How much time do you spend making videos?

Landen

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I've actually gotten to a point where I'm worried I'm focusing more on my editing than my content itself. For my series, it usually takes me about an hour to shoot film, and then upwards of 8-9 hours of editing because I create my YouTube version and my short 1-minute long version for promotion, as well as photoshopping thumbnails, etc. I envy those that have gotten so big they don't have to edit their own content anymore and can just focus on the message itself.[DOUBLEPOST=1499798124,1499798071][/DOUBLEPOST]
a normal video w/ me and emily = 30m-1hour to shoot
vlog to shoot = all day
toilet paper forts = 3-4 hours (or 24+ hours for one)
editing = 3-5 hours (importing, finding music, editing, seo/title/tagging/descriptions, exporting)
thumbnail = 15 minutes (photoshop a screenshot from the video while it uploads to YouTube)
seo = 1 hour or more (on-going...I often re-visit this and try to get my videos ranking higher if I didn't do a good enough job)

as @ZakDTV mentioned also, there's also an element of research and stuff that goes into it which takes up time. not to mention commenting and interacting with your community




checked you out, you put a lot of love into your channel and it shows. keep it up brotha, I know all about that grind.
SEO?
 

FRANKIEandEMILY

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I've actually gotten to a point where I'm worried I'm focusing more on my editing than my content itself. For my series, it usually takes me about an hour to shoot film, and then upwards of 8-9 hours of editing because I create my YouTube version and my short 1-minute long version for promotion, as well as photoshopping thumbnails, etc. I envy those that have gotten so big they don't have to edit their own content anymore and can just focus on the message itself.[DOUBLEPOST=1499798124,1499798071][/DOUBLEPOST]
SEO?
Hey i hear you about that. I started out (dunno if you're starting out or not) at 8-9 hour edits and have gotten much quicker to 3-4 with even higher quality editing. depends on your content though...vlogs take the longest for me, reap the least views most of the time, but are my favorite to do. i have had great success with the 1 min promo videos highlighting a video/our channel...however I haven't been consistent with that enough and need to get back to that. I think i'm going to take highlights of a longer video and recycle an outro/template to make it faster and more efficient when editing.

as for SEO, yes this is wildly important. SEO = search engine optimization...when you change how you think of YouTube from a "content" website to simply understanding it's a search engine, it changes your perspective on creating/promoting videos. This means finding trending (searchable) content to create + very strong titles + equally strong descriptions and tags. I read somewhere about the 3-peat rule: Repeat the same keywords from your title in the first lines of your description and in your tags. I've seen this help A TON.

That being said SEO when you're small is a bear. You can spend all day doing it and get it as close to perfect as possible and still not rank as high as you want/higher than others doing it wrong due to a range of variables (larger channels, views, algorithm stuff). Kind of sucks but it's still worth the effort.

Like you said, I look forward to the day when we're a bigger channel who can make a Vlog or any content and not worry about the SEO as much and simply make an intriguing title/thumbnail about the video. People like Casey Neistat and other big names only write a title, put some links in the bios and then don't even use tags (i looked up his tags for some videos before). This - to me - makes your videos look much "cleaner" with a less keyword-y description and stuff. Almost like a website without ads imo.
 

ScouseMouse

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I recently started a gaming channel and for me atm there isn't any research, I wrote a list at the start of making the channel of all the consoles I'd play on and under each console a list of games I was gonna play. So for now I just look down the list and start a series on what I fancy playing (I play every game from start to finish completely). In the future I may need to research up and coming games etc but for now I'm just doing the games I wanna do.

I don't do much editing out of gameplay because I want the videos to be authentic play throughs and not just cutting out every time things go badly etc so I'll play for maybe 30 ish mins and that'll translate to a 25-30 min video.

Editing takes maybe 4-5hours, 1-2hours to render from Premier Pro, 30 mins to 1hr to upload.

So from the point of starting to getting it uploaded you're talking ~8hr per video.

I'll have the camera, microphone, lighting etc all set up when I'm gonna play so I'll tend to record a few videos all at once, and then my girlfriend (who does the editing) can edit them at her leisure.
 

AllVisuals4U

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With my newest subtitled videos, it's about 40 minutes per video. Glad i create short videos as i see the hours of editing done here! Respect for that.
 

RafaRBE

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Well since my channel is all about music, it actually needs only a nice visualizer/spectrum and different background images. I usually spend up to 30 minutes creating a video itself. I also have to watch them again and again because I have to be sure that the music sounds good, make sure that the spectrum is'nt too high/low, and make sure that the images which I use have a good resolution etc...even if it's only music and some animations, it might sound very easy at first, but there are actually many minor factors to take care off xD

So yeah...in my opinion the only thing that takes pretty much time is the uploading, because where I am right now they offer pretty slow internet.

BTW respect for the other guys who need more time for editing.
 

beardyben91

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I hope I'm not out place here, but I would suggest you check out VidiQ, I just checked out your SEO and you will definitely be featured more places if you can get that number up, at the moment your SEO ranks pretty low and if you can get it up, you will be more likely to be featured, or appear as a recommended video on other channels / videos
 

MechaJake

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Probably around 8 hours a video for me. Really depends on how ambitious I'm feeling with my edits. Most of the time it involves making extra assets in Photoshop and doing a LOT of key framing in premiere.
 

Chey

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I spend 6 - 8 hours excluding filming. If I were to film and then edit instantly afterwards, 8 - 12 hours.
 

Roman Ryder

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Hey everyone, I was just wondering how I compare to everybody else as to how much time you spend making a video, research, scripting, filming, editing and all. ~Column 1 P.S: I know it doesn't really matter, because video making varies for YouTuber to YouTuber but whatever
I'd guess a 3-5 minute video takes me 3-5 hours. I spend quite a bit of time researching titles and keywords. Then a little time making an outline and adding a few notes of key talking points or stories that I want to include. I typically just have a slide to introduce each point and transition between takes, but if there's any graphics or pictures I need, I'll also include that in my script notes. Shooting the actual video usually only takes about 30 minutes. Then there's another hour of editing, including making the graphics. I really need to make a checklist for this step. I thought this week was pretty much perfect, but I left off my social media icons and handle. Whoops! Then maybe an hour with uploading, captions, and setting up initial facebook, twitter, and instagram posts.