You need help because you want your videos to look good (to other people)! Often course creators are so excited to finally get a video recorded that they just want to publish it and move on to the next video. However, if you're asking students to stare at your face for even 5 minutes, you should do your best to make sure the experience is as painless as possible.

​Take a look at the 2 screen shots below - can you see a difference between them? Which one would you rather watch during an online course?

Can you tell what changes I made to get the top video looking like the bottom one? 

• I zoomed in so there aren't giant black bars on all sides.
• I positioned the lady & her table in the center (there is equal amount of wall on both sides).
• I straightened the image.
• I brightened it.
• I reduced the highlights a bit.
• I adjusted the color so it's not so pink.

I did all these things using Adobe Premiere, before I started breaking the video into clips and adding text and images to make the content easier to follow.

So, the first thing you do when you record a new video? Make sure it looks good! Ask people what they think or what they'd change. And if you don't know how to fix it, learn how on YouTube or ask someone for help!

Often video editors ask for at least 2 hours of post-processing time per hour of video recorded. Why does the editing process take so long? In this video, I'll show you some behind-the-scenes footage of what video editing looks like in Adobe Premiere and explain why you want to allow plenty of time for editing video and audio so it sounds clear and looks good.

Beyond the details I explain in the video, there are also a bunch of other things that take time:

• moving the video & audio files from the camera to a computer or alternative storage device
• renaming files so we can keep track of them easily
• creating new adobe files
• formatting and exporting slides so they match the video format
• editing audio files so sound levels are consistent
• editing out video/audio content that is distracting, inappropriate, off-topic, etc.
• dividing the video into sections that are usable to clients (usually people don't just want a whole, unedited video - they want just the parts where they are teaching or saying something useful)
• exporting the videos with the appropriate settings
• sharing the videos in a way clients can view them (often this means uploading them to Dropbox or YouTube, since video files are too large to be emailed)