How to Turn a Video Into a Blog Post
A transcript is a first draft with terrible structure. Here is how to turn one into something worth reading, and why publishing it raw does not work.
The Scriptorium team ·
Turning a video into an article is mostly deletion. The transcript gives you every idea you had, in the order you happened to say them, with all the repetition and none of the structure. The work is choosing and rearranging, not writing.
Why you cannot just publish the transcript
Spoken and written language are different registers, and the difference is bigger than people expect. Speech repeats itself deliberately, wanders, backtracks, uses "so" and "right" as punctuation, and relies on tone to carry meaning that the words alone do not.
On a page, all of that reads as padding. A published raw transcript makes a good talk look like a bad article.
The process
- Transcribe the video. video to text, then correct the names and terms.
- Read it once, marking what is worth keeping. Expect to keep between a third and a half.
- Find the actual structure. What you said in the video followed the order you thought of it. Written form wants the conclusion much earlier and the arguments grouped rather than scattered.
- Write the opening yourself. Spoken introductions warm up; written ones cannot afford to. Say what the piece is about in the first two sentences.
- Rewrite each kept section as prose. Cut the fillers, finish the unfinished sentences, remove the repetition.
- Add what the video conveyed visually. Anything you pointed at or showed on screen needs a screenshot, a table, or a sentence describing it.
- Add headings and a conclusion.
- Embed the video. The article and the video should live on the same page.
What to cut
- Warm-up and housekeeping. "Before we start, make sure you subscribe."
- Repetition. You said things twice in the video for a good reason; on a page the reader can look back.
- Verbal tics: so, right, basically, you know, kind of.
- Digressions, however good. Split a genuinely good one into its own article.
- Anything that only made sense with something on screen, unless you add the image.
What to keep exactly as said
Specific numbers with their sources, direct quotes from other people, technical instructions where the wording matters, and any phrasing you got right the first time. Some spoken sentences are better than what you would write at a keyboard, and those are worth preserving.
How long it takes
Meaningfully less than writing from scratch, because the thinking is done and the examples exist. Meaningfully more than nothing, because the editing is real work. Anyone promising a finished article from a video at the press of a button is describing a raw transcript with headings added.
On asking a model to do it for you
A language model will turn a transcript into something article-shaped, and it is a genuinely useful way to get a structural first pass — an outline, the natural section breaks, a list of the points you actually made.
What it will not do is keep your specifics. Summaries drop the numbers, flatten the qualifications and smooth out the one unusual thing you said, which was probably the reason the video was worth watching. If you use one, use it for the skeleton and write the sentences yourself.
Publishing it
Put the article and the video on the same page. The article is what search engines read and what a reader who will not watch a video gets; the video is what people who prefer watching get. See video transcripts for SEO for how to publish the full transcript alongside it.