Do You Also Do These 5 Mistakes When Making Videos?
Remember that time when you were working on a super important document and your computer turned off? Can you still feel the pain inside you for these long hours of work lost in the blink of an eye?
See, working on a Word document isn’t so different from working on a video. You cut, join, edit, and combine different chunks into a well-organized piece of content. Hence the same principles apply. You really don’t want to lose your work for stupid reasons, do you?
In this article, I’ll address the 5 most common mistakes you should avoid when shooting and editing videos.
Not Saving Your Work Frequently
That’s a given, and autosave should be a common feature in every software that’s involved in large projects and industries.
These are my pieces of advice:
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Learn the keyboard shortcut to save your work (Ctrl + S / Cmd + S) and use it all the time, on every change if needed.
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Active the autosave feature on your editing software if it’s available.
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Locate the place where your cache and temporary files are stored, just in case.
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Make a copy of your assets before editing them to make sure you have them somewhere in case you love anything during the editing process.
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Use an appropriate device that’s well-equipped to deal with modern editing software (high RAM, large disk volume, fast CPU).
By now, you should have learned your lesson since this mistake often has terrible consequences, such as unrecoverable data, lost work, wasted hours, loss of motivation, etc.
Learning the keyboard shortcut to save your work will help you a lot. It’s common to almost every software, hence it’s useful everywhere, not just in your editing program.
Not Being Plugged into an Electrical Outlet
I don’t care how much battery’s left on your laptop, camera, lights, and other devices. If you’re reading this article it means you know already that relying on battery alone is not a good idea.
No matter what:
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Have your audio-recording device plugged into an electrical outlet, or charged up to 100% with an external secondary battery, just in case.
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Have your video-recording device plugged into an electrical outlet, or charged up to 100% with an external secondary battery, just in case.
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Have your laptop plugged into an electrical outlet, or charged up to 100% with an external secondary battery, just in case.
Simple, right? Then do it!
Losing hours of work just because your devices run out of battery is a total waste. This situation is easy to avoid using a simple rule of thumb.
Have your devices plugged into an electrical outlet, and carry a secondary battery per device.
Having a Screen Filter Activated
That one is sneaky. Nowadays, most smartphones and laptops have eye-protecting software filters that aim to reduce eye strain by filtering out specific colors from the display. And they’re automatically activated past a chosen hour of the day.
As a video editor, can you tell what’s wrong with that?
Put simply, these programs change the colors on the screen. Hence you can neither work on the color grading nor assess the quality of your shots.
These are my recommendations:
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Turn off every single software that tweaks your display colors and disable their scheduled activation.
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Make sure your display color profile is similar to your viewers’ devices.
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If your editing software has guides and recommendations, follow them. Most of the time, you can’t trust your eyes, hence trust your program.
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Make sure that your physical display has no built-in automatic color treatment, otherwise disable it.
There you go! There’s nothing more annoying than realizing only hours later that your color grading is completely wrong because of your display color system.
I recommend wearing particular glasses that are designed specifically to reduce eye fatigue, as opposed to using software-based protections.
Not Using a Proper External Disk
There are two types of external disks for storing data. They’re called HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and SSD (Solid-State Drive). I’ll spare you the technical aspects.
Buy and use an SSD.
Compared with an HDD, an SSD is:
Approximately 10 times faster.
Less prone to physical damage and memory loss.
Physically lighter and smaller, but also more durable.
That’s also a given. If you’re editing videos on an external disk, always use an SSD, period.
Not Locking Your Camera Settings
Have you ever shot a long video only to realize later that it was neither properly exposed nor focused? I bear with you, that is frustrating.
It’s quite simple:
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When you start shooting your video, always start by locking focus and exposure.
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If you’re using smart exposure and autofocus, don’t move too much in order not to confuse your camera.
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Use artificial lights when needed. That will make you stop relying on natural light, which is based on the weather, hence random and unreliable.
It is absolutely necessary that you don’t even think about it. It must become a reflex, and a step within your shooting setup.
Additional Resources
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