Why Your Editing Tutorials Are Failing – Christian Cotovan on What Actually Lasts

The Problem With Most Editing Tutorials

Most tutorial channels are built on the wrong foundation. They teach you where to click, not why you’re clicking there. That distinction sounds minor until the software ships a UI overhaul and suddenly every video in your library looks like a relic from three versions ago.

Christian Cotovan has lived this problem from both sides. He’s a software developer turned video editor turned educator who has built tutorial libraries for Camtasia, Descript, and Riverside. He didn’t start with a grand content strategy—he started during the pandemic, sharing things he was learning in real time, answering the same questions he kept seeing pop up in Facebook groups and forums.

“I saw this question coming up again and again in the groups I was part of. And instead of explaining it every time, why not make a video? And even today, some of my most successful videos are about simple questions people ask repeatedly.”

That reactive, community-driven approach turned out to be more durable than most carefully planned content calendars. When you’re answering real questions from real users, you’re producing content that has built-in search demand. The views don’t spike on day one—they compound over months as the video surfaces in search results, YouTube suggestions, and increasingly in AI chat recommendations.

His booking page now includes a mandatory field: “How did you hear about me?” The answer coming back more and more often? ChatGPT or Claude recommended him. That’s not a vanity metric—it’s evidence that consistent, specific, helpful content gets indexed by systems that route people toward solutions.

Teach the Principles, Not the Button Locations

The core argument Christian makes about editing education applies whether you’re building tutorials, courses, or any kind of software-adjacent content: software changes constantly, but the underlying logic of how editing works does not.

“Learn the principles, not where to click. If you learn mechanically that to remove filler words you go there, click that, do this—the next time the interface changes on you, and this happens a lot, especially when a platform updates its UI, things will move, disappear, then reappear. Many of my clients find themselves completely lost because the interface changed.”

Descript, one of the platforms he teaches, has overhauled its interface roughly four or five times since he started covering it. Each time, users who learned procedurally—memorizing sequences of clicks—were lost. Users who understood what they were trying to accomplish could find the renamed, relocated button in seconds because they knew what to look for.

This principle extends to how he structures his own teaching. He doesn’t just tell you to check a box. He explains what the box does, why it exists, and what happens downstream if you ignore it. That approach makes his videos longer than the algorithm typically rewards. He’s gotten complaints about it.

His response: he doesn’t care. Long-form contextual teaching is what builds genuine understanding. Short-form can work—he cites Daniel Batal’s DaVinci Resolve Shorts as a model of compression done right—but the format has to match the content, not the other way around. Audience feedback will tell you which direction to lean. You have to publish to find out.

The Descript Course That Taught Him an Expensive Lesson

Christian built a 12-hour Descript course. Two months of production. Comprehensive, branded, polished. A few months after launch, Descript redesigned the entire interface.

He describes it as a punch in the face. Everything he’d built—the templates, the visual design, the step-by-step walkthroughs—was tied to a UI that no longer existed. He made a decision on the spot: never again would he pour that kind of effort into a monolithic course built around a living, changing software product.

The alternative strategy he landed on: publish incrementally. One video at a time, evolving alongside the product. When a feature moves or disappears, that’s not a crisis—it’s a new video. A one-minute “they moved this feature, here’s where it is now” clip can earn as much goodwill as an hour-long deep dive. It’s also far easier to update than rebuilding a 12-hour course from scratch.

This July, Riverside shipped a completely new editor. Most of the Riverside videos he’d been publishing weekly for the prior year looked dated overnight. He’s now remaking them. But because those videos taught principles alongside the interface, many of them remained useful even after the redesign—the logic held, even if the screenshots didn’t match.

Where Human Judgment Fits in an AI-Heavy Workflow

Christian is not anti-AI. He’s built custom tools using AI—a B-roll finder that takes a video and surfaces relevant footage so he’s not manually searching through hundreds of clips. He uses AI to strip filler words and silence. It’s cut his editing time down meaningfully.

But he watches everything AI touches before it ships. Every time. His word for what separates a competent editor from a purely automated output is “discernment.”

The honest reality, as he sees it: AI handles maybe 80% of the mechanical work. The remaining 20% is judgment—knowing when a cut feels wrong even if it’s technically clean, catching alignment errors where a word gets clipped, recognizing when a silence is doing narrative work and shouldn’t be removed.

• AI filler-word removal frequently cuts words too short or leaves unnatural gaps
• Jump cuts from AI-driven edits can make on-camera subjects look erratic
• B-roll suggestions from AI often overshoot—you get 50 options and still have to make the final call
• AI doesn’t know that an interface changed this week, so its step-by-step guidance for software tutorials is often stale

His forecast for the next five years: AI improves, but the human review step doesn’t go away. The editor’s job shifts from doing the mechanical work to auditing the AI’s work—which still requires knowing what good looks like. That knowledge comes from actually editing, not from prompting.

His Production Process Is Simpler Than You’d Expect

Given that he runs a tutorial channel, coaches clients, freelances as an editor, and is building his own platform (Media Makers Club, which he migrated away from Thinkific to a self-built platform this week), his personal production process is notably stripped down.

No scripts. No teleprompter. One take, almost always. He hits record, talks through what he knows, and if he says something wrong, he stops and starts the sentence over—he doesn’t stop the recording to fix it in post. He edits what he has. He never re-records the whole thing.

For short videos, his entire pipeline—record, edit, export, thumbnail, description, publish—can run in under an hour. He knows that earns him some criticism (“that’s why your videos get 50 views”). His counterpoint: those 50 views on day one become consistent traffic over months as search catches up. The videos that look like slow starters are often the ones that keep performing years later.

The content strategy feeding that pipeline is just as simple: stay in the communities where his target users are asking questions. When the same question appears repeatedly and no good video exists for it, he makes one. When he answers a question in a comment thread, he links to the video he already made. When he can’t find a video to link, that’s his next recording.

What This Means for Anyone Building Tutorial or Educational Content

The lessons from Christian’s approach aren’t specific to video editing software. They apply to anyone building educational content in a space where the tools, platforms, or best practices shift regularly—which is most spaces.

• Build for search longevity, not launch spikes. Tutorial content compounds. Don’t judge a video by its first-week numbers.
• Teach the why, not just the how. Content anchored to underlying principles survives UI changes, algorithm shifts, and software pivots. Button-location content does not.
• Publish incrementally. Monolithic courses built on living software are a liability. Modular videos are easier to update and just as valuable to learners.
• Use communities as your editorial calendar. Repeated questions in forums and groups are content briefs. Treat them that way.
• AI accelerates, it doesn’t replace the review. Any workflow that skips the human check on AI-processed video is trading short-term speed for quality you’ll eventually have to defend.

The through-line across all of it: the software will keep changing and the AI will keep improving. But knowing why you’re making a specific edit has always mattered more than knowing where the button lives—and that’s not something any update can deprecate.

Christian’s site is at cotovan.com, with free tutorials, coaching booking, and links to the Media Makers Club community at mediamakers.club.