Are you looking to be a TikTok influencer, start your vlog, or a YouTube channel, or go professional in video editing? You might have come across terms like aspect ratio, B-roll, jump cut, and resolution. These are associated terminologies with video editing.
While it is important to know these terms and what they mean, you should understand that the ultimate goal in video editing is to organize your video clips and present them in a way that makes sense to the viewer.
Editing a video helps with the structure of the video. When editing professional work like documentaries, films, or television shows, a logical structure must be established. It helps tell the story better.
This does not mean that other areas such as color balance, effects, music and/or audio should be dismissed. They are all essential aspects of video editing. In this article, you will find out 5 insider tips that will help you edit videos like a pro.
1. Decide on an appropriate tool
Your level of experience and need will determine what video editing tool you need for your video editing task. If your video is a simple one with only a few shots that you need to put together, you can use simple video editors listed here like a YouTube video editor, iMovie or Windows. For more complex videos with peculiar requirements, tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X will suffice.
2. Consider angle variations
If the person or object caught within the frame of footage is shot constantly from only one angle, it doesn’t matter how interesting what the person is saying is, viewers are bound to get bored. But when the camera angles of the video shot are varied, it makes for a more visually appealing video.
3. Color manipulation
Another way to keep your video visually interesting is to manipulate the colors of the footage. This involves color grading and color correction. You may not always be fortunate to shoot your video or receive for editing a video shot in a brightly-lit environment.
In such cases, color correction is necessary as it helps balance out the brightness, saturation, and contrast of the video footage while maintaining a natural appearance. Your task as a video editor will be to ensure that consistency in these colors is maintained across all footage that will be included in the final video draft.
Color grading involves using filters and effects to help tell the story of the video. This also involves transition patterns. They can be excluded from a video editing process or varied according to the artistic taste of the video editor.
4. Use a directory
The ultimate goal of video editing is to tell a coherent story with a video visual aid. To make this happen, a structure is needed. When you have a lot of video shots covering many parts of an event, it can be difficult to sort them out.
Getting a project directory helps with this as you can organize your clips into labeled folders. Depending on the event, you can create other folders within the main folder and put sound, music, and picture files from different periods of the event. This way, you can easily reach these files when you need them and organize them into one video.
5. Trimming
Trimming is a necessary part of video editing. It cuts out all the extraneous footage that does not add to the story being told.
Final words
Color correction and shot variation help tell a story better. But to ensure that your final production looks like a professional ensemble, you must be wary of jump cuts.
Jump cuts allow the entry of characters or elements that were initially not in the preceding shot. Not only do they fail to tell a complete story, they also make a work look shabby.