The Content Workflow That Cut My Editing Time by 20X

I wasted well over 300 hours in eight years filming and editing my content the wrong way. One free program fixed it. OBS records your camera, your microphone and your screen into a single finished file, so the gap between hitting stop and being ready to edit went from four and a half minutes to thirteen seconds for me.

The eight steps I used to run after every single take

Here's what my process looked like for years, and what most people reading this are still doing. Script into the teleprompter app, phone propped under the lens. Hit record on the camera, which writes to a memory card. Hit record on the microphone in a separate program. Hit command shift 5 to capture the screen, because half of what I teach is click by click. Film.

Then open Premiere Pro, drag in the camera file, the audio file and the screen recording, sync all three by hand, fix the levels, add my presets, and cut a circle out of the talking head so it sits nicely over the screen recording.

That's eight steps between "I said the last word" and "somebody can start editing this." None of it is editing. It's all setup for editing, and I was doing it fifteen times a week without ever counting it.

What four minutes and 22 seconds actually costs you in a year

So I timed it. I filmed a 60 second clip and ran a stopwatch from the moment I stopped recording to the moment the video was genuinely ready to edit.

Step after you stop recording	Old way	Filming in OBS
Get the camera file off the memory card	Card out, import, wait	Already on the computer
Pull the microphone audio in and sync it	Manual, every take	Baked in, already in sync
Pull in the screen recording and sync that too	Manual, every take	Baked in
Build the circle or rectangle overlay	Cut by hand in Premiere Pro	Already on screen while you film
Total, stop to edit-ready	4 minutes 22 seconds	13 seconds

Thirteen seconds is how long it takes me to open one folder and drag one file. That's a 20x improvement, and if you're newer at this you're thinking it's four minutes, who cares. Run the multiplication.

I film about 15 videos a week. Four minutes 22 seconds times 15 is an hour and five minutes a week, four and a half hours a month, 52 and a half hours a year. That's six and a half days of your life spent on file management. I've measured the weekly saving at four and a half to six hours, and that number has held up for two years.

The files also get small. I can film for 30 minutes in OBS and the output almost never passes 3 or 4 gigabytes, where the same shoot straight out of a camera in 4K is enormous. Every hour you spend watching an upload bar is the same hour, just quieter.

The six scenes I film everything on

OBS is free, open source, and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It's the one free tool I'd take over every other one on my free tools list. Download it, then build what I call the fundamental four. Four presets, six scenes, and I have never needed a seventh.

1. Talking head only. A video capture device for your camera, then an audio input capture for your microphone. Done. I run a Canon R5 in through an Elgato Cam Link 4K, about a hundred dollars, the easiest way I've found to make a real camera behave like a webcam. A Shure SM7B handles the audio.
2. Screen only. A macOS screen capture, or display capture on Windows, plus your microphone again. Then a desktop audio capture, so anything playing on your screen records at the quality your computer is putting out instead of through a microphone across the room.
3. Circle over the screen, left and right. Your face in a circle in the corner, screen recording behind it.
4. Rectangle over the screen, left and right. Same idea, different shape, and it's the one I reach for when I'm showing something wide.

The left and right versions matter more than they sound. When I'm walking through something on screen I switch sides mid-video so my face is never sitting on the thing I'm pointing at. One click, no editing.

Two settings worth doing before your first take. In Preferences, under Output, point your recording folder at one place and never change it. Mine is called OBS exports, and every time I stop recording one file appears there. Then set your audio and resolution once, properly.

The two overlay presets, and the one thing that breaks them

Scenes three and four are the only genuinely fiddly part, because OBS doesn't ship with a circle. You make one with two image files, a circle mask and a rectangle mask, plus optional drop shadows. Both of mine are a free download in the description of the video above, so you can do in ten minutes what took me a couple of hours to work out.

Once you have the files, here's the shape of it. Add a second video capture device for the same camera, because you can't reuse the one you already added. Right click it, Filters, add the effect filter called Image Mask and Blend, browse to the circle PNG, set the alpha mask color to alpha channel. Your face is now a circle. Add the drop shadow as an image source, drag the camera above it, size them to match, then group the two so they move as one piece.

Duplicate the finished scene, flip it to the other side of the frame, and you have your left and right versions. That's the whole build.

The part I don't like about baking the overlay in

Honest trade-off: once that circle is on screen while you film, it's in the video forever. I still forget sometimes. I'll say "come over here and click this part of the screen" and my own head is sitting on the button. It takes a couple of weeks to stop doing that. I bake it in anyway because it deletes the single most expensive task in the chain, and when I want post-production flexibility on one video I film that one on the screen-only and talking-head scenes separately. Two second decision before I press record instead of a twenty minute job after.

Filming in batches is where the rest of the hours come back

The workflow above kills the setup tax. Batching kills the context switching, and it's the bigger win of the two. I sit down on a Monday and film 10 to 12 videos back to back. That's two to three weeks of content out of one day, because the lights are up, the camera is framed and my brain is already in the room.

The catch is that batching only works if you already know what you're filming. Walking into a batch day with a blank page is worse than not batching at all. I batch scripting, then shooting, then editing, in three separate blocks, the same block system I run the rest of my week on, and the ten hours I used to lose to editing go into writing better scripts. If you're filming course lessons and don't have the outline yet, the AI tools inside Course Creator 360 (CC360) draft your curriculum, your modules and your freebie so you show up with something to read.

Then those files need somewhere to live. Every CC360 plan includes unlimited courses and unlimited video hosting, so the single OBS file goes straight into a lesson, behind a checkout, with the email sequence attached. All three plans are here, and Premium and Elite come with an onboarding call where my team sets up your domain, DNS and email deliverability, so the videos you just filmed actually reach the people who asked for them. Want to see it working first? Book a live demo.

The honest ceiling on editing faster without an editor

This gets you very far and it doesn't get you all the way. Editing is still the biggest bottleneck most creators have, and about 1 in 17 of the sales calls we've reviewed has someone naming time as the exact thing standing between them and a launched business. People write into our support chat asking whether we can hand them an editor, which is not something software solves.

So here's what's true. OBS removes the four minutes of assembly per take: the syncing, the leveling, the overlay work. What it can't remove is the cutting, the pauses, the restarts, the moment you lost your train of thought. That work stays real work, and the fastest way to shrink it is to get better at talking to the camera so there's less to cut in the first place.

When you're ready to make your first hire, make it an editor, before a VA and before anyone else. I hit that wall years ago, trained more than a hundred editors and started my own editing agency called Content Bug, and it's why I haven't opened Premiere Pro on my own footage since. If your bottleneck isn't the editing but the tech around it, the funnel, the emails, the checkout, that's what the CC360 Experts page is for.

One more thing that costs nothing and buys back hours: film a short brief for whoever edits for you. Mine run four to seven minutes. Clear direction up front means I hit the output I wanted on the first pass instead of the third, and revisions are where editing budgets die.

The order I'd set this up in tonight

Download OBS. Grab the circle and rectangle presets from the description of the video above and drop them in a folder you'll never move. Build the talking head scene first and record 30 seconds to check your audio, because bad audio is the only mistake here you can't fix later. Then the screen-only scene, then the circle, then duplicate it for the other side. Point your recording folder at one place. Then block out Monday morning, script 10 videos, and film them all in one sitting.

That's the machine. It cost me nothing but an afternoon, and it's why I can run a software company and still put out short form, long form, course lessons and team training every week. For the other side of it, the place those videos turn into a business, CC360 comes with a 30-day trial on Premium and Elite, and everything you film this month has somewhere to go.

Frequently asked questions

Is OBS really free?

Yes. OBS Studio is free and open source, on Windows, Mac and Linux, with no paid tier and no watermark. I film 100% of my content on it: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, course lessons and team training. The only money I've spent here is hardware, and a laptop webcam runs the whole thing until you decide otherwise.

Do I need a real camera and a Cam Link to use this?

No. Every part of the workflow works with a built-in webcam and the microphone you already own. The Cam Link exists because I wanted my Canon R5 to act like a webcam, and it costs around a hundred dollars. Get the workflow running with what's on your desk first, then upgrade the camera once you know you'll keep filming. My current kit is in the full tools rundown.

How do I get the circle and rectangle overlay presets?

They're a free download linked in the description of the video above, one file for the circle layout and one for the rectangle. Download both, give them a folder with a permanent home, and point OBS at them once.

Won't a baked-in overlay limit my editor?

A little, and it's a good trade. Your editor can't reposition your face afterward on those takes. What they also can't do is bill you for syncing three files and cutting an overlay by hand on every single video. For the rare piece where you want that flexibility, film the screen and the talking head as two separate scenes and hand over both.

How many videos can I actually film in one batch day?

I film 10 to 12, which is two to three weeks of content, with the scripts already written. Start at three or four. The number that matters isn't how many you film, it's whether you ever set the room up twice.

Where do the videos go once they're edited?

Course lessons, a sales page, an email sequence, a community, an ad. That's the part CC360 does: unlimited courses and video hosting, funnels, emails and a checkout in one login, plus templates so you're not designing pages from scratch. Plans are $97, $147 and $297 a month as of September 2026, and the $147 and $297 plans include a 30-day trial and an onboarding call. Start there and film your first batch this week.

Related

• The 15 Best Free Tools for Course Creators
• The Productivity System That Works For Course Creators
• The Tools You Actually Need to Run a Creator Business
• How to Get Comfortable Talking to a Camera