Our Friday Fails posts have been a lot of fun for our team to produce, and our readers really love them. We’ve decided to take our experience and turn it into lessons learned for those of you out there who may be planning on launching your own video series.

Transcript:

Welcome to another edition of Friday Fails! My name is Mike. Usually I’m the guy editing these videos, but today I want to talk to you about fails with video editing.

While doing our research on these videos and doing our own videos, we’ve come across quite a few fails and a lot of them can be solved by the simple act of editing your videos.

By editing your videos I don’t mean that you have to use some crazy Michael Bay editing style. What you need to do is create a great flow for your videos with great transitions between each take. For example, you really want to edit out all your uhs, ums, stutters and stammers.

While I may be as handsome as Ben Affleck, George Clooney, or Steve Buscemi,  I’m definitely not as talented as they are when it comes to memorizing their lines. If you flub a line, that’s fine, it happens. Stop, take a deep breath, count to three and start your thought over again from a natural breaking point and you’re set.

Another fail we see is background noise in your videos. You really want to make sure you have a very quiet set when you’re recording. If you have a noisy office with a lot of foot traffic it may be best to shoot early in the morning or later in the afternoon when there are fewer people around.

And, on the same topic, if you have background music, make sure you keep that volume very low so you don’t have to scream over your audio.

Another fail we see is video length. Generally you want to keep your video short because people have very short attention spans. Anywhere from two to three minutes is a perfect, perfect sweet spot to be in. However, if you do have really great content and you’re delivering it in an entertaining fashion, you can be as long as you need to be.

How about some quick tips for setting up your own video shoot?

1. Invest in some lights. You really don’t need to spend a lot of money. We use drop lights that we bought from Home Depot. They’re construction lights, but they work perfectly for our situation.
2. Also, use a good quality HD video camera when you’re recording. Preferably one that will allow you to plug in an external microphone for quality sound and video.
3. To go along with our first fail, invest in some good editing software. Whether it’s iMovie on a Mac, or Adobe Premiere which is available on both PC and Mac. This will help make your videos really, really killer.
4. Most importantly, have fun. Take a shot if you need to, we won’t tell anyone. The more fun you’re having, the more fun the viewer will have while watching you.

These are our tips and tricks to make your make your video series top notch. Turn in next week for another Friday Fails.

This article originally appeared on LyntonWeb.