Video Editing... my new workflow

I love shooting videos and photos to create a small video to share on Instagram or Youtube. I hate the editing part. Going through minutes to hours of videos to find something interesting is rather boring.

Last Saturday I rode the Massochistah 2021 ride and had brought my GoPro Hero 8 and the Mavic Mini drone. I had mounted the GoPro on the front of my bike and used it to record during the ride. The drone I took up after the ride to create some overhead shots of the afterparty.

I ended up with about an hour of 2K video footage divided over 25 videos and wanted to bring it down to 1 minute. The goal would be 12 clips of 5 seconds. I was dreading it a bit as that would be a big task.

I use iMovie on the Mac to edit videos. I would normally import all the videos from the event I want to add and then drop them all on the timeline and then start looking for sections I want to save. This creates a huge timeline and is very hard to manipulate.

This time decided a little different approach. Besides iMovie I had Finder open with the folder with the 25 videos. I had already loaded 1 video shot from the drone. A trimmed it down to a short clip with a rotating zoom on above the starting location.

I then dragged the first video footage on the timeline. I scanned it for contents and then picked out a 5 sec section that was interesting, in this case the whole group was still together and approaching an intersection.

I did this now for all the video clips they varied in length from a few seconds to over 10 minutes. Some video clips did not contain anything interesting and I just discarded them from the timeline. Some of the longer footage had multiple interesting sections and I edited out 2 and one case 3 clips. This way my timeline was never really long other than the big clip I was working on at the end.

When I was done with all the videos I had 2min and 45s of footage. More than double that I needed. I then started watching the footage and noticed that in many cases 5 seconds was actually way too long and I mostly ended up trimming the clips even more, mostly ended being 2-3 sec clips.

I was then still above my 1 min and removed clips that did not add that much or were basically similar to other clips. I ended up with 19 clips averaging 3 secs per clip. Was pretty happy with the result. It gave a nice overview of the ride with the camaraderie, climbs, descends, the mud and gnarly sections and other riders we encountered.

It still took me about 2 hours, but it felt way more efficient than my old method.

Then it was a matter of exporting for Youtube and Instagram. For Youtube I exported to 4K which resulted in a 376Mb file. The footage was only 2K, but the up conversion resulted in a really clear smooth video. For Instagram I exported to 1080p. The file ended up being 151Mb. Funny enough this export took longer than the export to 4K.