Amateur video editors

With the proliferation of free online video sharing websites, especially YouTube, thousands and thousands of wannabe video editors are putting their work for everyone to see. This is all nice and good, and many of these videos are of quite high quality and very entertaining. What irritates me, though, is when someone comes up with a relatively interesting idea for a video (or video series) but then lacks even the most basic video editing skills, resulting in a video which could potentially be very good, but which is a pain to watch, ruining it.

You don't need to be a professional video editor in order to understand some of the most basic concepts of video editing. Some common mistakes are:

Making the video outright boring with mostly irrelevant content which is shown way too long. For example, showing too much introductory text for way too long. One of the worst examples I have seen had like 5 introductory screens containing text, all of them consisting 1 or 2 lines of text, and each one shown for something like 10 seconds, making the whole introductory text last for 50-60 seconds. Overall there was so little info that it could have been put all in one single screen for 5-10 seconds.
Similarly, showing a logo or similar screen at the beginning of the video for too long. 1-2 seconds is a good maximum. (One of the worst offenders I have seen recently had a logo screen for 20 seconds, in each of the videos in the series. Nothing at all happens during those 20 seconds, just the logo. This is NOT how you do video editing.)
Using fancy video effects simply because the video editing software happens to offer them. One of the worst offenders is the classic "star wars scroller" text effect. All these fancy cheap effects are boring, obnoxious and irritating. If you want to scroll text, just scroll it normally. The only transition between static screens which is not annoying is a cross-fade (or fading through a black screen), and even this effect should be very fast (preferably less than a half second). All the other transition effects in video editing software are annoying and distracting.
Displaying text for too long or too short time, especially the latter. If you want to display some text during a video, make sure that the average person will have the time to actually read it. If you display it for too short, it will be irritating when people won't be able to read it fully.
Using a text color which makes the text difficult to read. The worst possible case is using pure red or pure blue text, especially on compressed video. This is because the red and blue channels are destroyed the most with lossy video compression, and pure red and blue are the two basic colors which the human eye sees the weakest (especially when they are shown against certain backgrounds). Yes, using pure red or pure blue text is way too common in amateur videos. Don't these people ever watch their own videos? I'm not kidding here. This is an actual example:

But it gets even worse:

The best and most readable text is colored white, with a black border around the characters (which makes the text readable regardless of what the background looks like, and white/black are the colors that survive lossy compression best).
Similary, using some fancy font which is hard to read, or which is too small. (Using fancy fonts is in the same league as using special text scrolling or screen transition effects: Just because your video editing software offers them doesn't mean it's a good idea to use them.)
Horrible sound mixing. If you are going to insert movie clips or whatever, or make a medley of such clips, make sure that the sound level of the entire video keeps the same throughout. Nothing is more irritating than the sound level dropping and raising between clips.
Using too much compression, completely disregarding the resulting compression artifacts. The worst offenders are almost incomprehensible because of this.
(On the other hand, using too little compression is not good either, as most people have a limited bandwidth. Videos should aim for the best quality/size ratio. Some effort should always be put into this.)
Create a widescreen video by taking a regular 4:3 video and stretching it horizontally until it covers the widescreen 16:9 view. This distorts the image making everything look stretched.
If you don't have widescreen material, then don't artificially try to create it by distorting the original material. Just keep the original aspect ratio.

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