The typical action sports enthusiast who comes to VideoTov for video editing has hours and hours of unedited video footage sitting on his or her computer. Sometimes the customer doesn’t have time to edit all that video. Sometimes the customer has tried to edit it and realized that getting those great transitions and effects and timing the best moments with the music is hard—video editing software has a steep learning curve. Either way, most customers want to just hand it over to a professional video editor to just “make it so.”

I’m not the typical VideoTov client. I had no footage of myself kitesurfing because I already knew what a time-consuming pain in the neck GoPro video editing is. Even with all that “easy-to-use” video editing software, my attempts took SO much time and came out looking rather lame. As much as I’d love to fill YouTube with my kitesurfing adventures, the video editing process was just too much of an obstacle.

But when I came across VideoTov, I the idea of making kitesurfing videos became exciting again. I could go out and do the fun part of kitesurfing with the GoPro camera and leave the editing to a professional video editor with experience in editing action sports videos.
Here are eight things I learned by working with VideoTov:

1. Always be videoing. You never know when the amazing perfect moment is going to happen—the perfect landing, the epic wipeout, that once-in-a-lifetime sea critter swimming by, that epic wave. I really wished I had been capturing these moments all along, even if I didn’t know at the time how I’d get them edited.

2. Always, always, always charge the camera. In order to check out VideoTov’s services, I had to get some footage. It wasn’t the most ideal time of year for epic conditions. Summertime off the Pacific Coast can mean days, weeks, what feels like an eternity without a swell. The one night I didn’t bother to charge the camera, the next day an awesome rogue swell came through.

3. All these Technical Tips

4. Include your friends in your videos. What’s the best part about looking at old yearbook pictures? Seeing your friends from way back then. When you’re old and gray, your favorite parts of the videos will be seeing your friends. That’s really what soul (kite)surfing is about, isn’t it? The community, the crew, the people.

5. Include shots of the place and the sunset. One thing I would do differently in my next kitesurfing video is include more shots of the beach, the sunset, and the parking lot where we all hang out. It’s another element of the capturing the community and the whole soul surfer experience.

6. Tell a story. I got a little carried away with the “Look, Ma! That’s me on video kitesurfing!” and forgot to tell my story. People do like seeing killer moves, and they love epic wipeouts, but what really keeps them coming back and inspires them to share your video is a good story.

7. It’s amazing what a professional video editor can do. I wasn’t too excited about my video footage. It was small conditions. Seeing myself on video for the first time, all I could see was everything I was doing wrong, how I wasn’t pushing it enough. And I gotta say, if I were to sum up my VideoTov editor’s work on my video in one sentence, it would be, “Making something outta nothin’.” He definitely lived up to VideoTov’s promise of “making the best video possible out of your footage.”

8. Collaborating makes the project exciting. Using the VideoTov platform to go back and forth with my editor was really fun and easy. I immediately became the project manager, deciding where I wanted Twixtor-enhanced slomos, cool transitions, etc. You get to choose your level of involvement, so you can give as little or —in my case—as much feedback as you want.

If you’d like to get all that video footage sitting on you computer edited and upout on YouTube where it belongs, click here to delegate the video editing to a professional video editor.