Becoming a YouTuber has always been a life goal of mine.

Right now, one of my main goals is to reach 25,000 subscribers on my true crime channel. Learning how the YouTube algorithm works, promoting videos on TikTok, and creating content is a huge passion of mine. I know that with consistency and high-quality content, I can reach that milestone in no time.

Video editing, along with photography, graphic design, coding, music production, and programming, is one of my favorite creative outlets. I genuinely enjoy the entire YouTube process — from researching and recording to audio mixing and finalizing videos.

Fortunately, I’ve completed and published my first “high-level” production YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22aJ0zjj3uo&t=38s

Russian Prisoner Tattoos and some of their meanings.

I have always wanted to create a video documenting the secret language of Russian Prison tattoos from the soviet gulag systems. This topic has always piqued my interest, and I was determined to make a video covering this.

My YouTube channel is mostly based around the True Crime genre, Hmong Crime, and Internet Mysteries.

Before diving into the main content I want to create, I really wanted to learn how to build a proper YouTube video—something that felt high-quality, at least by my own standards. I didn’t want to start making dedicated content without first understanding how to create, edit, upload, and fully process a video from start to finish.

So I chose to make this video about Russian prison tattoos as a kind of starter project, just to get immersed in the whole workflow and gain some real experience before moving on to the bigger ideas I have planned.

A lot of my early inspiration came from documentary-style YouTube channels. Creators like SunnyV2, Vox, Vice, and even the New York Times really pushed me toward making more documentary-type videos. High-quality, well-produced videos that dive into an educational topic while still being entertaining—that’s peak YouTube content to me. And it’s exactly the kind of work I want to replicate through my own lens.

I use Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects to edit my YouTube videos. For this project, I gave myself a one-week deadline to research, script, and produce everything. Honestly, the worst part was dealing with the playback. I had no idea Premiere Pro let you manually render previews. Before learning that, I used to sit there waiting for the playback to load on its own—over and over again. I’m not kidding, realizing you could render it yourself would’ve saved me months of frustration. Once I figured that out, editing immediately became a lot smoother.

Researching the tattoo information itself wasn’t hard—it was actually pretty straightforward. The real challenge was choosing which tattoos to feature: the ones interesting enough for me, but also engaging for viewers. I used a bunch of different sources to build the script and finished it in about a day.

Recording the script, though, took forever. My voice isn’t naturally smooth or crisp, and sometimes being an Asian person with stupid Asian genes makes my vocal delivery a bit mumbly or unclear. I’ve been practicing speaking more clearly, but it’s tough. That part alone was the biggest time sink.

I used Adobe Audition to record and clean up the audio.

The video itself was actually really fun to work on. I picked up a ton of new tricks in both Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Honestly, Premiere Pro has become my favorite editing software just because of how clean and intuitive it feels—once you understand how everything works. The only annoying part was the constant rendering and figuring out how to make each segment flow together smoothly.

When you’re making a good YouTube video, you can’t let the screen sit still for too long or the audience gets bored. That was one of my biggest struggles. I wanted movement, but not nonstop, chaotic movement. I wanted transitions that were quick and clean, but still gave viewers enough time to process the information. So I structured the video to move through each topic fairly quickly while using smooth animations to tie everything together. I also added some lens blur and chromatic aberration to give the footage a subtle retro look—something I’ve always liked. Thankfully my GPU could handle it, but those effects definitely slowed down my processing time.

The entire thing took way longer to make than I expected. What felt like hours of work would produce maybe a minute of finished video. Kind of depressing, but honestly, I’m still proud of what I made—especially considering I’m a beginner. I wanted the video to feel serious, but not too serious. One of my biggest challenges was audio. I didn’t want it to be just my voice the whole time; I knew that would lose viewers’ attention quickly. I needed sound effects and background music to keep the pacing interesting. Back then I had no idea there were free music libraries for creators, so I just used whatever copyright-free resources I could find—like co.ag music and scattered free SFX.

Recording my narration was easily the most time-consuming part. Like I said before, my voice isn’t super clear or smooth, and I talk fast, so I ended up re-recording each line over and over again just to get something clean. On top of that, I didn’t realize Premiere Pro could normalize audio. At first, I did everything in Adobe Audition, but the normalization never came out loud enough, so I kept re-recording until it sounded right. Eventually I learned how to normalize directly in Premiere, which made everything easier.

By the time I finally uploaded the video, it was already a week and a half past my deadline—but honestly, I didn’t mind. I learned so much about transitions, motion graphics, and even 3D layering. After posting, I realized I hadn’t optimized anything for SEO, which explained why the video only reached around 200 views at first. So I re-released it with fixed audio, proper tags, and scheduled posting. I even cut the video into shorts and uploaded those too. After doing that, the video hit around a thousand views. And for me, that was huge. A thousand people watched my little six-minute project—and that honestly means a lot.

Originally, I planned for the video to be around ten minutes, but I didn’t want to drag out the content or break my deadline again. Plus, the script was already starting to feel repetitive, so I trimmed it down to keep it concise. Before this, I was working on a different video that took months, mostly because I didn’t know how to render previews properly back then. That one was about Hmong true crime. But this newer video feels way closer to the tone and style I want for my channel.

Overall, even though it took two weeks to make a six-minute video, I’m really proud of it. It’s a solid first step into the kind of content I want to create. Thanks for watching.

If you're interested in Russian Prison Tattoos, and some of their meanings- check out my video!

Some cool things I learned how to do when video editing on Premiere and After Effects

Adobe Transitions

3D layering

Chromatic Blur

Normalizing Audio

YouTube algorithm and SEO

https://www.epidemicsound.com - TOOL FOR YOUTUBE AUDIO

Thanks for Reading

- Devv