Behind the Editing of "AX YOUTAITE REACT to CB Winners"

YASS!!!!! IT'S DONE!!! It'S FINALLY OUT IN THE WORLD!! And it's gotten such an explosive response so far omggg thank youuuu QAQ

It's been a wild ride executing the Youtaite React AX (Anime Expo) special, from filming outside for 3 hours in 108 F / 42 C weather, to the crazy complicated edit that it became and how many things kept popping up that needed to be done before it was ready to go. It really took me over 50 hours of working on this after the shoot to get it done and ready for upload..... Under the cut, I'mma discuss the post-production process in more detail!

For this episode, we put up a clipboard during the youtaite meetup for anyone to sign up, with only the info that they'd be doing a challenge and not to spoil the answers. We then had participants watch entries from a selection of the chorus battles with the most participating entries/were the most iconic for their time, and they racked up points by guessing the song, group, and CB.

We got some hilarious struggling as well as folks expressing their love for entries/groups/their friends—so I think it's pretty entertaining and full of heart. ^^ Everyone did great! I'm also in it kind of as a host.... I swear I tried to cut my intro out but it didn't make enough sense without someone spelling out the setting and what was happening... I don't even know how I let Fome talk me into that ending. That's not me.

Anyway! I also asked them questions after the challenge and got lots of wholesome answers, so that's what the next episode is going to be composed of. Someday. When I....make time....to edit it.

So enjoy this one!! For a while!!! Please!

AX YOUTAITE REACT to Chorus Battle Winners 【ep. 4】

I think it's fascinating being able to look into the project timelines of professional editors, so here is mine for this project in Adobe Premiere!

This is actually probably one of the most complex edits I've ever done. Typically for work, the videos I edit don't have this many separate components (in this case, how nearly the entire 8 minute video is covered in graphics made of different layers) while also having many conditions to fulfill.

When it comes to conditions, I'm reminded of a certain event that I edit videos for where our crew follows 40 individuals around for 5 days, shoots b-roll of all their activities, and interviews them all. On my end in editing, I have to make sure that all 40 of them speak once, AND all their important activities and themes/learnings are sufficiently mentioned, AND all 40 of them have approximately the same amount of b-roll screentime. It's the biggest mental challenge for me among my regular work projects because there's tons to juggle and keep track of (and the video has to be done and shown on the last day of the event QvQ;;). A lot of the learnings from doing these videos I was able to put towards YTReact this time—for example, keeping a tally list of how many times each person spoke.

For this project, these are the conditions I had to meet:

• All 11 participants have sufficient screentime and nobody feels particularly under-represented
• Showing a fun/sweet/entertaining side to every participant (this was easy ♥)
• Also showing that they each know some answers
• None of the 18 CB entries should feel particularly under-represented or over-represented
• Making sure that parts where the participant refers to a specific point in the CB entry match up with that point
• Fast pacing since it is a long video. Tried to make it a good mixture of funny and heart. Clips need to flow well into each other.

For episodes 2 and 3, I had some help with editing but this time they were understandably busy with real life, so I basically did it myself from start to finish. (Aside from most of the motion graphics elements which were made by Kumo and Myst.)

1. Prep

So the first step was to prep the footage. I renamed the files to add each person's name, and also cut up the CB compilation video (which Fome made), renamed each clip so I'd know which entry they are, and colored them in alternating light green-dark green so it's easy to tell from a glance when the song has changed. Then made a "stringout" sequence in which I synced camera footage + audio, mic audio, and the CB compilation video + audio. This kind of organization definitely saves your butt later and makes it easy to tell what's happening in the edit just by looking at clip names without having to watch!!

2. Selects

Next is selects. I watched each person's entire challenge footage and made different color marks on parts depending on how much I thought they should be in the final video. Also a special color for parts that have to match up with a certain point in the CB entry (i.e. when Squadus sings along or when Jae salutes the saluting art).

3. Story Building

After all that, I went song by song, checked each person's footage to see if I marked anything, and copied all of those selected clips to a new sequence. Then went back and added some more clips to the under-represented entries and removed some from the over-represented ones.

Then I reordered the clips to make them flow better, and that gave a lot of perspective on what I needed more or less of. Afterwards, I made that tally list of how many times each person appears and adjusted it as best as I could so that each person appears at least 10 times, but nobody really appears significantly more than others. Adding and removing clips while still fulfilling all the other conditions of the video flowing well AND there being enough focus on each CB entry, etc etc—that's the equally frustrating and fun puzzle-solving aspect of editing!!

After it was mostly in place, I'd watch through the video just to tweak the pacing and I hope I was able to keep it engaging with some room to breathe on certain parts??

4. Graphics / Audio / Polish

When I finally finished doing my best at meeting all of the conditions, it went into the polishing stage. Putting in graphics (lemme say that it is so chaotic that many CB groups choose to add special symbols to their names LOL it took a long ass time for me to find passable fonts that would support those symbols while not looking toooo inconsistent), adding all the transitions, choosing and adding background music for non-CB parts...

Then the audio edit, which I was able to do directly in Premiere since the mic quality and ambience stays consistent enough that I didn't really go into detail, yay. In the Audio Track Mixer, I added a multiband compressor on the dialogue track, and then you can see all of the keyframes I made for leveling out volumes lolol. Also tried to make all of the CB entries feel relatively the same volume. (The VA ending section surprised me by being really difficult so that took a lot of EQ work and I'm still not happy with it tbh........)

AND OF COURSE COLOR CORRECTION. It was a lot of work in both normalizing shots and also matching the color/brightness/contrast for every shot. I probably went over the color correction on the entire video at least 5 times, while also adjusting little things with every watch. After each pass, I thought I was done but I was wrong. ;^; In fact, I still wish I could fix some things because differences that aren't as noticeable on my laptop are pretty noticeable on my phone..... It's a hard balance... I fidgeted with color starting from story-building all the way up until upload, heh.

Hopefully you didn't, but you may have noticed that a handful of our participants looked quite...glowy. ;; The lovely crew volunteered to suffer with me despite not having much experience with video shoots and we had the additional layer of challenge of shooting outside and not knowing how much the sun's movement (and buildings' reflection) would change the shot. Near the end of the shoot, we realized that the environment had changed so much that the shot became incredibly over-exposed and we didn't think to adjust for it ;n; Of course I don't blame anyone; mistakes happen! I'm just grateful that we got through that grueling, physically torturous shoot and no one felt seriously unwell afterwards other than me. Bless that crew so much aaaa luff them

THE MAGIC OF COLOR CORRECTION... The result still isn't ideal at all, but it's a huge improvement on everything being blown out!!!

Sho's portion unfortunately needed the most color fixing. :c If you're not super familiar with color correction, I do recommend using Lumetri Color in Premiere as it's compact, easy to use, and effective! Below are the base settings used for this specific clip, but also keep in mind for contrast that Coda and Squadus have clips where I didn't touch anything at all, so this is quite dramatic.

So that's the basic gist of the process I took to finish this video! It...was a lot. I'd like to now take time to focus on my other projects too (remember how I keep saying my solo is almost done? orz) so please be patient for the next episode—thank you for your support!!