Angelo DiTocco
It’s so annoying. It takes forever to do and it’s hard to get any satisfaction out of it. Writing is fun. Gaming is fun. Editing is not fun.
“Then why the hell did you become the Managing Editor?” Well, I apologize for any confusion I may have caused you. When I said, “editing is not fun,” I wasn’t talking about the kind of editing I do to Binghamton Review articles. I actually enjoy going through the articles other people write, seeing what they have to say, and figuring out how I can make them shine even more. What I’m ranting about is a different kind of editing: video editing.
I’ve already brought up my YouTube channel more times than I can count in this publication. Aside from these articles, it’s my only semblance of a personality. I think it’s super cool to make videos that I can share with the world (even if most of them are just slightly edited Minecraft recordings), and it’s hard to imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t make them. With that being said, the process isn’t always easy.
I’m currently working on what is easily my biggest project yet, not only in terms of YouTube but probably in my whole life as well. It’s 7 months in the making: 4 months for the in-game challenge itself and over 3 months spent editing so far. Yet I’m still only halfway done with the video. When I finally finish it, you can bet your ass there’s gonna be a full-page ad in the Review for it (if space allows).
You might be thinking that this video must be completely insane if it’s taking me this long to edit it. It’ll be my best video yet, sure, but the production value will be much closer to that of the average Minecraft YouTuber. You won’t be seeing any top-of-the-line graphics or anything like that. So what’s taking me so long?
The first problem is motivation. You’d think that during the summer where I had double the free time, I’d be able to churn out the video at Mach speed. However, I have a bit of a skill issue. The abundance of free time seems to create a vicious cycle of burnout. I’ll have a couple days where I do nothing but edit, but then I’ll get bored and spend the next week doing basically nothing. Add on a couple trips and factor in my desire to actually get out and enjoy the good weather while I can, and you end up with only 29% of the video done in a whole 104 days of summer vacation. Luckily, my motivation is sorta coming back, so if all goes well, I’ll be done sometime in October (knocks on wood).
My summer schedule
The second problem is perfectionism. I’ve already said that I have high expectations for this video. I might have given up on implementing all the professional-looking graphics that are so commonly used by many of today’s big-time YouTubers (because the video would then take me years to finish), but I still want it to be the best thing I can reasonably produce. I have a team of early access reviewers to whom I send parts of the video as I create them. That way, I can get feedback as I go. My stuff is generally received well, but I do often end up having to rewrite sections of the script and remake bits and pieces of the video in order to more clearly explain something or cut out boring stuff. In fact, there was a whole 11-minute section of the video that I had to get rid of almost entirely because I just kept yapping too much.
Lastly, there’s the fact that editing itself just takes a fuck ton of time. It often takes over an hour of editing just to get a minute of the video done. Some of this is admittedly my fault for not taking the time to learn the full potential of my editor, but at the same time, DaVinci Resolve is such a complicated program that I’d be surprised if anyone knew all the things it could do.
It baffles me how many YouTubers (especially the ones who don’t hire editors) are able to pump out content so quickly. From getting all the footage to writing and reading the script to putting everything together, it’s hard to comprehend how a well-edited, long-form video can be made in a couple weeks or even days. I guess it helps if YouTube is one’s job, but if that were the case for me, then I would actually hate editing, and I wouldn’t just be exaggerating to make the article title more flashy.