time tends to change things

the most formulaic process is for my "speed edits" which are the ones that take hours and not. days lol. i don't tend to post on these here as i'm less proud of them - they're fun but not overly creative! tumblr for me is where i put the edits that are long and personal and therefore don't get much love from the algorithm.

without further ado, here's the process i used yesterday to create this edit of dan which i posted on tiktok and twitter about two hours after the phodcast:

THE CONCEPT

before i do anything, i have to plan the "concept" of the edit. for speed edits, this is simple. firstly, i choose an intro and a song. i do the auto beat markers for the song and then go through and readjust them. then i make the intro fit the frame and lower the audio at the start to make it louder once the "edit" part actually starts. at the end of the intro, i use keyframes to decrease the saturation from usually around -15 to -50 which is when it goes completely black and white. i also put effects like collision or drop down to make that "falling" effect.

the basic concept of a speed edit is usually captured just by this intro and audio - like an emo dnp intro and a fall out boy song or a cunty moment to rihanna - but this effects how the rest of the edit is made (what clips i select, what effects i use, how extreme the zooms are, tempo, and more). it can even extend into aspect ratio - more cutesy edits i often made 4x3 rather than 1x1.

COLOURING AND EFFECTS

i have saved some premade colourings to my capcut, three of which i use most commonly though there are a bunchh i have ready to use - screenshot below is only a sample! i also have a folder of favourited filters and effects that i combine together depending on the vibe (one which is cunty, one which is more "grungy", one which is more soft). i also have presaved "panning" which is when the edit subtly moves around, typically combining a pendulum and mini zooms, as well as flash effects to add that sort of flicker. some of these are really subtle but atp it's routine to include them!

once i've stacked this all up, i stretch the effects out for the duration of the edit. here's what that looks like on the sample in question:

CLIP SELECTION

to put the actual meat of the edit together, i copy in a clip which has keyframed zooms (which basically means making it zoom in quicker at the start and end) and a speed graph (which is when the clip is slow motion at the middle and fast at the beginning and end to make it look smoother, similar to the zoom!). this means i can insert a new file into the same clip so i don't have to redo speed settings or zooming. then i use smooth slow motion to make that look better. these files come from my organised folders which are split into photos, clips and full videos. i store these on a specific editing hard drive! i don't use scenepacks or anything, i use yt-dlp and ffmpeg to download the raw video files from youtube or at least chunks of them directly onto a hard drive, setting the quality to 1080p because twitter and tiktok compress anything less - though that's Way too technical for this post lol, and i barely understand it, i'm mainly running off of reddit advice (screenshot is the code i used for the sample edit).

clip selection is quick for speed edits as i usually know exactly which clips i'm going to use - this means i can just go straight to my folders without installing anything and if i do need to install something, i can just copy paste some code. however, it is the longest part of my more creative edits but i enjoy narrative storytelling through dan and phil clips. as you do. which means doing this for every single clip. and sometimes it glitches. fun stuff!

once clip selection is done, i get to the "making it look good stage". i add animations to the clips in batches of 4. the first usually uses "unfold" which means popping out into a zoom. the next three then use "swoosh" which is kind of explained in the title. if the colouring is dark, i'll manually add a white flash overlay. at the start of each clip i then stack 5 vertical blur effects where i use keyframes to make them go from 100 strength to 0 which adds a bit of Oomph for lack of a better word. on the final of the third clips, i adjust the saturation so it fades to black and white and sometimes i also add a partial fade out for emphasis using a plain black image with a fade in effect! here's how a single clip would then look when zoomed in (i added the overlays here for show, the colouring is light enough that i don't need them, but this is what that looks like anyways):

each batch of 4 clips accounts for one bar of music. i will select all these clips together and turn them into a compound clip which basically means combining them into one long video rather than 4 short ones - this means i can use animations that span multiple clips or multiple animations on the same clip. to use a practical example, in this edit the start features a drop down effect that i want to last across the entire first bar to create a falling impact, so i make 4 separate clips into one big clip and apply the effect to all of them.

i also use a slide in this edit every 2 bars to make it more visually interesting. i do this using the slide left effect. if i were to do this without compound clips, it would be limited to 0.2s which is fancy for saying. choppy as fuck. but because capcut Thinks it is combining longer clips, it allows me to extend the effect to a full second which is what makes it look a lot smoother.

TO LOOP OR NOT TO LOOP

i make my edits in batches of bars, each containing usually 4 clips. this can change, for instance if a song has multiple prominent musical beats i may split a beat into two clips or make one longer - all in all though, a bar ranges from 2 to 10 clips. i then repeat this for the next bar (again. can adjust the amount of clips). every edit contains at least 2 bars - usually, however it contains 4. your average chorus is 8 or 16 bars. thus, the question is raised: to loop or not to loop? in other words, to spare myself having to select anywhere between 16 and 64 more clips, i will often repeat the same clips from before. this is easy to copy due to my use of compound clips though i always quickly check that they line up with the beats i marked all the way back at the start.

to make a loop clear i usually make a visual change to signify this, which usually consists of:

lowering the saturation to make it closer to black and white

lowering the frame rate to make it choppier

adding grain or visual noise to make it lower quality

adding a blur or moving portrait effect to make the edit seems double layered on top of itself

you can see the difference of this on the timeline:

i tend to add the effects on a different layer to the main colouring so that the reduced saturation does not apply to them - i like a rainbow blur on top of black and white because it looks cooler to me. once that's done, i render the edit to watch it back and see when (and not if) i made a mistake - there always is one lol. after that's all good, i apply motion blur and optical flow to the entire edit then export it onto my hard drive to post!

LONGER EDITS

this process seems really complicated when i write it out like this jesus christ but it's actually really quite speedy and simple for me - i've been editing on this software for just over two years and have forged this style by constantly doing it, hence it becoming second nature. however this is not always the case! on edits i don't release day of upload, i spend a lot of time making it be more creative. sometimes this can be experimenting with effects or spending more time just making sure they work - for instance, my phandomgives edit i'm posting later is in the style of the previous one but took about double the time because i spent ages ensuring it looked good and fiddling around with things. text also takes FOREVER because capcut desktop doesn't have the animations i like for it's auto lyrics feature which means typing and animating each word. one by one. i also have a whole process even just to get certain words bigger and overlayed. it's a Lot!

most often though, the most time consuming task for me is CLIP SELECTION!!!!! jesus christ. i am an annoying person who likes to make long edits in which every clip tells a continuous story. sometimes i like to add a three act structure. for nobody's benefit except my own. the fun code process i did earlier then has to be done for every clip. for hundreds of clips. not to mention the planning time i spend using the text boxes to mark out where each chunk will go. audio editing is also a fun time consuming thing as sometimes i will shuffle around lyrics if it works better which means separating the vocals from the instrumentals and fidgeting around with those. i also chop up what dnp say to make it fit the music better (not changing their actual wording! just changing the speed they say it at or cutting stammering. sometimes i even use other clips where they say the same words for clarity!), which takes forever. this is why you will never catch me complaining about the process i just showed in detail because at least it is consistent and formulaic lol.

but as much as i'm moaning now, these longer edits are a lot more fulfilling to me than the formulaic ones. they all have a little piece of me in them and i love them so so much. without them, i would not feel nearly as creatively fulfilled by the editing process - some edits are satisfying visually, some are satisfying to my heart (im being corny for the bit here but genuinely getting compliments on those and the response to them is so beyond lovely).

i'm currently wrapping up a longer dan x megan thee stallion edit in this strain, which has been in the works since january - im saving it for when tiktok frees me from shadowban jail though :))

TL:DR

HOLY SHIT i am so bad at being concise but the editing process in its most diluted form goes:

choosing the vibe

choosing the audio and intro

adding effects to match

picking the clips

adding effects to the clips

looping the clips with different effects

(for longer edits) adding text and playing with the audio of both the song and of dan and phil.