How to edit YouTube videos faster without cutting corners

Where does the editing time go?

Most of an edit is not creative. It is finding things, fixing things and repeating things. Before you speed anything up, see where your own hours go:

The habits in the third column work in any editor. The fourth is what a tool can take off you entirely.

How long does it take to edit a YouTube video?

It depends far more on how the video was shot than on its length. A single-take talking-head video with a clear plan can be edited in an hour or two; a scripted piece with B-roll, graphics and many retakes can take a day or more for ten minutes of finished video. The biggest variable is how much raw footage you have to search through for every minute you keep.

That is why the fastest editors spend their effort before the edit: less footage, better organised, means less of everything after.

How can I edit my videos faster?

Change the order you work in before you change your tools.

1. Shoot to edit. Say a line again straight away when you fumble it, rather than carrying on, and pause for a beat before the retake. Record in script order. A clean retake next to the mistake is the easiest cut there is.
2. Log before you cut. Mark the good takes and the moments you know you want. In Sharpy you can make subclips and mark favourites and rejects, then filter the bin to Favourites, Rejected or Unused. Logging footage with markers and bins shows how.
3. Cut by the words. Reading a transcript is faster than scrubbing a waveform. In Sharpy's WORDS tab you select words and press Delete, and picture and sound go together as one step. Editing video by editing text covers it.
4. Work in passes. Story first, then pace, then picture, sound, colour, captions and export. Polishing colour on a shot you later cut is the most common waste of an afternoon.
5. Learn the keys. J, K and L shuttle backwards and forwards; In and Out marks save every drag. Sharpy uses Premiere Pro's keys by default, with Final Cut Pro's as the other preset, so your hands do not have to relearn anything. The shuttle runs from 0.25 to 4 times speed.
6. Reuse what you can. Keep one caption style, one brand kit with your logos, colours and fonts, and one export preset per platform. In Sharpy, a preference you repeat three times is offered as a standing rule, so you stop asking for the same look on every video.

What does Sharpy take off your hands?

The parts that are labour rather than judgement. Drop a recording on the window, or ask your agent, and Sharpy:

• Reads the whole recording first. Every word, pause and shot, 1.7 times faster than real time on the base Mac mini M4, so a 30-minute recording is read in under 18 minutes. Nothing is uploaded first.
• Chooses the takes. When a line was said more than once, across one file or several, it chooses the best combination for the whole piece, not only the best of each line, and never joins on a closed eye.
• Cleans up the words. Fillers, repeated words, restarts, retakes and long pauses come as one list, each with its reason. Hear plays an item with a second and a half either side, and Cut all removes every item of one kind in a single step. Pauses are shortened to the speaker's own rhythm, never closed up. Removing filler words and dead air goes into the detail.
• Captions the edit. Captions come from the edit's own words, in a style you saved under your own name. A video Sharpy did not cut is heard twice, by two speech engines, before anything is burned in.
• Mixes to the target. The voice is cleaned, music ducks under speech, and the mix is normalised to the loudness you choose with peaks held under the ceiling.
• Exports in one choice. One destination sets the shape, codec and loudness together, writes .srt and .vtt captions beside the video if you tick the box, and puts the title, description, tags and chapters inside the file, with chapters written as YouTube timestamps where YouTube's rules allow them.

It renders quickly too: 903 frames a second on a 1080 × 1920 timeline on the same Mac. And because every model runs on your Mac, there are no credits to ration: one plan, unlimited edits.

What should you still do yourself?

The parts that need you. Sharpy's job is to hand you a finished edit you can check in minutes, not to decide what your channel is.

• The hook. Decide what the first line promises. Sharpy checks that a cut opens and ends the way its format does, but what the opening says is yours.
• The review. Read the edit decision list. Every cut has a timecode and a reason, so you can check the edit in the order it was made rather than watching it three times. What an edit decision list is explains how to read one.
• The changes. Say what you disagree with, in the window or in plain words to your agent: "keep the second take of the intro", "leave the pause before the last line". Each change is one step you can undo.
• The final watch. Watch it once through as a viewer, start to finish, before you upload.