It’s tricky to make a video, and this one shows you just that. Remember, the original video ran for around a minute. This is 16 minutes of editing going on here. It’s not terribly optimised, is it? :P

I thought it might be interesting to show what happens after I’ve finished recording something. There’s usually quite a lot of footage, pictures, music and other bits and pieces to assemble before a video is ready for YouTube. Even something as silly as putting more sugar on a doughnut doesn’t edit itself!

I’m using Final Cut Pro X for this, running on a rather old Core 2 Duo Mac. It works, although the computer isn’t particularly enthusiastic about the amount of processing involved. I hooked everything up to a larger television so there was a little more room to see the timeline and shuffle things around.

First up are the pictures and the little introductory sequence. I’m trying to keep the video fairly short and snappy rather than leave every image on the screen for an eternity. There’s nothing particularly exciting about watching a picture of caster sugar for twenty seconds, no matter how delicious that sugar might be.

Final Cut has a useful snapping feature, normally controlled with the N key, which makes it easier to line clips up on the timeline. You can shorten an image, move it around and add a transition without leaving a giant unintended gap. Of course, I still managed to create a few gaps while demonstrating it. That’s why you check!

Then we get into transitions. There are fades, wipes and an impressive collection of effects to choose from, although using every effect in the menu would probably make the finished video rather unpleasant to watch. I generally prefer to keep things fairly simple, particularly with the computer struggling to render anything complicated.

There’s also the audio to consider. For this little video I had a look through music available from YouTube and chose a section that seemed to fit. You don’t necessarily have to start a track right at the beginning, and trimming a piece of music can help it match the footage rather more naturally.

I spent a fair amount of time adjusting where the music started and stopped, listening to how the fades sounded and checking that everything lined up. It’s a little fiddly, but you get a much better result when the soundtrack doesn’t suddenly begin or end in the wrong place.

The outro needed attention too, including some text and the usual links to other videos. I had a few templates available, although they weren’t always behaving quite as I’d hoped. Final Cut is a wonderful program when it cooperates, and a rather different experience when it decides to have a little tantrum.

Of course, the real entertainment begins when it’s time to render everything. A Core 2 Duo isn’t exactly the fastest machine for this sort of work, and the amount of time spent waiting can become rather ridiculous. Then there’s the disk-space problem, because capturing and editing video uses an impressive amount of storage.

By the time the project is finished, I’ve usually watched the same minute of footage so many times that I never want to see it again. But that’s the price you pay for making the video reasonably presentable. Hopefully this gives you a better idea of why even the shorter McRetro productions can take a while to appear.

Thanks for watching this little look behind the scenes. If nothing else, perhaps you’ll appreciate the next ridiculous cooking video just a tiny bit more!

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