How Do You Start Creating Videos (And Why You Must)
In a digital ecosystem where content is king, video reigns supreme. You will need to master the art of video creation. It isn’t merely a skill, but a hero-tool to engage, inform, and inspire your audience. This guide to video creation for beginners offers not only a deep dive into user-friendly video editing software like Descript, but also compares it with notable competitors to ensure that you choose the best tool suited to your needs.
You Can’t Ignore Video in Modern Business Times
The digital age has transformed how we communicate, learn, and do business. High-quality video content has become instrumental in establishing an online presence, conveying messages effectively, and connecting with audiences on a more personal level. From educational courses to marketing and client testimonials, the versatility of video content is unmatched.
Types of Videos That Elevate Your Business
In today’s digital age, video content has become a crucial component of any successful marketing strategy. Videos have the power to engage, educate, and inspire audiences in a way that text or images simply cannot. Whether you’re a small business owner, a content creator, or a corporate executive, incorporating various types of videos into your marketing efforts can help elevate your brand and drive results. Here are some key types of videos that can take your business to the next level:
- Explainer Videos: Explainer videos are a powerful tool for introducing a new product or service to your audience. These videos use a combination of visuals, voiceover, and text to simplify complex information and help viewers understand the value proposition of your offering. By clearly and concisely explaining how your product or service works, explainer videos can increase customer understanding and drive conversions.
- Team Videos: Showcasing the members of your team through team videos can humanize your brand and build trust with potential customers. By highlighting the skills, expertise, and personalities of your team members, you can create a personal connection with your audience and demonstrate the people behind your company. Team videos are also effective for recruitment purposes, as they can attract top talent by showcasing your company culture and team dynamics.
- Brand Videos: Brand videos, also known as “About Us” videos, focus on telling the story of your brand and creating an emotional connection with viewers. These videos are ideal for building brand awareness, showcasing your brand values and personality, and establishing a unique brand identity. By focusing on storytelling and emotion, brand videos can help differentiate your brand from competitors and resonate with your target audience on a deeper level.
- Product Demo Videos: If you have a new product or service to launch, product demo videos are a great way to showcase its features and benefits. These videos provide a hands-on demonstration of how your product works, allowing potential customers to see it in action before making a purchase. Product demo videos can help increase product awareness, drive sales, and enhance the overall customer experience.
- Tutorial Videos: Tutorial videos are valuable for providing educational content to your audience and positioning your brand as an industry expert. Whether you’re sharing dog training tips, Photoshop tutorials, or social media strategies, tutorial videos can help viewers learn new skills and solve common problems. By offering helpful and informative content, you can build credibility, attract new customers, and foster loyalty among existing audience.
Each type of video serves a different purpose. You can increase brand awareness, drive sales, or educate your audience and videos can help stand out in a crowded digital landscape. Keep in mind that YouTube is now the second largest search engine, which means if you want to be found for specific keywords, this is your chance to get your brand in front of millions of potential customers.
Why Video Matters Even More for Coaches and Consultants
Professionals like you in the service industry play a crucial role in guiding and supporting clients towards achieving their goals. Video content allows you to showcase your expertise in a more dynamic and impactful way.
Here’s why this matters:
Visual Impact
As visual beings, humans are naturally drawn to moving images and visual storytelling. By incorporating video into your online presence, you capture attention and create a lasting impact on viewers. Whether it’s a demonstration of a skill, a client success story, or a motivational message, video offers a compelling way for you to engage and connect with potential clients – even without a discovery call, or before you ever meet in person.
Personal connection
I don’t need to tell you how important building trust and rapport is in this industry. Video allows you to show your personality, sincerity, and passion for your work. It helps you to quickly build a personal connection with your audience. Clients are more likely to choose someone they feel a connection with, and video content facilitates that connection even before the first interaction.
Saving Valuable Time
Building on the point above, as a coach or consultant, your videos will allow potential clients to meet you without (or before) having time scheduled for a call. They will have a chance to “meet you” before tying up your time and determining you aren’t their cup of tea. This is one obstacle you can remove prior to your first conversation.
Educational opportunities
You can scale yourself by delivering valuable educational content to your audience. This can include tutorials, webinars, or online courses where you can share your knowledge and expertise in a format that is easy to consume and understand.
Demonstration of skills
Video content provides an excellent platform for demonstrating your skills and capabilities. Whether you are a business coach providing tips on effective leadership or a fitness consultant showcasing different workout routines, video allows you to visually demonstrate your expertise. This adds credibility to your services and helps potential clients understand the value you can bring to their lives.
Video Creation for Beginners To Engage An Audience
You’ll find the abbreviated version here. To read more about video creation pre-production so you know how to come up with great ideas and can research and develop content for your video, take a look at this article: “
Define Your Video’s Purpose
Before turning your camera on, let’s talk pre-production. That’s the process of planning your content before you create it and it is just as important as the actual content creation.
It’s essential to pinpoint what you want to achieve. Are you seeking to educate your target audience, promote a service, or share insights? Understanding your objectives will guide the tone, structure, and content of your video.
Don’t skip this step – you’ll only land in the large graveyard of unwanted videos on YouTube. Thoughtfulness goes a long way here: your audience will feel like you have read their mail and understand what they need. That will build trust and confidence that you can help them. What could be a better way to attract leads who understand how you can help?
Scripting: The Blueprint of Your Video
A well-crafted script serves as the foundation of your video. It should outline clearly what will be said, who will say it, and the key messages to convey. Each sentence should be purposeful, driving the narrative forward while keeping your target audience engaged.
You can use AI to help you with a script and do other things to speed up your creative process:
Underlord: AI Editor for Videos & Podcasts | Descript
Storyboarding: Visualizing the Scene
Storyboarding involves visualizing the scenes of your video through drawings or illustrations. This process helps in planning the sequence of shots, deciding on visuals, and organizing the flow of the narrative. It’s a crucial step that aids in visualizing the end product and ensuring cohesion throughout the video.
You can use a presentation software, a simple set of index cards, or a spreadsheet to plan scene-by-scene. Or you can use the many storyboard examples in this Venngage article which comes with storyboard templates, too. Here’s a simple example:
Here are some questions to think through as you plan your storyboard:
- What point do you want to bring across? This is the central message or theme of your video. It could be a tutorial, a promotional video, a storytelling piece, or any other concept you want to communicate to your audience. Understanding the main point will help you determine the visuals that will effectively convey your message.
- What would best visualize your point? Once you have identified your main point, think about the visuals that can help you convey it effectively. Consider the different types of imagery, such as still images, video clips, animations, or illustrations. You may also want to think about using text overlays or graphics to enhance your visuals.
- How can you create a logical flow? As you plan your storyboard, think about the sequence of shots that will create a coherent and engaging narrative. Consider how each scene connects to the next and how they can be visually represented. This will help you organize your shots in a way that captivates your audience and keeps them engaged throughout your video.
- What emotions do you want to evoke? Visuals have a powerful impact on emotions. Think about how you want your audience to feel while watching your video. Do you want them to feel excited, inspired, informed, or entertained?
Choosing the Right Background and Lighting and Microphone
The visual appeal of your video can enhance the viewer’s experience. Opt for backgrounds that are not too busy but complement the subject matter. Proper lighting is crucial; it not only improves the quality of the video but also brings out the best in the subjects on screen.
You don’t have to spend crazy budget here to look good. These days, you can work with the phone you already use and microphones that fit your budget.
Sound, lighting and background are your 3 magic powers, although one could argue that even if you only have lighting and sound set up well, you will be able to replace your background.
A small ring light or this soft-box style light bar that can stand on your desk or magnetically attach to your laptop will work quite well. And the popular and affordable Blue microphone like the snowball or a higher-end Shure mic will be a great investment that won’t require a sound technician to set it up. These are all simple plug-and-play devices that are ready in seconds.
4 Sound & Lighting Equipment Examples for Any Budget
| Blue Snowball Microphone | Sure Microphone |
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| Softbox Light Bar | Ring Light |
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Mastering Descript: A Guide to Video Creation for Beginners
Descript is celebrated for its ease of use, making it an ideal tool for video creation for beginners. Here’s a simple process you can use (I told you it was simple!):
- Starting a New Project: Once you launch Descript, start by creating a new video project. Import your video and audio files into the project area. Descript’s interface is intuitive, guiding you through the initial setup.
- Transcribing Your Recording: Descript will automatically offer you to transcribe your video. Accept it and the magic happens within a few minutes. This transcript serves as your editing foundation because you will simply edit the video by correcting the text in to cut segments. There’s another advantage to this step: you can use this text to convert your video into a blog post and get your expertise in front of an even wider audience!
- Editing Your Video: Descript allows you to edit your video directly from the transcript. This feature is revolutionary as it lets you cut words out as if you were editing a text document, and the video edits accordingly.
- Overdubbing: If you make an error in narration or wish to change a segment of your video’s dialogue, Descript’s Overdub feature allows you to type the changes. The software then synthesizes the new audio in your own voice, blending it seamlessly into the existing recording.
- Adding Captions: Captions are essential for accessibility and help keep your audience engaged. Descript can auto-generate captions from your speech, which you can edit for accuracy. For the beginning, forget about sound effects. You can add sound effects and B-roll once you have mastered the basics.
- Exporting Your Final Video File: Once your video looks and sounds the way you want, export it in your desired format directly from Descript, ready to be uploaded to any platform.
For now, we focus on getting this part right, because getting you started and able to launch your first video will make you more likely that you keep producing more content than if you waited for the perfect video. There’s no such thing – this field is always evolving and creatives come up with new trends nearly every day. You’ll only keep learning and growing if you’re starting somewhere, which is why I recommend using video editing software like Descript to make it as easy as possible.
Optionally, you can experiment with Descript’s powerful features such as studio sound to remove that “hallway sound” if you struggle with that or want to remove background noise. You can also play around with letting the tool adjust eye contact in case you read from a teleprompter and want to make that less obvious.
Comparative Analysis: Descript vs. Industry Competitors
To give a clearer picture of how Descript stacks up against other popular video editing tools, here’s a detailed comparison:
| Feature | Descript | Synthesia | ScreenPal | Adobe Premiere Pro | Wisecut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Logo |  |  |  |  |  |
| User-friendliness | Excellent | Good | Very Good | Moderate | Good |
| Automated Features | High | Moderate | Low | Low | High |
| Pricing | Affordable | Premium | Budget-Friendly | Expensive | Affordable |
| Best For | Beginners | AI Video Creation | Casual Users | Pros | Fast Auto-Editing |
How Does Descript Shine?
Descript excels in user-friendliness, effortless content creation, and innovative features like Overdub (replacing what you said with what you really wanted to say!) and automatic transcription. It’s a fun-to-use video editing software that democratizes the editing process, making it accessible for non-technical users to produce professional-looking videos that have studio sound even when you have a low-budget production.
If you want to collaborate with someone on a video or work with an editing assistant to help you, you will like the commenting feature that is built into the editor and allows you to comment at the exact time of the video recording you want to give feedback for. Maybe you discovered an error in the caption or want to show a slide while you’re speaking. You can either do that yourself or leave a comment for a video editor.
Descript comes with a library of free and premium assets you can use to enrich your video. For example, while you’re talking, you may want to break up the monotony of seeing only one person talk by adding b-roll (that’s video footage that runs on top of your main video recording) to illustrate what you’re talking about. Sometimes a slide you have created will fit, but sometimes, you may just want to show a stock photo or video that depicts what you are talking about.
You may decide to share your horizontal video in vertical format on other platforms. Descript is great at converting your video for social media clips, audio recordings (e.g. for podcasts), or different file types with a simple click.
Practical Descript Examples: Ultra-Fast Editing Process
Example 1: Correcting Speech Errors
Imagine you’ve recorded an interview but there were a few stumbles as you’re talking. Instead of re-recording, you can use Descript’s Overdub to type the correct text, and the error disappears as if it was never there. This not only saves time but also enhances the quality of your video. You want a video to be ready to publish without big post – production efforts.
Example 2: Seamless Cut and Arrange
You recorded a 10-minute tutorial but want to highlight certain parts only. With Descript, you can select the text in the transcript corresponding to the parts you don’t need, delete them, and what remains is the streamlined, focused content.
Conclusion: Make Starting Easy And Grow From There
With Descript, video editing becomes not just manageable but enjoyable. It’s a tool that equips you with everything needed to create engaging, professional videos with ease. As you embark on your video editing journey, remember that each video is a story told—one that can inform, convert, and connect.
If you’re looking for a way to reduce the editing process and want a simple video editor that doesn’t require a steep learning curve and can help you to do basic things like improving the audio quality, cutting the video, inserting additional media such as presentation slides for instructional videos or explainer videos, then Descript with its user-friendly interface, drag-and-drop functionality, and a really helpful tutorials will cover all your needs for a long time.
If you want more complex editing for advanced users and complex projects, you can choose a video editing program that provides you with more advanced editing features like Adobe Premiere Pro.