2026-05-21
How I hired a video editor
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- My youtube channel was not that successful, so take my advice with grain of salt
Main
- ffmpeg
- I wasted a significant amount of time writing my own video editing scripts using ffmpeg and bash. I think I learned things by doing this, for instance I learned how audio normalisation works or why noise-correction algos suck or why web-optimised videos are encoded at multiple resolutions or what on earth a moov atom is. But also, this was not the most optimal use of my time if I my only goal was to become famous on youtube. I weakly regret the time spent on this.
- iMovie
- Apple iMovie has amazing UX for someone who is a complete noob at video editing. I briefly experimented with this.
- Hire a person to edit videos
- What I soon converged on as ideal was just hiring a person off of reddit to edit videos.
- My current video editor has zero aesthetic taste and creativity. They will only mindlessly follow the instructions you give them. But this is currently fine with me.
- It helps if you have atleast spent a few hours yourself using iMovie, so that you understand what instructions you are giving your editor. It is far easier to delegate tasks that you know how to do yourself, even if it would take a lot more time and googling for you to do it, because you lack practice.
- My editor charges approx $150 for a video and claims to spend 10-20 hours editing each video.
- I'm sure if you are willing to pay significantly more, you can find an editor with much more skill. Especially a good idea if you plan to have this person on your team full-time, see also: Naval Ravikant on why you should only have geniuses on your founding team. Youtube revenues are significant lower than tech revenues, hiring someone at this skill level is expensive, I can't advice you on fundraising and burn rate and all of that for a youtube channel, since I lack experience myself.
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