How I automated my content creation and saved 15+ hrs every week

I want to talk about a project I've been building on the side, to streamline my content creation workflows.

The Goal

I'm primarily a freelance developer, but I also post a lot of content (mostly on YouTube, but I'm expanding to other platforms).

I don't want content creation to take up my entire day. I also have to work with clients, build projects, and grow my business. But content creation is also one of the ways I advertise my services and grow my brand. So, as a one-man team, I decided to automate and streamline my workflows as much as possible.

Phantom Editor is the solution I've built. It is custom-tailored to solve my own unique problems.

The Solution

It's a collection of Python and Bash scripts that each solve some simple problem for me.

I have scripts to automate video editing and processing, youtube uploads, video recommendations, posts to Twitter (X) and LinkedIn.

My Workflow

Let's consider YouTube first. My typical YouTube workflow was like this:

1. I script a video.
2. I record the video.
3. I do audio processing, remove silent bits and mistakes, and add background music and other edits. (this could easily take me hours)
4. I create the thumbnail.
5. I go to YouTube and upload the video.
6. I share the video to my followers on Twitter/X.

Yikes! All that work for just one video. There's no way I can scale this if I keep doing it manually.

My New Workflow

Long-form

Now, let's consider my new YouTube workflow with the Phantom Editor.

1. I script the video.
2. I record the video.
3. Phantom handles the audio processing, removing silent bits, removing mistakes, adding BGM, and more. All automatically with just a few terminal commands.
4. I create the thumbnail. (I'm working on streamlining this more.)
5. Phantom uploads the video for me, adding the proper titles, description, and other metadata, and also shares the video on all my social platforms with a nice caption.
6. Phantom analyzes all my past videos and uses AI to recommend relevant videos to my users. I then add these as End Screen Cards in my video.

So, really all I do now is script and record the video (takes 20-30m on most videos), and create the thumbnail (takes 10-15m). Phantom handles all the editing (takes 1-2hrs usually) and repetitive tasks like uploading and sharing the video (takes 5-10m per video, more if you count the upload time, and is just a repetitive task anyway).

Short-form

Oh, and I've also automated my short-form content using Phantom. Here's how that works:

1. I plan and record 5-10 shorts all in one raw video recording.
2. Phantom automatically cuts out silent bits from the raw file.
3. It then clips that long raw file into individual video files, one for each short (using faster-whisper and voice activity detection).
4. It then cleans and processes audio, and adds BGM to every short.
5. It automatically generates and prepends a thumbnail to each short (using Pillow and ffmpeg).
6. It generates captions for each short and burns the styled subtitles into the video file using ffmpeg.
7. It automatically uploads every short to YT, IG reels, and Tiktok.

So, to record short-form, all I do is record 5-10 shorts (takes like 10-20m). And then Phantom handles the HOURS of editing and uploading for me.

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And this doesn't even list the other useful things this tool does for me, like:

• running sentiment analysis on my videos using LLM models.
• helping me find high-performing outliers on other channels in my niche.
• analysing competitor channels using the YouTube API, some fancy mathematics, and AI models.

The Future

This project is a work-in-progress. I plan to keep adding more features as my workflows evolve.

How can I help you?

I'm a freelance developer, and I love solving technical problems like these that help people do more with their time and energy.

We all have 24 hours in the day. What if I could make your 24 hours worth someone else's 48 hours? That's what I can do for you, with the help of AI and automation.

Message me on any of my socials, or just book a call on this page. I'm sure there's a big bunch of repetitive tasks you do every week that I can automate and save you 10-20hrs every single week.

Imagine what you could do with an extra 10-20 hours per week. 😈

Here's my links: