Transcription
[Music] Gox is considered the best editor on YouTube, but it's not for the reason you think. I've edited videos with over 1 billion views and discovered five secrets Gox uses in every video that you can steal to make the audience addicted to your editing.
Starting with number one, in the last 5 years of being a full-time artist, sure, it's cool for the text to go behind the glasses. Obviously, that's cool. It's pretty. But it blurs behind it. He typically doesn't do things just for the sake of doing them. He did it because his camera has such an intense shallow depth of field that it blurs his glasses naturally. If the text is meant to look like it exists in his reality, then it needs to match that blur.
[Music] The sound design is completely different from what you hear on the market today. You typically hear a bunch of whooshes, and it sounds amazing, but this also sounds amazing and it sounds uniquely different and it's never feeling too repetitive with the sound design. A lot of editors find one whoosh or one boom and they start spamming it. But Gaus goes through and he finds different sounding ones, different variations. You can pitch it down, you can slow it down, you can speed it up, you can reverse it, and it can sound like a totally different thing.
You know, guys, Gauss really liked my last editing breakdown, so he's probably going to like this one, too. But you know what Gauss doesn't know? He doesn't know about the gosh darn 12 viral editing secrets, link in the description, which over a thousand editors have used to raise their rates and the editing strategies that keep the audience and your clients coming back.
One, you don't learn if you don't start. Two, experimentation is king. This looks to be like layers and layers and layers, and I'm trying to decipher exactly what is real and what's not. This may not actually be VFX. It could be a projection. Do you see when he writes on the page, it bends down like that? Look at his fingers. He's got a little white on the fingers. We're so used to seeing crazy editing on Gox's videos that when we see something that is just well done cinematography, we're like, "Yo, that's some crazy editing."
In the past three months of being a full-time artist, I haven't done any of this. I've been stuck in comfort. So far, Gox has not spoken to the camera directly at all, and this is a deliberate choice in order to make his video feel like a film. However, there's a reason why the top creators don't do this. It limits authenticity and it limits the amount of connection the audience can have to you. So, while it's great for cinematics and artistry like Gox is going for, I don't believe it suits the majority of YouTubers. My dude actually added sound design to his eyeballs.
[Music] Oh, this is so underutilized. Oh my gosh. This is my favorite thing to do in edits. It's when you take the music and you adjust the frequencies so it sounds like it's playing in the actual building. Sounds like it's coming from a radio like this.
[Music] That is such a neat way to immerse the audience in the story. Four, reduce tools to the strictly necessary. You sneaky bastard. Typically, amateur editors cut on the beat and it makes their edits feel incredibly predictable. And that's why professionals will tell you to cut on the action or cut on motion. But Gauss is cutting to the beat and the action. He's cutting in the middle of placing the glasses down, putting the camera down, and cutting to the t-shirt being thrown in. He's breaking the editing rule while not breaking it. That's pretty genius.
Notebook. Self-explanatory. That shot is the perfect example of what we're trying to do with editing. All these shots are perfectly in frame. You're not seeing the edges of the book, the little outer rim, none of that stuff. It's your job as the editor to make sure something like this is fixed. The seam in the middle, you want it to be perfectly lined up in between each shot. If there's edges of the book showing, you want to hide that. For example, this shot right here. Here's what it actually looks like. It's a giant mess. Stuff is all over the place. It's ridiculous. But all you see is this beautiful shot. It's the same thing with editing.
To push boundaries, to create limitlessly the heart of this project. Now, let's see what I'm getting myself into. Right about here, I start to feel like, uh-oh. Oh, maybe cutting a bit too fast. And then, right when I felt a little bit of discomfort, it's okay. Breathe. He cuts to this shot and he holds it for a while. The editor is responsible for the comfort and the relief of the audience just as much as they're responsible for the tension, suspense, and curiosity.
The perfect canvas for the next stage of the process. I don't want to give away that editing trick. Go get it in the master class. Yeah, I'm not giving that one out. Like, sorry. Most editors never get good enough at editing to ever work with a creator like Gox because they ignore the human algorithm, the psychology that keeps people watching. This is the kind of knowledge I can't share on YouTube, and only a few editors even know it. But those who do are getting hunted down by million subscriber YouTubers.
One of my students, Andrew, thought my program might just be some YouTube fluff until he got a $6,000 raise from one client and now edits will tennis videos with me full-time. Hit the link in the description to join the Elite Editor Academy where I break it all down step by step.
Ceramics hasn't been touched by time. I don't think people actually realize how key the little sounds of the dogs barking in the background and the crickets are to Gox's videos. Audio like that is what you would hear in your neighborhood. Because he's not typically talking directly to the camera all the time, he has to make up for some of the authenticity loss by using diagetic sound. By adding these sounds that you would normally hear in your daily life, it subconsciously makes you connect yourself to Gauss.
This story began in the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Notice he is not going back to the drums right now. He switches to an entirely different genre. Classical is one of the best genres of music to use if you want something to feel truly magical. I've seen this trend, which you know, it's cool to see editors doing a lot more of the classical music, but they only pick the tracks that sound like this. That's all they use. And now their edit feels flat as heck, even though they have quote unquote the right music. Well, it's because there are different genres of music within classical. You got chamber music, sonata, symphony, concerto, baroque. There's so many different types of classical music. You don't just have to spam fast violin music all the time.
A duck and his owner, a group of friends. If you listen closely, you can hear speaking in the background, which is also known as voila. I've gone to many museums and many art galleries. And one thing that typically isn't happening is a whole lot of speaking. Gauss ain't saying nothing. This guy's just rubbing his hair. This guy's just filming on his phone. This guy don't even know what planet he's on. So, why did Gauss add it in? Designed authenticity. It's not true authenticity, but without it, the edit would feel a lot more flat.
You notice how much smaller Gauss's captions are compared to what you typically see on YouTube. Gox realizes that captions are necessary for some of his shots, but he also knows that too many captions can pull you out of the story. So, he makes it extremely tiny. And I feel like a lot of editors could learn from this.
First, I took hundreds of images from every angle, every detail, every port. Listen to the sounds of his camera. If you were to go on the internet and try and find the sound of a camera, a lot of it is going to sound like this. It's harsh. It hurts. So, why do his sound soft and comforting? One thing that I think is going on is that he just found better sound effects, but I believe he is also softening the sounds artificially. He's taken out these two frequencies right here. By lowering those down a tad, it makes the sounds feel more approachable and comfortable to the ear.
Now, Gox's editing is cool, but I'm about to break down how this YouTuber bends time and builds heartpounding suspense to pull tens of millions of views, even with videos way longer than most attention spans. And you can watch that video.