Edit YouTube Videos for Free — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:02] without spending any money in 2023 if you're smart about it nowadays I personally spend a couple thousand every single month creating videos for my channel fulltime but back in the day when I ran my first YouTube channel I

[00:15] used to do everything by myself for free so here's how you can too first you're going to need a script for your video if you don't want to spend any money you can write scripts totally on your own or B you can use AI to help you to

[00:29] Worse depending on the type of videos you're creating for example because I make my videos sharing my knowledge of YouTube and my past experiences with the platform I don't use AI very much to help me as AI doesn't really know what

[00:42] I've been through and what to teach people as a result while on the other hand I do in contrast if you have a channel that's maybe more generic or if it's more important for you to crank out videos quickly than it is to spend time

[00:54] crafting your own well-written scripts you may want to use AI to some extent to help you speed things up to be honest I haven't yet found an AI that can write a full 8 minute video script just off of a few prompts but I'm sure I'll get cooked

[01:07] in the comments by some chat GPT wizard that actually does no way anytime I use either prompt it for help outlining the about if I need more content or I'll have it help me revise obviously chat

[01:20] gbt exists but I find that vid iq's AI chat bot trained on YouTube's data and GPT 4 is one of the better tools for the job all I have to do is prompted and it spits back a helpful response if you use my link in the description it's only a

[01:34] dollar which isn't free but dude I'm sure you can literally ask a family to you AI tools also work great if or one of your own products into your video cap cut who I've partnered with

[01:47] for this video actually has a really cool YouTube specific ad script generator for free online and it's super easy to use as an example if I'm a creator that makes drawing videos and I want to pitch my freelance services in

[02:00] my videos I can literally just prompt the generator give it my unique selling point and Bam capcut generates five different versions of the ad raid for me doesn't even have to be your own products like imagine I'm doing a

[02:12] sponsor for nordvpn instead of spending time scripting that all out myself I can and tweak it later if I need to AI is a great supplement to the script writing process even if you don't have money to invest into your channel but it also

[02:26] script writing talents to be effective I have a video on script writing that teaches you exactly how to write scripts yourself so go check that out later also own video using the advice I'm giving

[02:39] you for a burner Channel I have called gadgets which is a channel in the text SL gadgets Niche and even though I said to use AI as a supplement and not your only method for script writing I went ahead and threw some prps at vid iq's AI

[02:51] to turn out a 3-minute video script with some minor edits that I made later speaking of getting things done once your script is finished you'll need to if your video actually requires a voiceover like gaming channels or

[03:04] aren't really going to need this but anyway my channel was predominantly faceless up until recently and there's obviously value in not having to record yourself with a camera and or detach your identity from your YouTube channel

[03:17] but editing a faceless video also takes a lot longer and requires you to put in entertaining and on the other hand inface videos give you a role to use entertaining but also require you to set up a camera backdrop and lights I hear

[03:31] creators often say that they can't afford to record in PH videos because other stuff but chances are they probably can if they just use what they already have prior to about 2 weeks ago I had never recorded my face before you

[03:44] don't even really need to buy a professional camera if you own a newer smartphone as the cameras on those are already really good I have a spare Google pixel 6 that I bought a while ago because its camera is just better than

[03:56] already have if you have an iPhone you're fine the same goes for buy one if you don't have one because honestly your phone's mic is pretty good already if you do own a mic though and honestly even if you don't I have an

[04:10] that you'll also want to watch later after you've recorded your voice over the free version of capcut desktop and throw either your voice over or camera footage into a new project then roughly cut it all up to get rid of the parts

[04:24] where you mess up which for me was a lot I recorded about 45 minutes of footage with my camera which shrunk down to about 3 and 1/2 minutes when I cut out all of the bad parts next you probably didn't use an incredible microphone to

[04:36] record yourself especially if you were just using your phone and chances are your audio is super echoey and bad so to fix that literally just check this box noise or Echo because I was recording from my phone's mic which sat pretty far

[04:49] away from me as I was recording my voice was a little too quiet so I also boosted working with camera footage you'll probably also need to color grade a bit this is a especially important if you're using shitty lights that you already own

[05:02] as they probably aren't perfect compared to like studio lights and stuff the really warm and yellow so this was important for me as well some video editing software make color grading really complicated but capcut keeps the

[05:15] process very simple and easy by giving you a bunch of free presets to pick from slightly but it does a pretty good job balancing everything out well now let's talk about pacing it's pretty common knowledge that a video's pacing is meant

[05:28] possible which I often see creators fast as possible in their videos and edit as much as possible as well while this works for some styles of video it also doesn't work for others the real

[05:41] determiner here is the audience that your video targets to give an extreme example a Channel about knitting and crocheting will probably Target people in their 60s and above who can't handle the crazy ADHD cuts of a Nate wealth or

[05:54] Mr Beast video in contrast a fortnite video generally appeals to a younger audience who in in turn need faster cuts and crazy ADHD editing to keep watching in the case of the video that I'm making techgadget videos appeal to a lot of

[06:07] people but generally an audience of 24 to 35 years old is in the range of who I'd actually like to Target with this video so as a result I still paste and cut the audio to be pretty quick but nothing like too crazy with any video

[06:20] something like this with higher energy in the first 30 seconds to hook the viewer and then once they're hooked you can drop off a little bit and still maintain a pretty fast pace fo less than the intro to just finish out the video

[06:32] to avoid rough transitions between Clips you've cut like this I like to overlap the audio from each clip and cap cut moving them to separate tracks and then extending them to overlap as I mentioned previously the pacing of your video is

[06:45] seconds or so so for the intro I wanted to add some animated subtitles cap cut makes this super easy with their automatic subtitles workflow allowing you to literally just select some audio hit generate and then fix any mistakes

[06:58] look nice and animate in using any of cap Cut's pre-loaded text animations this whole process took me about 5 minutes to do and it just adds so much to the video now it's time to make things interesting and add in footage to

[07:11] just the camera footage that I'm working with a roll which is just the term for footage where you're talking directly to the camera is a great supplement to a video but is often super boring if the entire video is just you talking to the

[07:24] depend on your audience like we've mentioned so to help this we need literally just any kind of footage that isn't a roll if you don't want to spend any money pixels.com is great to find free stock footage and if you're trying

[07:37] to screen record something I recommend using OBS or streamlabs I personally do most of the editing so that I'm not constantly interrupted by the need to go download more materials when I'm in the middle of cooking up a crazy edit for

[07:50] general rule of thumb try to use a lot less a-roll than you have Boll in your camera and have no a roll then you're straight just obviously use all roll I footage in the intro and then added in some animated text on top of it to make

[08:05] things more interesting cap cut once again makes adding in titles and text really easy by having all of these customizable presets available to use footage was laid out I made everything more interesting with What's called the

[08:18] Ken Burns effect to make this effect start by dragging your playhead to the start of the clip you want select it hit this button to create a key frame then move the playhead to the end and change the scale to create another key frame

[08:30] and Bam you're done after adding in some Transitions and titles once again given to me by capcut it was time for sound design somebody else has probably told you this already but good sound design is essential to an edit but that also

[08:42] doesn't mean you need to go crazy with adding a million sound effects if you're doing sound design right you basically as a viewer shouldn't notice the Sounds in the video to find good sound effects to use cap cut once again clutches up

[08:54] effects right inside of the editor I like to put music between -5 and -25 DB voice over and also like to change the song every so often like maybe 30 to 90

[09:07] I'm doing just to keep things fresh and interesting finally for your video's thumbnail I'd recommend using cap codes in editor thumbnail creation tool or there are always Alternatives like CR and that won't cost you any money

[09:20] creating thumbnails I'd recommend watching my video where I interview six professional thumbnail designers each with millions of views after this one