How to Summarise a Youtube Video: 6 Easy Steps

Immersing yourself in the video is the most time-consuming step in summarizing, but it’s unavoidable. We’d advise you to watch the video at least three times when working on such a task. Please focus on the video per se when watching it for the first time. Leave any task behind and ensure you understand the motion picture, plot, and specifics, whether it’s a documentary, stand-up, or culinary show. 
 
Once you do that, try casting your mind back to thinking about the most vivid scenes. Try doing a brief brainstorming session and proceed to watch the video the second time. This time, however, you need to step away from being a passive viewer and get involved in the scene, taking notes of the most crucial points you observe in the video. 

Upon watching the video again and taking notes, your task is to work on these notes and elaborate on theses you jotted down during the session. It would be best to create separate blocks describing different scenes. This way, you will manage to return to them and include more information if something additional comes to your mind.

After you work on every block, it’s time to stick them together so that they create a bigger picture of the whole video. Start reading every block and use transition words to secure coherence and high readability. Also, keep in mind the requirements of the summary if it is your home assignment. Pay close attention to the instructions providing information on the task’s format. While some teachers can greenlight the writer and let them break down a summary into various paragraphs, others explicitly require writing a one-paragraph summary. And finally, make sure you don’t exceed the required word count. Otherwise, you will lose a considerable number of points, no matter your text’s quality.

Whether a college task, remember that it’s just a summary, so only vital things need to be there. The summary’s primary point is to provide a general account of the motion picture, letting the reader know what it’s about. Avoid including spoilers at all costs.

When you have a draft written down, don’t rush to deem the task completed. It would be best to re-watch the video, simultaneously analyzing whether you might have missed something. Don’t hesitate to repeat previous steps, i.e., noting things you haven’t included in the summary but which should be there (remember, no spoilers). 

The summarization process may be different and sometimes easier if you have some knowledge of coding. Python will allow you to skip steps that require watching and re-watching YouTube videos, thus saving you some time. However, it doesn’t mean it will simplify the process so that you will have nothing to do but make a few clicks. There is still hard work, including downloading the subtitles, performing the text preprocessing, tokenizing, executing various summarization algorithms, and many other steps. Plus, programming will be of no use if the video doesn’t have subtitles, so the chances are there might be the only manual way possible to summarize the video at the end of the day.