So one of the new hobbies that I’ve picked up over the last couple months, which has been extremely slow moving, is video editing. I cook a lot and also watch a lot of travel and cooking videos online, particularly on YouTube, so I thought it would be fun to do my own videos. I already get so much joy out of cooking and documenting via photo and Instagram, so how hard could it possibly be to edit videos using real video software?

The truth is… it’s pretty frustrating, difficult, and exacerbating, like with learning any new skill or software for the first time. I was thinking about the first time I had to learn all the “e,” “eu,” “eau,” “ou,” etc., sounds in French my first two weeks in freshman year of high school, and that was extremely brutal. Studying Chinese every night and doing homework was just excruciating in college, as we had daily quizzes (which in the end, truly served their purpose because somehow, all these years later, I still know most of that stuff!). Any new skill is painful and annoying in the beginning, but I hope this all pays off.

Collectively over Saturday and Sunday, I probably spent over six hours…. just trying to figure out how to create and save templates in Adobe Premiere Pro, only to find out that the method I was using was relevant in older outdated versions of the software, and that “Legacy Title” templates no longer exist in the latest version. Instead, I’d need to undo all that because they could no longer be used, and instead create new templates in what they are now calling “effects graphics.” It took several Google and Adobe forum searches to find what I was looking for. Yep, it only took six hours — no big deal.

I have to keep telling myself that this is just part of learning, that eventually, this will all get much easier, and it will become like second nature to me. It’s a small investment of time now for a bigger payoff later. Fingers crossed.