How to study from YouTube videos (and where Filmina fits in)

If you're wondering how to study from YouTube videos, here's the short answer: don't watch them straight through. Before you hit play, decide what you need from the video; watch it in chunks of five to ten minutes; at the end of each chunk, pause and say or write what you remember without scrolling back; and keep what you wrote next to the lecture slides for that topic, not in a separate notebook. A video you only watched feels understood. A video you paused to recall is one you actually learn.

For a lot of students, YouTube is the second professor of every course. Your lecturer covered price elasticity of demand in ten minutes and three slides, and that night you find a twenty-minute video that walks through it slowly, with graphs and examples. The trouble is you watch it in bed, nod along at every step, and the next day you can't explain the difference between elastic and inelastic demand. Watching a video and studying it are different things.

In this post I'll walk through how I do it, with an example from an intro microeconomics course, and I'll be upfront about which parts you can do in Filmina and which you can't.

Before you hit play: give the video a job

The most common mistake is opening a video "to understand the topic". That's too broad, and it leaves you watching everything with the same level of attention. Before you start, open the lecture slides and write down what didn't make sense. For example:

• What it means for elasticity to be greater or less than one.
• Why total revenue goes up or down depending on elasticity.
• How to calculate it with the midpoint method.

Those three questions are the video's job. If it answers the first one four minutes in, write it down and keep going. If a section covers something your professor didn't, you can skim it. And if the video answers none of them, switch: there are plenty of videos on every topic and not all of them match your course.

Check the description too. A lot of educational videos are split into chapters with timestamps, which lets you jump straight to what you need instead of watching twenty minutes to find three.

Watch in chunks, and pause to recall

This is the part that changes the most. Every five to ten minutes (or at the end of each chapter), pause and, without rewinding, answer out loud or on paper: what did it just explain? What example did it use? What didn't I get?

It feels like wasted time, and it's the opposite. One experiment with online lectures found that slipping short quizzes between segments reduced mind wandering and improved learning: students who answered between segments took more notes and drifted off less. And the effort of recalling without looking is exactly what, in Roediger and Karpicke's work, sticks better than studying the same material again.

With the elasticity example, a pause might look like this:

1. Minute 6, pause. "Elasticity measures how much quantity demanded changes when price changes, in percentage terms. If it's greater than one, quantity changes more than price."
2. What I couldn't remember. The example about gas and movie tickets. I write it down as a question: "Why is gasoline inelastic?"
3. Keep going until the next pause, and if that question doesn't come up, go back to that minute at the end.

Playback speed and the transcript

Watching at 1.25x or 1.5x is fine if the speaker is slow and the topic isn't new to you. What doesn't work is speeding up just to get it over with: if you can't remember anything at the pause, the speed was too high. For anything new (the first time you see a supply and demand graph with both curves shifting), stick to normal speed and pause more.

Most videos have captions, and many have a full transcript: on a computer, the option to show it is usually in the description, below the video. It's useful for two things: finding the exact minute where something was said, and copying a definition without typing it out. Use the transcript to search, not to read. If you read it top to bottom, you're back to watching without recalling, just with text. And if the captions are auto-generated, double-check technical terms: they often get names and acronyms wrong.

After the video: bring it back to your course material

A video only really pays off when what you got from it ends up back on your slides. Otherwise, during finals week you've got the lecture slides in one place, ten videos in a playlist somewhere else, and notes you can't match to any lecture.

When you finish, do three things:

1. Answer your opening questions in your own words, without looking. If one doesn't come, go back to that exact minute, not the whole video.
2. Put each answer next to the slide it belongs to, with the timestamp so you can find it again.
3. Write one or two exam-style questions from what you learned: "If the price of a good rises 10% and quantity demanded falls 20%, what happens to total revenue?" Answering that three days later is worth more than rewatching the video.

If the video is a recorded lecture from your own course, things are a bit different (it's ninety minutes long, there are student questions, there's dead time), and I covered that in how to take notes from a recorded lecture.

Where Filmina fits in, and where it doesn't

Filmina, a web app that explains your lecture slides out loud, doesn't replace the YouTube video, and I'll say that first: right now it works with files you upload, not links. You can't paste a YouTube video into Filmina. Where it does help is everywhere around it:

• Your slides, explained. You often go looking for a video because the deck has three words per slide. Filmina explains it out loud, slide by slide, pointing at the part it's talking about. Sometimes that's enough and you don't need the video at all.
• What you got from the video, inside the lecture. In your course's notebook you write (or paste) your notes, with the timestamp and the link, and attach that note to the elasticity slides. From then on, Mina takes your notes into account when explaining those slides, and in the chat an answer drawn from them is labeled "From your notes". I covered how to set up that note in how to digitize handwritten notes.
• If you have the video file. When your professor shares the recording as a file (MP4 or MOV, for example) or you have an audio file of the lecture, you upload it and it opens in the reader with the transcript alongside, following along as it plays. Tap a line to play from there, change the speed, and what you listen to counts as studied for Practice and Review. It's all in Uploading and reading files.
• The questions afterwards. If you finish the video with something still unclear, you can ask Mina about the slide, the lecture or the whole course, and it answers with your material in front of it. More on that in how to chat with your notes.

The limits, plainly: you need a connection and an account; each file can be up to 30 MB, so a long video often won't fit and it's better to upload just the audio; and turning audio or video into text uses transcription hours, which are limited each month on the free plan (details on the plans). The full walkthrough of a course is in how Filmina works.

A plan for a twenty-minute video

To make it concrete, here's the elasticity video from start to finish:

• 2 minutes before. Open the slides, write three questions, check the video's chapters.
• 20 to 25 minutes of video, in three or four chunks, with a one-minute pause at the end of each to say what I remember.
• 5 minutes after. Answer the three questions without looking and put each answer next to its slide, with the timestamp.
• Three days later, 5 minutes. Answer the exam-style question I left myself. If it doesn't come, go back to the exact minute.

That's about 35 minutes total for a 20-minute video. It sounds like a lot until you compare it with watching it three times, in finals week, half asleep.

Frequently asked questions

Is studying with YouTube videos effective?

Yes, especially for a topic that got rushed in lecture or for a worked example. It works much better if you watch in chunks, pause to recall what was said and bring what you learned back to your slides.

How do you take notes from a YouTube video?

Don't copy what's said while it's being said. Watch in chunks and, at each pause, write what you remember in your own words along with the timestamp; use the transcript to look up an exact definition, not to copy it wholesale.

Is it okay to watch lectures at 1.5x or 2x speed?

It depends on whether the topic is new to you. If you can say what was explained after each chunk, the speed is fine; if you can't remember anything, slow it down.

Does Filmina work with YouTube videos?

No: Filmina works with files you upload, not links. If you have the lecture video or audio as a file, you can upload it and it opens with the transcript alongside, and whatever you got from a YouTube video you can save as a note attached to that lecture's slides.