Ep. 78: How to make $100k+ editing YouTube videos ft. Rachel Kisela

“So I always tell people the one thing that you cannot teach is intuition and, like, decades of obsessive, chronically online content consumption, which I have engaged in over time, and it gives you, like, such an intuition for what feels right in terms of, like, pacing and things like that. The technical stuff, you can always add in and learn how to, like, rotoscope and after effects and all that stuff. But the intuition is, like, the core part.”

“So I definitely like to start by knowing the title and thumbnail, and most creators at a certain level have that, like, right off the bat. Like, before they film the video, that's how they kinda, like, figure out their good video ideas based on what's clickable. So I love knowing that and knowing, like, what words to even emphasize in the intro, maybe with, like, captions and stuff to kind of, like, drive that home. Whatever information the viewer had to click on is what I want to emphasize and gear the whole video towards.”

“So then I'll take all that information and say, okay. I think this project is going to take me, for example, no longer than twenty hours. So on this first project, we're gonna do an hourly invoice. If we go over twenty hours, that's totally on me. I will not cap I'll cap my invoice at twenty hours, and that's on me. And then if it ends up taking me, like, forty hours, that's a conversation that we can have if we wanna work together more moving forward.”

“And then I run a business on Etsy making disco ball lamps, and that's my last 30% is my disco ball lamps. And I'm about to start another Etsy business that's, bibs for brides at their wedding so they don't spill their food on their white dress. The disco ball lamps are really fun. So I spend all day editing, and then I sit down to watch YouTube, and I make a disco ball lamp.”

“But ever, you know once I started taking, like, serious editing jobs, I would always ask myself the question, is this content making the world a better place? I would ask myself for every single person that I worked with that question. And there are a lot of creators that the answer is no. And I would always be like, okay. You know, if I wanted to just, like, make a paycheck and dip, I would have chosen a different career path. Like, I chose this career path to uplift people that I feel like are making the world a better place.”

“But just the other day, someone in the Discord was talking about they they were working for a YouTuber, and there was, like, you know, all the different team rooms. And the cleaners would come through at night, and the editors were always there. So the cleaners would just learn over time, oh, just don't clean the editing room because they're using it. So the editing room got progressively more and more dirty because they were always there, and the cleaners wouldn't clean the room.”

“I was floored because USC Annenberg trades with Columbia for the top journalism school in the country. There there was granted, there was one professor that was excited about new media and YouTube. The rest of them, not only not only were not excited, they actively disliked new media. And even when we would screen our documentaries, if he saw a jump cut on screen, he would scream and pause it and say, people don't people this is jarring. Jump cuts are jarring. Don't use jump cuts.”

“And I also I read in, one of my editing books. I think it was the art of the cut. Somebody talking about if you you need to be able to build a scene that stands alone without music because music can be such a crutch that if you use if you build it around, like, one track, for example, and the client's like, I don't like that track. Like, that's, like, the worst thing to hear as an editor, and you're like, I built this whole thing around that track.”

“And, also, I think the term is radical it's not radical ownership. Extreme ownership as a leader of saying, if this goes well, it's because of all of us. If it doesn't go well, it's because of me. I didn't communicate effectively. If something comes back to me not looking like how I want, it's not your fault. It's my fault for not communicating effectively and and taking that ownership even when it's the hardest to take that ownership.”

“This is another piece of advice for editors, but I think a lot of editor times, editors, they don't emphasize what makes them different enough. And as an editor, you're molding to whatever it is the footage and the content that you're working on. And some little piece of your experience that you think might be irrelevant to editing could actually be extremely relevant and make you irreplaceable in an editing role. For example, I, like, took some coding classes in college. I had a new statistical programming software. And there was this guy in Upwork that was making video tutorials for statistical programming. Where where else is he going to find an editor that understands what he's teaching and what he's saying and statistical programming languages?”