My Second French Video is Over 20 Minutes Long

Published: November 28, 2025 • 4 min read

As I write this blog post, my second French video is being rendered in DaVinci Resolve. I did it again, and this time, the video is over 20 minutes long.

I'll be honest, I still struggled to get myself to record French videos. I think it's because in my head, I still call myself someone who is learning French versus someone who knows French. But that's okay for now. With every video I record, I'll break that identity and become more confident.

My Laptop Doesn't Like Me Anymore

Now, my video recording experience today makes me believe that my laptop doesn't like me anymore. A less dramatic way to say that is that I think I need a new laptop. The one I'm currently using, a Dell XPS-13 which I got 3 years ago, cries for help every time I open DaVinci Resolve. You can imagine that this slows me down, which I really do not like. But hmm, I guess that is something to keep in mind for the future.

I also learned that I use the word "Now" a lot in English. I never really noticed it until recording videos and seeing that I had to say a longer version of the word in French, "Maintenant." I guess it's time for me to polish up my English.

DaVinci Resolve Tips I Learned Today

This is my fourth time editing a video with DaVinci Resolve and it's so beautiful to see that with every video I record, I learn something new that makes me faster. For instance, here are a few things I learned today by doing a number of Google searches while editing the video:

Redo shortcut: The shortcut to Redo an action that was undone with Ctrl+Z is Ctrl+Shift+Z
Auto-unlink clips: Instead of unlinking every video clip you drag to your timeline by right-clicking and unchecking "link clips," you can simply click the chain icon and it happens automatically for all videos in your bin. This definitely saved me a lot of time.
Extract audio on import: You can simply extract the audio from your clips when importing them into DaVinci Resolve if you do not want to use the video. I learned that after I had already imported all my clips and created proxy files of them all. However, I will definitely be using this in the future.
Drag just audio or video: I can drag just the audio of a clip to my timeline by holding down the Shift key, and I can do the same for a video clip by holding down the Alt key. This meant that I didn't have to keep deleting the video portion of each clip that I only wanted the audio of.
Move playhead with C key: And the best of them all, I learned that I can move the playhead to my cursor's position by simply clicking the C key. Learning this tip almost brought tears to my eyes cause you can't imagine how annoying it is to have to scroll all the way to the end or beginning of a clip just to find the playhead and then drag it all the way to the right position.

Progress, Not Perfection

Oh well, I am really really happy right now. The first video was an 11-minute video and now this is slightly over 20 minutes. Both of them are far from perfect. I still have a lot of work to do, especially with my pronunciations. They both also were read from a script created from translating the audio of the English versions, and most of the video itself is in English since the French Writing Playground app is not bilingual.

However, the next app that I will most likely have to record videos for is ViteHero, which is a bilingual application, so that is exciting! This time, the English and French video recordings will be completely different. I can't say for sure when that'll be completed, especially since I am now going to concentrate a lot of effort on the 777-1 experiment. But I'll eventually get it done.

Your Turn

If watching this makes you want to start your own French journey, do it. I found my tutor on Preply, and you can get 70% off your first lesson using my referral link.

As always, thanks for reading!

My Second French Video is Over 20 Minutes Long