👋 Welcome! This document outlines the process we follow to produce sermon videos for YouTube (and our website). The purpose of our edited YouTube sermons is to engage both (1) active students of God’s Word, and (2) people unfamiliar with biblical teaching. This mixed audience, combined with the oversaturated state of social media platforms (in this case, YouTube) has led us to include a “trailer” at the start of every sermon to hook our viewers, encouraging them to listen to the rest of the sermon. Conceptually, having a trailer for a sermon can seem quite foreign, so I’ve written a brief explanation for each aspect of our trailers here:

Having understood the theory behind our trailers, this document will describe the practical steps involved in entire video editing process. Please note, this document describes how to edit a sermon video from scratch. However, you are more than welcome to copy and paste elements from the template Davinci Resolve (DR) project file titled “[INSERT NAME]“ to help save you time. Please still read through this document (or watch the tutorial in its entirety) to understand the exact reason why certain elements have been adjusted, set up and timed the way they have in the template files.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• 1. SETTING UP
• Noting Highlights
• Download Livestream from YouTube (or Google Drive)
• 2. EDITING THE TRAILER
• Select & Trim Clips
• Add Music
• Add Captions
• Add B-roll (optional)
• 💬 FEEDBACK
• 3. EDITING THE REST
• Sermon Proper: logo, transitions & titles
• Outro: add voiceover & “Reflection Question”
• 4. EXPORTING & UPLOADING
• Exporting as MP4
• Thumbnail Quote
• Timestamps
• Uploading to YT

1. SETTING UP

Bethel Bible-Presbyterian Church BBPC Media: Video Editing Part 1 - Setting Up

Noting Highlights

Either while you listen to a sermon being preached in real time (or during a second listen later on), note down, word-for-word things that the preacher says that you think might work in your trailer. Even if you’re not 100% sure about what clips will make the final cut, it’s better to give yourself more than enough material to work with, than to find yourself lacking material and having to re-listen to a sermon (or re-read its transcript).

You are welcome to note down sermon highlights within that sermon’s “Video Editing” page on Notion →

Download Livestream from YouTube (or Google Drive)

Log in to YT using your personal account. To gain access to the church’s YouTube channel, send your personal YT account email address to Josh or Sanjana. Once you have access to the church’s YT channel, it’s profile will appear under your personal account, subtitled “Editor”.

Enter the YT studio of the church’s YT channel. Locate and download the livestream which contains the sermon that you would like to edit.

NOTE: If the sermon portion of the livestream is disrupted in anyway, download the locally recorded sermon video from this Google Drive folder instead.

2. EDITING THE TRAILER

Bethel Bible-Presbyterian Church BBPC Media: Video Editing Part 2 - Editing the Trailer

Before you do anything, check that the video and audio tracks are perfectly in sync with each other. Occasionally, either the video or audio may be delayed behind one another. When this happens, unlink the video and audio tracks, then drag either track to align them in sync, and relink the tracks together.

Select & Trim Clips

1. Open the YT livestream which contains your sermon video. Open the transcript tab and search for the lines whose timestamp you want.
2. Import the YT livestream in Davinci Resolve (DR), and locate that line using the timestamp identified in YT’s transcript.
3. Cut out only the clips you may want to use in your trailer (you will further trim this down to only 1-2 minutes of footage). Once you think you have enough footage to work with, delete the rest of the livestream, and move these clips to the start of the DR timeline.
4. Trim away the preacher’s unnecessary pauses to keep the trailer moving along at a decent pace.
5. Once you have cut and trimmed things down to ~1-2 minutes of footage, you have completed the first stage!

Add Music

Either import a song from the “Background Music” Google Drive folder, OR download a new one from Fesliyan Studios or any other royalty free music website. Feel free to include a combination of 1-3 songs per trailers. More than 3 songs might result in the trailer feeling overly fragmented, rather than one cohesive narrative/message.

• Pay attention to the volume levels of the preacher and your music. If you can, wear headphones while adjusting volume levels. Applying the Goldilocks rule, the music’s volume should be just right.

OPTIONAL: Rhythm & SFX

• Feel free to use the rhythm of the music to your advantage by aligning key moments in the trailer with key beats/points of emphasis.
• You are also welcome to add sound effects if you think they will help illustrate or emphasise things. Eg. If a preacher is describing a fire burning, you might add the sound of a burning fire. If he delivers a dramatic line that calls for maximum weight and attention, you might add a “riser” or “impact” effect. Source these from the ”Sound Effects” Google Drive folder, or websites like Mixkit.co or Pixabay.com.

Add Captions

Use “Basic Titles” to create “convenient captions” which are the exact words that the preacher says (with correct capitalisation and punctuation). To save time, once you have set up one title with the correct settings, you will duplicate or copy/paste this title and only adjust each copy’s words and timing.

Default settings include (feel free to tweak as you see fit):

Fonts: either Avenir Next (demibold) or Stix Two Text (italicised)

‣

Download Font Families

Transform:

Position X = 0

Position Y = 0, -115, or -230

• NOTE: These values are for captions that span 2-3 lines, and are the default font and size (Avenir Next: Demibold, 96).

OPTIONAL: Illustrative Captions

Refer to previous trailers on YouTube for examples of this.

• Sometimes, less is more. Rather than displaying all the words the preacher is saying, you might think of a more creative way to illustrate what is being said. This can be a powerful tool to help bring an idea to life and convey it to an audience an a short amount of time.
• Illustrative captions do not function as subtitles. Since titles possess such a wide array of adjustable settings at your disposal (eg. changing fonts, colours, sizes, position, opacity, transitions, etc.), there is a spectrum in terms of how creative you want to be with your titles. In a sense, the sky is the limit!

Add B-roll (optional)

Source B-roll, royalty-free footage from websites like Pexels, Vecteezy, Pixabay or Envato. Feel free to use whatever B-roll you think is appropriate. Note, B-roll does not have to be real life footage; they can also be animations or vectors!

If you choose to use real life footage, we recommend applying a Gaussian Blur (from the Open FX folder) to the clip, and reduce its speed (right click the clip and change speed). Combining these effects on real life footages renders it, in a sense, as background footage, rather than an attractive distraction in the foreground of a video. Of course, it’s up to you if you are using a particular B-roll clip as a centre piece for viewers to focus on, or as a backdrop to help “set the scene”, while the captions remain the focus.

💬 FEEDBACK

Once a first draft of your trailer is complete, export it and send it to the “Video Editing Team” Whatsapp chat for your fellow editors to review and share their thoughts. Give them a couple days to get back to you and then clarify any questions or suggestions they have. Implement whatever changes you see fit, and then export the trailer once more to send to Pastor for a final check.

Your fellow video editors are here to support you!

If you are unsure about any part of your trailer (eg. which clips to include/remove, whether a particular background song or illustrative caption is appropriate, etc.), you are always welcome to send a draft of your trailer to the Whatsapp chat for advice! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns.

3. EDITING THE REST

Bethel Bible-Presbyterian Church BBPC Media: Video Editing Part 3 - Editing the Rest

Sermon Proper: logo, transitions & titles

1. Immediately following a trailer (or a few seconds before final captions disappear), add the Bethel BPC “Logo.mov” file.
2. Add an empty pulpit in the track below the Logo clip and time it so that the pulpit appears when the screen turns white during the Logo clip.
3. Cross dissolve to the preacher just before he begins preaching. Fade in audio.
4. Add sermon title as a “Slide in and scroll lower third” title. Sermon title font: Plantagenet Cherokee. Scripture reference font: Lato (italicised & capitalised).
5. Add sermon point overlay when the preacher begins speaking on the first message point. Add a sermon point as a “Fade on” title. Tracking for the title: 0.6?
6. Duplicate the sermon point titles and overlays as needed, until the closer prayer.
7. When the preacher says something like “Let us pray…”, the final message point corner title should slide offscreen.
8. Fade video and audio of the preacher out as soon as he says “Amen” at the end of the closing prayer.

Outro: add voiceover & “Reflection Question”

1. Add “Uplifting Pad.mp3” to an audio track beneath the sermon audio track, and time it so that it starts playing when the second “pulse” sound aligns with the start of the Reflection Question/s being typed onscreen.
2. Write one or two Reflection Questions for viewers to consider. This question serves to help them apply what they have just heard. NOTE: Send the question/s you think of to Pastor to check before adding to your video.
3. Add the Reflection Question/s as a Text+ title. Adjust the text’s font size and linebreaks so that it fits naturally onscreen. Time the “write-on” effect so that the question/s start being typed on screen as soon as the sermon video fades to black, and ends such that it is typed at a reasonable speed (not too slow or fast). Adjust its position so that it moves up to make room for end cards (recommended sermons for viewers to watch next) to appear below it. Ease in and out this vertical movement.
4. Add a “Keyboard Typing” sound effect and adjust so that the typing sound plays only during the write-on effect of the Reflection Question/s.
5. Add an empty pulpit png (or extract one from the sermon video itself) that fades in after the question/s have been typed onscreen.
6. Add a voiceover. Select the correct voiceover if the sermon was preached by a guest speaker.
7. Balance the volume levels of the “Uplifting Pad”, “Typing” sound effect and voiceover mp3s.

4. EXPORTING & UPLOADING

Bethel Bible-Presbyterian Church BBPC Media: Video Editing Part 4 - Exporting & Uploading

You’ve completed your first sermon edit! Thank God! Just a few left things to do to help make publishing this sermon video on YouTube easier for our publishers.

Exporting as MP4

In DR, go to the “Deliver” tab on the bottom right of your screen. Name your video for your own reference, select a location (folder) on your computer to save the video, and set its format to mp4. Export the entire timeline and wait for it to render.

Thumbnail Quote

Each of our YouTube videos contains a “Thumbnail” which is the image people see before they click on a video to watch it. Our thumbnails contain (1) a quote from the sermon, and (2) a screenshot of the preacher taken while he preached his sermon. Our publishers will format your thumbnails for now, however, please help them out by writing intriguing/interesting quotes from the sermon that you think can be used in your sermon’s thumbnail. Type these underneath the “Thumbnail” heading inside the “Video Editing” of your sermon’s Notion page.

Keep in mind that the quotes we use are almost never taken verbatim from their sermon; they are almost always tweaked to fit the size constraints of the thumbnail, meaning we can only fit around 10 words onto any given thumbnail. So please don’t reject a sentence or phrase just because it appears too long in the sermon itself; we can always adjust its length and shorten it as needed later on. Please give our publishers more than enough material to work with, rather than less options or shortened phrases.

Timestamps

Within the description box of our YouTube sermon videos, we include a sermon outline with timestamps for people to easily skip to whatever section of the sermon they are interested in. This is a simple tool we can use to make our videos a tad bit more interact and viewer-friendly. In order for our publishers to enter this into the description of your sermon video, please type the timestamps for each of the following sections of your sermon videos:

1. Trailer
2. Introduction
3. Main sermon points (denoted by roman numerals and capitalised)
4. Reflection Question/s

You can easily identify timestamps by viewing the video within DR.

IN YOUTUBE:

IN THE ‘VIDEO EDITING’ OF YOUR SERMON IN NOTION:

Uploading to YT

1. While logged into your personal YT account, either open YT or YT studio.
2. Click on the “Create” button located in the top right corner of your screen. Click “Upload Video” and select the edited sermon video that you just exported.
3. Rename the video title with the sermon title and date.
4. Set the video’s “Visibility” to “Private”.
5. “Save and close” this draft by clicking the cross at the top right of the upload window.

You’re done! One of our YouTube publishers will help finish off the remaining elements of the video and schedule it to be uploaded at a later date.