a few things automatically. With everything added to the timeline, we're now able to automatically remove any pauses that you had while you were talking to the camera. DaVinci Resolve only lets us do this to one clip at a time, so you do have the option of going through and doing it to each clip individually, but

7:56obviously that kind of takes a while. So, the hack that I'm going to suggest instead is what you can do is go ahead and select all the clips. We'll just do this one scene at a time to keep it simple, and you're going to right click and go up to the top and select new compound clip. You can just leave the name as a default. This is kind of a temporary thing, so don't stress about it. Now you see it's turned into one continuous clip with one long audio file. Now with our clip still selected, we're going to go up to the top here and click on clip, scroll down and look for

8:24audio operations, and then go across and click [music] ripple delete silence. As you can see, it's automatically highlighted all of the pauses where you weren't talking to the camera. It's just kind of like background noise or silence. So, you can adjust this if your clip is generally quiet, then you might want to like change your threshold so that it's not deleting so much. I think this looks about right for this particular clip. And then I'm going to click remove. I will say as a caveat to this, if you're dealing with a lot of clips that have varying audio levels, you might want to change your audio

8:57levels to make them more similar before you do this or just simply do the ripple delete silences on a smaller group of clips or individually. Finally, you're going to reselect all of those clips, right click again, and then select decompose in place using clips only. You can see everything is reverted back to being its own individual clip rather than from our big compound clip. And

9:19with all your awkward pauses cut out. This will automatically remove all of your pauses, which cuts down on editing time a ton, especially if you have a script or notes that you reference while you're filming like I do, and so therefore you have a ton of awkward pauses while you're looking down to remember what you wanted to say next. All of that is automatically gone. Okay, so my next time-saving tip is to transcribe your timeline. You can do this by finding your timeline in the media pool, right clicking, go down to AI tools, audio transcription, and then click on transcribe. This is just going to take a couple minutes and it's going

9:52to end up saving us a ton of time, especially if you're the kind of person that likes to do multiple takes or start over and say your line again until you get it right, because scanning through text is always going to be faster than having to watch back through all of your mistakes to find the right one. Also, for a lot of us, it tends to be like our final take is the one we want to go with anyway, so you can look through your text and very quickly jump to the final time that you delivered your line and just keep that part. So, once this is

10:19complete, we've got a transcription like this. The other benefit of this is if you're trying to remember where you talked about something in your vlog, so you can call back to it or grab a clip from that scene later on, so you can just click on the search button here and then search for a particular word. And you can see it's automatically highlighted and it jumped me to that part of the video. The other great thing is you can delete sections of the video right from inside the transcript, so I can see here Dan attempted this line twice. So, I'm just going to go ahead and select this and delete it, and you

10:48can see it's been automatically deleted from the timeline as well. So, especially if you're new to timeline-based video editors, using the transcript can be a bit of a shortcut to quickly cut out segments of A-roll without having to watch them back. Whether you cut out your mistakes or your retakes from the transcript or by watching back through the timeline, once you've completed this, the rough cut of your vlog is basically done. Now, we're going to move into creating the polished version of the video, which is going to include actually watching back what we have. Step number six, add B-roll. At this point, we're moving from doing

11:17batch tasks for the entire video to working more scene by scene, including cleaning up the cuts between clips, adding the relevant B-roll over top of our A-roll, adding transitions between scenes, and adding our background music. So, start with your first scene and watch through your A-roll. At this point, we should just be watching through your final best takes without any pauses in between, so that's saving us some time, but at this point, as we go, we're going to be cleaning up the cuts. Since the ripple delete silence tool won't always be perfect, oftentimes I find that it actually leaves more blank space at the end of a talking clip

11:49than I would comfortably want to have. Or sometimes it might cut a little too soon and you actually need to extend the clip out to adjust for that. Also, I personally like to layer my dialogue cuz I find it just makes it flow better, gets rid of any dead air. So, I do that by selecting my second clip in this case, and I'm going to drag the audio

12:07track down to audio track number two. [music] This means that now I can click and drag this over just slightly to the left, and if we really zoom in there, you can see that the final word of this scene is overlapping just slightly with the first word of this scene, and it just makes it really pacey and fast. If there's one thing I hate when watching a video, it's when there's like an awkward amount of silence between one word and the next. As I'm listening to what the A-roll clip is talking about, I'm going to start looking in the media pool for the relevant B-roll clips that go

12:46with that talking segment. To do this, you're going to click on the B-roll clip that you want and drag it into the preview panel. Then, you can start playing it back or scrub through it just by clicking and dragging along the timeline. And when it gets to the point where you want to actually use the clip, like the start of what you want, you can hit I on the keyboard to set your in point, and then you can continue to scrub along, and [music] when you get to where you want the clip to end, you can hit O to set your out point. Then, you can hover over the

13:17clip, and you'll see that you've got like a little video icon and a little audio icon here. For most of the B-roll that I use, I tend to just use the video clip cuz the audio isn't relevant or it might be distracting. So, I'm going to click on the video icon and then drag this into the timeline and I will put it on video two. So, it's layered over top of my A-roll. Technically, yes, you could just drag it here. However, it's going to be a little bit messy later if I choose that I want this clip to be at a different point and then now I've lost

13:47that original A-roll that I might have wanted to show at some point. So, that's why I always add it to track two so I can continue to independently move it anywhere in the video without disrupting my A-roll track. So, I'm just going to continue to do this going through my B-roll clips taking them into the preview panel setting my in and out points and then clicking on the video icon and dragging it down onto the track. Now, in this particular case, I just wanted to highlight you don't always have to have your B-roll just over top of A-roll. There's going to be some moments where you want a

14:17transitional scene where there's no dialogue happening. That's kind of what I intended for these clips just to be establishing shots to say, "Hey, it's the morning. I'm leaving the van." So, I'm going to actually select these and move them over to the left a little bit. This is why I leave the blank space between the scenes. You can see my intro's over here. Here's the morning

14:36scene. Because I have space to do this. We'll get rid of all the space later on, but for now, I can move these over. I can move them down onto my main track and I can have this just be visual. Sometimes when I'm editing to make things quicker, I'll kind of start watching it back and then I'll use the Q and W keyboard shortcuts to automatically trim to the right or left of the playhead. So, in this case, I'm going to hit W and that's removed the end of that clip. Now, I'm going to keep watching this. Sometimes when I have a longer clip like this, I like to do jump

15:05cuts. So, I'm just going to hit C. That's what I have set for cut. And then I'm going to move over here. Okay, now I'm going to hit Q to delete that. I'll play a little bit more. [music] Cut again. Jump over here and hit Q again. And now I've got this kind of a jump cut effect that just helps to make this clip go by quicker. Now, in the case of this final clip, I would like it to overlap my vlog section, so I'm just going to move this up to my track two {slash} B-roll track, and then I can move this over, and you will continue to

15:35see B-roll. The B-roll will be seamless, but then you will also start to hear me talk. Once the A-roll and B-roll of the scene are starting to come together, I'm going to start thinking about what I think the mood of the scene is, and then seek out music to match the emotion that I'm trying to portray here. Once I've collected some tracks that I like, I'll put them into my music folder, and in Resolve, if I right click and select resync media files, it'll automatically populate what I have in the folder that I imported into Resolve. Since we're talking about audio, I wanted to take a

16:05brief moment to talk about how I approach sound design in general. So, just to recap what we've done so far. Like you saw already, I put my A-roll talking tracks on audio track one and audio track two, so I'll just rename those really quick. Next, I'm going to put my music on tracks three, and I'm

16:23also going to use track four for this. The reason I have two is so that I can overlap the end of one music track with the start of the next. Speaking of the end of audio tracks, really quick simple tip for you, I find that a scene sounds so much more complete when the music track actually ends at the end of the

16:39scene rather than it just fading out. There would be more sophisticated ways to do this, but what I typically do is I just make a cut somewhere [music] arbitrarily, and then I trim to the end of the clip, and then click and drag the end of the music track so that it lines up with the end of the scene. Then, I will just line these up somewhere underneath the talking, so it's not going to be obvious. I click on the cut, right click, and I'll add like nine-frame crossfade. This is a very quick and dirty way of doing it, I'll admit, but I find that when it's

17:11underneath talking anyway, it's not super obvious, and it just feels very complete when the song ends when the scene ends. So then, just to show you what I mean about the music, we'll click and drag our first scene over here. So I'll take my next music track and I'm going to drag it down to music number two. And now you can see it kind of overlapping the end of that one and so there's just like no silent pause. It

17:34blends seamlessly from one to the next. Okay, and then finally, audio track five is open for any sound effects that I want to add later. The reason why it's so important that you have dedicated tracks for different types of audio is because we can make changes to the entire track at once. The simplest, most beginner approach to this is if you click on the mixer button in the top right-hand corner here, it'll bring up a panel that shows all of your different audio tracks now nicely labeled. So, for example, with music, I pretty much always want my music to be a lower level

18:04because it's usually background music. So, I can just go ahead and drag this down to be at minus, let's say 25 or so. It's typically where I keep it. We'll do the same thing for music two. This way, I don't have to go through each individual audio track and change the volume over here. I can just do it based on the entire track. If you want to make your audio sound even more professional, a couple of few tips for you. You're going to go ahead and click on the music note icon down here. This is going to take us into Fairlight. [music] There's a lot going on here and

18:33honestly, I'm no audio engineer, but I do have a couple things that I like to do. Over here, if we expand our mixer, we're going to see even more options than we did on the other page. Let's start by just working on our dialogue tracks. thing we're going to do is click on this green line here. This opens up the dynamics and I like to add just a default dialogue compression. What this means is if you ever were like too close to the microphone or got too loud at a certain point, it's going to reduce anything that's above this range, which is just going to make your talking sound

19:03more cohesive and more around the same volume. Anything we do to A1, we need to do to A2 so that all of our dialogue sounds the same. So I'm just going to add that same compressor. Second quick step you can take is adding a little bit of voice isolation, so I'm going to go

19:17back over to A1, enable voice isolation. I like to set this to like, honestly, 10, 15 at the most. I find anything over 10 or 15 starts to sound a little bit robotic, but at this level it just cuts out some of the background noise. Again, anything we do to A1, we've got to do to A2. Make sure that you've got the track icon selected here rather than click so that all of our changes are going to the actual track. Final thing we're going to add to our dialogue track is changing the EQ. At this point, I have a preset for this that I start with and then

19:50adjust [music] based on how it sounds. But to give you a basic rundown, in this zone, around band four, from like 1K up to 4K, this is a frequency range where if you boost it, it tends to make your dialogue sound a little bit more clear. And over here in the band one range, anything kind of like lower than 100, if we reduce that a little bit, it'll get rid of any rumble or like muddiness in the audio. Those are a couple tips to get you started, but it's best practice to listen back to your audio and make adjustments as you're hearing it until it sounds good. That being said,

20:25whatever changes we make to A1, we need to make to A2. So, once I've got the curve that I like here, I click on these three dots, click copy, go over to A2's EQ, and then click on those three dots again, and click paste. That way, even when our dialogue bounces between the two tracks, it should sound exactly the same. Okay, now for music, it's a little bit quicker. Like you saw before, I already reduced the gain, so we're at minus 25 for both of them. Then I'm going to go into the EQ, and I have a preset for this as well. The basic idea though is we're doing the inverse of

20:55what we just did on the voice. You might notice that four here is really low, before we boosted it up. That's because in the one to 2K range, that's where background music really starts to crowd out a human talking voice. And so if we reduce that a little bit, it means it's going to compete less with our dialogue. Also, it's generally good to take out the bass and the percussion and some of the higher frequencies, too, that can be distracting. So, this is the shape that

21:18I apply to every background music track. If you really wanted to get particular with it, you could adjust it based on the song, but I find for the purposes of a vlog, this is pretty good. Like I said, I'm not an audio expert and I learned all of this stuff from YouTube tutorials as well. I'm going to link a few videos in the description that helped me understand EQ a little bit better, so you can check those out for more details as well. With all of these settings in place, you're going to just continue the chronological workflow through your vlog. Watch back your A-roll rough cut, add in the B-roll that

21:52is relevant to what you're talking about in the scene, add in your background music and any sound effects, you'll find yourself with a complete [music] vlog. As you're going here, you're going to want to keep pacing in mind. You don't want the entire video feeling like it's at a breakneck pace with tons of cuts and high-energy music. Sometimes, you need to break it up with slower

22:10moments and pauses and longer clips. Even just to give your viewer the chance to process what they've just seen in the previous scene. Learning pacing takes time and practice, but it's all a part of good storytelling. Once your edit is complete, you're going to head over to the deliver tab. That's little rocket ship here. And what I typically do is change my format to MP4, the codec to H.265. All of this, I'm going to leave default cuz I set my timeline resolution to match my video at the beginning. I want it to be the timeline frame rate. I am going to change quality from automatic to restrict to 60,000. [music]

22:47This just makes it more compatible with YouTube's upload standards, and I'm going to leave everything [music] else the same. I'm not even going to open advanced settings, and I'm just going to click add to render [music] queue. Hopefully, this was a helpful guide to making the vlog editing process easier, but if you want the ultimate hack to making editing easier, that [music] is outsourcing. Like potentially to my team of video editors at Creatorly Media. I'll be honest, I personally love editing and I still do edit some of my videos just for fun cuz I enjoy it, but a lot of the time I personally outsource my editing to the Creatorly Media team

23:20because it just opens up my time to come up with more video ideas and spend time focusing on other parts of my business or honestly, just have a bit better work-life balance. To me, an unexpected benefit of outsourcing editing is just having a second opinion on my content, someone who is just as familiar with what I'm making as I am because she's editing it all the time, so I can get opinions and feedback when I'm not sure about an idea. And you could have the same with our editors because part of the editing package we offer at Creatorly Media is that you get like a monthly check-in call with your editor

23:47to talk about ideas, give feedback. Yeah, I just really think creative collaboration is really underrated, especially in the content creator space cuz so many of us tend to work on our own. Anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, like I said, all the details are in the description, but if you want to check out more DaVinci Resolve editing tutorials from me, I've got a ton of free info here on my YouTube channel. As always, thanks so much for watching. I hope you're having adventures and following your dreams, and I'll catch

24:11you in the next video. Bye.