A YouTube channel is a small factory: one video a week means ingest, story, sound, graphics and export all fit inside the same days the next video is being planned. The workflow below is built for that cadence, in the browser, on whatever machine is free.
Name the project after the episode number, drop every card into one bin, and let smart bins separate A-cam, B-cam, screen capture and audio. Ten minutes here saves an hour during the story pass.
The first pass is structure only: hook, promise, payoff, in rough order and rough length. Compression, b-roll and graphics come in the second pass, so the story is never buried under a beautiful timeline.
Retention lives in the small moves: a punch-in on a phrase, b-roll over a list, an adjustment clip for a quick look change. Each one is a two-second operation on the timeline, not a new project.
YouTube gets a standard recipe: H.264 or HEVC at a platform-friendly bitrate, loudness around minus fourteen LUFS, a thumbnail exported as a still and an end screen laid in before the render.
YouTube workflow questions that come up before a first render.
The safe recipe is MP4 with H.264 at 1080p or 4K at a healthy bitrate, colour tagged correctly, and audio around minus fourteen LUFS integrated. The export settings page covers the details so it is set once per channel.
Duplicate the timeline, reframe the clips you picked to a vertical project size, and export at 9:16 with the same preset family. The vertical video page covers smart reframe and safe areas.
Yes, with proxies. The timeline works on lighter proxy media while exports use the original camera files, so smooth playback is not paid for with quality.
Export the hero frame as a still for the thumbnail and lay the end screen into the final seconds before rendering, so the upload is one video file plus one image.
The studio is one project with several pages. These are the pages that usually come before and after this one.
Open the studio, import one card and run a first pass; the pages above keep the rest of the cadence on rails.
