If you want your vlogs to pop off, watch this

0:00So you've finished recording your vlog and now you want to edit the footage into an interesting and engaging video that viewers want to watch until the very end. So in this video I want to share with you my vlog editing workflow from start to finish. Everything from uploading and organizing my footage, creating the first rough cut, adding effects and interesting elements and retention editing, all the things. As always timestamps are below, use them if you need them. Let's jump in. We are going to be editing in Adobe This is my preferred desktop editor. It wasn't always my preferred desktop editor. I used to always prefer CapCut, but the

0:40more I dove into Adobe, the more and more I loved it. It seems like an intimidating software if you're new to the editing world. Like I thought, oh Adobe is way too advanced for me, there's no way. But it actually wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. So we now use Adobe and if you're interested in using Adobe Premiere Pro I have like a tutorial basics how to edit in Adobe Premiere on my YouTube channel so you can watch that. Today we're focusing on editing vlogs. The first thing that you are going to want to do before you make any sort of edit on your vlog is to

1:14create your project obviously in your software and set your project up for success. Basically organize all of your footage or any of the assets that you believe you'll be using when you're editing. So I usually will have four main folders with my edit. I have a folder for footage that I filmed. That's what footage is. Music that I want to use for the vlog, any sound effects and graphics. I

1:40categorize graphics as kind of like etc. stuff that's not necessarily footage that I filmed. Maybe it's screenshots from my phone that I want to pop up at a certain part or a slide that I made in Canva that I want to show up at a certain part or a cool title transition. You know, like it's just etc. things that I'll probably use in the video, but it doesn't qualify as main footage. It's easy to organize everything if your footage is already organized on your hard drives, like as you were vlogging, if you were staying up with organizing your footage while you filmed, then organizing it here will be a piece of

2:16cake. I usually edit my videos off of a portable SSD, so instead of editing directly off of my computer or like a laptop, I will put all of the footage and everything on an SSD and edit off of here because it makes the editing process more smooth since all of the pressure of the files and the storage is

2:39put here instead of on my actual laptop. So, I have one SSD already plugged in and then when I'm completely done editing, I'll take everything off of here and then this main hard drive is like it's my archive. This is like the desk drive that holds all of my archived complete projects. So, that's also post-editing organization. Within the footage folder, since this is a week in the life video, I have all of the days that I recorded and within each day is folders for A-roll and B-roll. A-roll is talking head videos like this or talking to the camera videos like you see here where I'm talking to the camera and then

3:24B-roll is kind of the supplemental footage. That's like the storytelling of the video. Personally, I always recommend having B-roll for your videos, especially vlogs. I feel like B-roll just adds this extra element of visual storytelling. For some of my vlogs, I record my own B-roll, while other times, maybe I just don't have the time or I look back at my footage and realize, "Oh, shoot, I forgot to film this or I didn't film enough for this part of the vlog. That's usually when I go to Storyblocks and look for something that I think could better help support my vlogs. Storyblocks is a library of 100% human-made stock media, meaning every

4:10asset is created by an actual filmmaker, artist, or a musician, and not generated by AI. Their library includes millions of footage clips, music tracks, sound effects, images, and templates, so I can usually find what I need without jumping between a bunch of different platforms. For example, I could look up sun coming through palm trees. Let's say for part of my vlog, if I went to the beach and went to a coffee shop and I didn't like vlog being out and about, I could look up sun coming through palm trees and preview a couple of these results and just find one that matches the style of the footage that I

4:54already filmed during that part. Like this is literally literally looks exactly like where I was. And if I'm not seeing something that matches exactly what I was looking for, you could also use their AI toolkit to customize any video to fit your unique style. For example, this is showing like a picture-perfect blue sky, but let's say on the day of filming it was more so around sunset, so I could press edit with AI, prompt it to change the setting of the video, give the prompt and be as specific as possible with like what you want changed and what you want to keep the same. Keep the trees the same. Press

5:39generate video, and now I'll have a clip that better matches like the time of day that I was recording my vlog. I do the same process for my music and effects or sound effects. So under audio, I'll kind of browse the music before editing to kind of feel what sort of vibe I want for my vlog and then download it, move it to my project in Adobe. Same thing with sound effects. Organizing your b-roll and project assets is something that you could honestly do at any point in your workflow, but for me, I prefer doing it at the very beginning before I start any editing. That way, as I start

6:18my edit or once I get going on it, I can really just get in the zone, already have everything I need in one place and not have to like stop my editing workflow to like, oh, I need to go look for this footage. Oh, I need to go look for this. That's personally why I like using Storyblocks during this setup step because they have everything. They have the footage, music, sound effects, images, templates all in one place or all in one library. So getting my project set up is super easy instead of juggling a bunch of different tabs and realizing later on that I'm missing something. Everything in Storyblocks is

6:56pre-licensed, which gives you one less thing to overthink before uploading a video because you don't have to worry about any sort of copyright rules. So if you want to start telling better stories with the same tools that I use, head to storyblocks.com/modernmilli. They're also offering a limited time discount for my audience only available through my link. So definitely check that out and a huge thank you to

7:21Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. Once you have all of your footage and assets organized, let's start editing our vlog. The very, very, very first thing that I do is I get all of my footage onto the timeline in order and begin my rough cut. This is just like knowing what I want to keep, getting rid of all the fluff. So, I'm just going to take my main A-roll that acts as kind of like the storyline, the video that will be from A to Z, and just start dragging it onto my timeline. So, that was Monday's A-roll. Now, we're going to do Tuesday's A-roll. I'm kind of just

7:59getting the story in order. Once I have everything in order from A to Z, that's when I do the rough cut where I'm just going through the clips and I'm editing out all the mistakes. The cool thing with Adobe is I use transcript and I transcribe my clips so that I can actually use the transcription to edit my vlog quicker instead of having to

8:25like listen and watch everything back. Okay, you can see here I messed up. Every week in the life of a content creator looks different. Okay, I started over. Every week in the life of content creator looks different. Oh, I messed up again. Every week So, like I'm just trying to skim the transcript and figure out what do I actually need to keep and I edit directly off the transcript where I'm like, "Okay, all that, let's delete it. Could go in the trash." Also, you could do filter by pauses. There's 17

8:55pauses here. There we go. Okay. And just mass delete everything. So, let's delete all the pauses. Delete. Easy peasy. Delete all. Cool. Now, all the pauses on my A-roll were automatically deleted and then it's easier for me to now go through this transcription and edit my A-roll. When I'm going through A-roll, what I'm looking for, obviously editing out mistakes or anything that doesn't drive the storyline. Also, if there's like a pause or a breath and I take like a big breath, every millisecond for me when I'm editing a vlog matters. So, I'm cutting out as much as I can so that it's as fast-paced as possible. I don't

9:38mean we're giving people whiplash, but I want people just constantly engaged when I'm editing my vlog. So, that's what I'm looking for on this first rough cut. Like right there, that was a interesting pause. I'm just going to zoom in. I love using keyboard shortcuts. I feel like it makes the editing so much quicker. So, I'm just going to press C, so I could cut this little clip. V to go back to the selector tool, and then I changed my F shortcut. So, F completely gets rid of it and brings my clips together. So, if you want more keyboard hacks, you could watch my Adobe hacks video because I

10:17also have a video that teaches like Adobe hacks for getting familiar with Adobe. But, that's kind of what I'm doing when I do my first rough cut. Now, if you learn one new thing by the end of the video, I want you to consider giving this video a thumbs up since it's going to tell YouTube that other creators like yourself would find something like this helpful. And if you learn two new things by the end of the video, consider subscribing since it's a simple and free way to support me and my channel, and it allows me to continue to make free content like this for you every single

10:47week. All right, next step. After I've done my first rough cut of the whole vlog beginning to end, now I do an edit that's condensing the pacing. Basically, I am going to watch through the rough cut, and I want to con- dense the storyline and the pacing of the vlog as much as possible. Basically, I am asking myself, is there anything I could cut to shorten this video, or can anything be replaced by like a voiceover storytelling moment with quick B-roll montage? So, before I talk more about

11:23that, let me show you an example. Literally from the jump, this beginning section of my vlog is 2 and 1/2 minutes long of me talking about what I did that morning. It's 2 and 1/2 minutes long of me being like, "This morning, I got up. I brushed my teeth. This is what I did." And it's like, do you really need to be talking for 2 and 1/2 minutes? No, I don't. So, when I was watching this back, I was like, uh this could be shortened by a lot. So, instead of me using any of this, I actually, here's like the actual edit. As you can see,

11:58there's like this blue section here. That is me doing a voiceover summarizing what that A-roll said. And it ended up being, instead of 2 and 1/2 minutes long, this was 45 seconds. So, I was like, "Oh, snaps. All of this didn't even need to be there. I could probably shorten that up." So, I'm not going to just like, "Oh, let me go re-film and redo my voiceover." No, I'm just going to keep track of any changes that I want

12:26to make for this condensed pacing edit. What I'm going to do here in Adobe, anything that I want to replace with voiceover, I'm going to right click, and I'm going to change the label to like mango or rose. I usually choose mango. That's like red, hey, let's re-film this or change this. So, like rose could be like a good, hey, re-film. And then, label, this needs a new voiceover. And then, I'll just supplement it with B-roll of everything that I did that morning. If you need to condense the pacing of your video, ask yourself how long do I want this vlog to be? And the shorter, the better [laughter] in my

13:10opinion, depending on the vlog style, but of course, I'm not going to get into the strategies of it. But, for me, I wanted this vlog to be no longer than 25 minutes, which means if I'm doing a Monday through Friday vlog, 5 minutes per day is what the final thing should look like. And on my first rough cut,

13:31Monday was longer than 10 minutes. Monday was longer than 10 minutes, and I'm like, "Oh, we're going to have an hour-long vlog for my YouTube channel." And that's just not what I wanted to do. I wanted it to feel fast-paced, and so that's why I did this condensed edit where I needed to go back and be like, "Okay, what can we summarize? Where am I

13:53yapping? Where am I talking too much?" And I'm going to cut-ish out or redo voice-overs. I will say it's definitely hard to condense your video because like we are naturally selfish human beings and we have a bias to ourselves. And there's moments in our vlog where we're like, "I just want to keep that in. I'm

14:15so funny. I'm so quirky. Haha, heehee." You know, like there's moments where you're like, "Oh, I'm just going to keep all of this in because it's me and all of this is important." Well, we have to like analyze this when we're doing our condensed edit. We have to look at this through our viewers' eyes. Like, what is going to be entertaining for them? What is going to be valuable for them? Where do we think they will get bored? Where do we think they might be like, "I kind of want to click off the video." And trying to look through their lens will help you with this condensed editing and

14:46the decisions that need to be made on like, "Can a whole section be completely cut? Does it need to be refilmed?" All of those things. I noticed for this vlog is usually around here. Yeah. For this vlog at the end of every single day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I would end the vlog talking about my Slack community and answering a

15:08question from one of my Slack students. And these clips, let me show you. Okay, that was Monday's clip. So, Monday's student response was 4 and 1/2 minutes long. So, it took me 4 and 1/2 minutes to answer one Slack question and I cut that down to under a minute. It was almost like 50 seconds. A 4 and 1/2 minute yap sesh where I know that I probably said some good golden nuggets there responding to a question, but I had to get Monday under 5 minutes and so I turned a 4 and 1/2 minute yap sesh into 50 seconds because I probably repeated myself a billion times. I tend

15:50to do that when I like say something where I'm like, "Oh, that was good." I try to rephrase it and say it this like a different new way, but it's really the same thing. So, I'm trying to just like find those moments and cut those out. If you're somebody who's new to YouTube and you want help understanding things like gear, setting up your YouTube channel with keywords, and just creating better videos in general, you can download my free YouTube starter workbook which guides you through how to set up and optimize your YouTube channel from the beginning. How to build a content strategy that actually helps you grow,

16:26helps you understand your equipment or what sort of equipment you might need and so much more. So, if that's something that sounds helpful or beneficial to you, I'll leave a link to that in the description below. When you're done with your condensed edit session, now we can apply our retention edit. This is where we have a little bit of fun. This is where we play play with layers. We get to focus on the hook of our video. We add zooms, B-roll, music, graphics, pop-ups, etc. So, we get to add the spice, add our personalities as a creator to our edit. First, let's talk about hooks and editing a hook for your

17:08video. First, let's briefly talk about the hook. I love zoning in on the hook of my videos because similar to short-form content, when you nail the hook and get people interested enough to keep watching past those first 30 seconds, you've got them in your back pocket. And there's a few ways to do your hook when it comes to your vlog. I think the a common way is starting the vlog with like kind of like a trailer of what your full vlog is going to be about. So like after you've already edited your vlog, you go back and you find the best moments of your vlog and

17:47you just put it real quick at like the first 10 to 15 seconds of your video as like a little teaser of what's to come. If you have like a big dramatic moment or a big blooper where you spilled coffee while you were shopping for Ross and you embarrassed yourself and it got all over the floor and then the janitors had to come and then they slipped and they fell in the coffee and they I don't know. I'm making ish up. But if there's like a big dramatic moment, start with that in the beginning of your vlog. It's not really spoilers. It's the perfect way to add a curiosity gap from the

18:20beginning of this video. Cuz yes, they saw the biggest moment, but immediately they're like, "What led up to this? How does this resolve?" So there's so many questions that they need answered and that's why I love starting with some sort of trailer or tease. The trailer could be more like aesthetic if you're more of like an aesthetic vlogger. You could have your trailer go more the aesthetic route if that's what your audience values. Now for me because my vlogs are sometimes educational, I'll approach my intros a little bit differently. Sometimes I won't record an intro until the very end. Because sometimes we don't know where our vlog

18:56is going to go. So I'll record Monday through Friday like let's say it's a week in the life because this one was a week in the life. So let's say I recorded a week in the life and then the next week as I'm playing with the footage, I'm like, "Okay, this would be a good way to intro the video talking about what they could expect for the rest of the week and then I could record a outro that same day. For this video, we actually knew what the concept of this video was going to be first because

19:20people wanted to see a week in the life. So, I actually scripted my intro separately and recorded my intro and outro at the same time. But, let's talk about like retention, editing, what we're going to be looking for, how we're going to apply it. We've already done Let's say we did that layer where we've con- densed everything down. We know the

19:41pacing, we know it needs to be replaced. Obviously, you would then replace everything. So, if you had to re-film, you would re-film. If you had to redo voice-overs, you re-record those. You can record directly in Adobe Premiere, so that's very convenient. So, you make those replacements and now we like add the spice. The spice for me is like the B-roll. So, here, that's when I started playing with Okay, let me go to Monday's B-roll and as I'm doing the storytelling where I say, "Oh, I woke up at 5:00 a.m." I have a clip of me waking up at 5:00 a.m. I have my whole morning kind

20:15of already edited here. So, B-roll's just one layer to the retention edit. I also, anytime there's talking head, I'm also going to add zooms. So, let's cut here. Anytime I want to emphasize something, boom, that section. I want that zoomed in. So, I try to keep my eye line the same. I'm going to point to where my eye is. We're going to zoom in a little. My eye went above my finger, so let's actually bring that down. And so now there's like a little emphasis on this part. So, I'm going through, I add my zooms in and out throughout the whole video. You could also do like instead of

20:53just zooming in, you could also like have fun and do something like this where it's like a little bit black box. Yeah. I can actually play with the audio and make my pitch go up and make my pitch go down. Anything to like make the video more fun. We added B-roll, we added our zoom in and out. This is where you would add next the music. So, for me, I like to have some sort of pattern with my music. I don't want it to just like feel random where anytime there's music it's like random. So, I have a more like vibey song. Yeah, I have a

21:30vibey song and then I have like a upbeat song. So, I associate those with like maybe one is like my around the house morning cozy music. We're going to add the music just for the morning montage. With music, you don't want that being especially if you're talking too. You don't want the music being too loud. You really want to lower that so it's like

21:54almost impossible here. That's still a little too loud. So, I want my music like behind my voice as much as possible. If I'm not talking, music can be the main star of the show and you would just have the audio waves. Let me show you an example here. With music, you want this volume of the music to match your voice volume or else if it's like too loud, you're going to blow out somebody's eardrums and you're going to shock them and they're going to be like ouch, I did not love that listening viewing experience. So, here my talking voice is hitting around this -18 decibels and so when we add our music

22:38for the b-roll, we want to make sure the music is also hitting around there. It looks like it's kind of hitting around 12. So, I actually might want to lower this a bit. That's a little bit better. Maybe a little too quiet, but you kind of see what I'm doing now though is trying to match those audio levels so it's a good consistency throughout the vlog. And then what I was saying before is with consistency of music, I like to have like let's say that morning around the house stuff, that's always going to be the soft jazzy one. Whereas if I'm working, let's have the work be more the

23:18upbeat fun hooray, let's go vibes. And again, you could see this audio waves. This is already I know this is going to be way too loud. So, because I'm talking, I would do that. And I would also add in like let it fade in a bit so that it feels a little bit more natural transitioning into those B-roll montages. And then also fading out as you transition out of any B-roll montages with the music slightly overlaying and transitioning into your

23:54voice. Another thing aside from zoom, B-roll, music, this is where you would add like the graphics, the pop-ups. If you referenced anything that you want to pop up and appear on screen, you could add transitions, text on screen, so many things. Video transitions are easy to find in Adobe, so you could just simply like drag and drop those where you want a transition to appear. So, after you finish all of that, you're on the final step. This is the final watch through. Because at this point, your video is probably going to be close. It is like 99% of the way there. And so this is my final tip for

24:34you. Before you export your video, I want you to sleep on it. And then come back and give it one final watch through. Make any final tweaks with a fresh perspective. I know editing is already super time-consuming and you probably spent hours and hours editing and you just want to be done with it. You want to export the video and just be done with it. But if you've been editing for hours, you might not be catching simple mistakes or spelling mistakes or glitches that are happening in your video. So, take a step away, give yourself a break, sleep on it, come back, do one final watch through before

25:06exporting your video. Now, as you know, I love editing in Adobe, and if you want to steal some of my favorite Adobe Premiere editing hacks to increase your editing efficiency and your workflow, then definitely watch this video next and don't forget to get your additional media resources from Storyblocks through the link in the description. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you

25:28in the next one. Follow your joy. Bye.