Tomorrow's Problems for Tomorrow's Me
Just cut the footage and stitch it together. That was all it would take.
I resented the past version of myself who'd thought that.
Four in the morning. After hours of abuse, my eyes were screaming. They felt as dry and gritty as seaweed left to bake in a desert for a week, and the inability to focus was just a bonus.
Monitor light filled my studio apartment, flickering and pulsing as the footage rolled. Every time I looked at it, my head ached.
Who the hell said editing was easy?
It wasn't just a matter of cutting clips and gluing them back together. Every time I played back what I'd made, it looked like a rag sewn from scraps — that wretched, that unworthy of anyone's time.
The process of rewatching the entire stream from the beginning, supposedly to find edit points, was a problem in itself. Watching myself on screen muttering nonsense was faintly nauseating. I even started to wonder if that was really my voice. Sometimes it gave me the creeps.
And that weird cringe wasn't the only issue. I'd hunted for edit points, more or less, but I had no idea which parts to cut or how. Even when I roughly found them, I then had to figure out how to connect them. Slap them together and the scenes jumped with this jarring sense of wrongness.
That was why starting something unfamiliar was so hard. Take one step forward and you immediately ran into a new problem. Problems stacked on problems.
Loop the edited footage long enough and every shortcoming jumped out at you. No matter how much time I poured in, I couldn't be satisfied. I was starting to understand why people hired editors. You couldn't learn the craft from scratch while also doing daily live streams and this whole mess.
I left the footage I'd been wrestling with and opened Newtube, just to cool my head. Watching the same clip on repeat was going to drive me insane. Taking a break to see how other people edited their videos seemed like a good idea.
"Hmm..."
Newtube, by its nature, was used by countless people, and the number of videos uploaded was beyond counting. There were the so-called hakko, with low subscribers and low views, and then the "big corps" sitting on huge subscriber counts and viewership. Not everyone who uploaded hired an editor. Plenty of people, even without much skill, still poured their heart into editing every frame by hand.
Those were the videos I wanted to reference. Watching a major Newtuber's work wouldn't give me the ability to recreate it. If anything, it would just raise my standards until my own footage looked like garbage mixed with sewage — and I'd be lucky if that was all. What I needed now was someone at about my skill level. I wanted to see how people like that put a video together.
Of course, I had no intention of taking notes from videos that were edited like garbage. Surely there were people who edited in ways a beginner like me could actually follow — the so-called high-value methods, where the result looked good relative to the time and effort invested. That was what I was looking for.
For reference material, Last of Quantum videos would be best. Depending on the game, editing styles created completely different atmospheres. You couldn't slap healing-game effects onto a war game.
Finding videos to reference wasn't hard. Just searching Last of Quantum in the Newtube bar brought up tens of thousands of related clips. The game was popular, sure, but that didn't mean every related video was. Scroll down a little and there were plenty sitting at a hundred to around a thousand views. Surely one or two of those would be worth a look — a thought that arrived with a simultaneous sense of despair at how long it would take to watch them all. To understand an editing style, I'd have to actually watch. Factor in the time to figure out what techniques they'd used, and my head was already starting to hurt.
Still, it would be more progress than looping footage that offered no answers. Thinking that, I was browsing for something watchable when a video caught my eye. The view count was unusually high, but that wasn't why it drew my attention. The character in the thumbnail looked far too familiar.
"That's... me."
I wondered if it was just someone who looked similar, but the more I looked, the more it was a dead ringer. And the title blatantly called it an Unknown gameplay video, so it was definitely me. Had someone taken my footage and edited it?
Curious, I clicked. The start was nothing special — a typical short intro, then my own soft voice. The footage seemed to be from today's stream. The broadcast had only ended a few hours ago, and there was already an edited video up? The quality was bound to be crude.
That was what I thought as I hit play — and the video demolished my complacent assumption with ease. How to put it. The pacing, the push and pull of the edit, was no joke. The parts that needed punch and the parts that needed to breathe were crystal clear, and the framing was perfect. Scenes that had been nothing special became highlight after highlight once they'd gone through the cut.
My interest naturally shifted to the channel owner who'd edited it. Two thousand three hundred subscribers. Only three videos uploaded, including the one I'd just watched. They'd even put up the drunk stream? That was a dark history I wanted wiped from memory — not that I remembered much of it anyway.
Every video on the channel had high views. The one I'd just watched was already at a hundred thousand; considering how recently it had gone up, that was a considerable number. The other two had cleared four hundred thousand each. The official channel I'd just created had zero videos and zero subscribers. At this rate, it was hard to tell whose channel was the official one.
They were way better than me. I wasn't angry — not because the channel description said they weren't monetizing at all. Purely because it was so much cleaner and more entertaining than the video I'd edited. Same ingredients, a completely different dish. The gap in the cook's skill was glaring. View counts were a pretty objective metric.
Why not just have this person be the editor? I hadn't planned on hiring one, but if it was this person, I thought it might be okay. There was an email address in the channel description, so contacting them wouldn't be hard. What should I write? Would it be weird to suddenly ask if they wanted to be my editor? I hadn't even gotten a reply, and I was already thinking about the next step — how to set the contract terms, and so on.
I spent a while clutching my head, writing the email. It was late, so a reply would take some time. Given the state of my body, waiting up for a response seemed out of the question. I spun the chair around and collapsed straight onto the bed.
Sometimes the cramped space felt like a feature. Turn around from the desk and you were on the bed. Was there a better layout for making a human lazy?
I'd created the channel intending to upload a video today, but it was going to take a little longer. I'd named it Unknown, but I wasn't sure people would even realize it was mine. I questioned whether anyone would bother looking for my stuff in the first place. There were countless Last of Quantum videos out there — why would they watch mine? There was a mountain of settings to configure, too. I thought Trisch's streaming channel had a feature to link a Newtube URL; I should connect that. Come to think of it, there were a lot of stream-related banners as well. I'd have to fill those in one by one.
The worries chained together, filling my head — until the sleep that washed over me quietly settled the clutter in my mind. My body, already comfortable, had long since become one with the bed.
Whatever. Falling asleep like this was probably fine. I doubted anyone would watch a clumsily edited video anyway. You could say I should just invest more time — but I'd already seen a perfectly edited video, and my standards had been raised. Sitting with the footage forever wasn't going to produce a result I'd be happy with. Had I really ground so much time into a video nobody would watch...? Ah, whatever.
I should've listened to Jump from the start. An experienced person's advice really doesn't miss. If I'd thought about recruiting an editor from the beginning, I wouldn't have wasted all this time. I couldn't rewind hours that had already slipped away. For now, waiting for a reply to the email was all I could do.
If they refused... whatever. It would work out somehow. Tomorrow's problems could be left to tomorrow's me.