13 Best Video Editing Tips For Beginners

With the availability of free video editor apps, it has become more accessible for amateurs to get in the video editing field and share the content they have created. In addition, this has also provided a great boost for students looking to learn film editing. In this blog, we will talk about some of the best video editing tips that can be used on any video editor to create impressive videos. 

Best Video Editing Tips

1 Make Tight Cuts

Any video you shoot that requires long shots of you talking to the camera will require knowledge of tight cuts. This means you must know which parts of the video are unnecessary and should be taken out. This will help in closing the gaps between the dialogues and shorten the running time. 

 

2 Create Backups Of Your Videos

This is one of the most important things to keep in mind – make multiple backups of your videos. Making this a habit will help you save tons of effort in the long run. These backups will keep your videos intact even if you run out of storage on your device or your drive experiences a sudden crash and stops working. How many backups should you be making? Well, they should be enough and not too much. Ideally, you should create three backups per project and save these in different storage devices. 

 

3 Plan Ahead, And Shooting Accordingly

Depending on what type of video you are making, you can plan ahead of the shoot dates and map out the type of shots you will be taking during the shoot. This is an important step because it will help you avoid the mistakes that could lead to reshooting some parts of the video if you forget them the first time. 

 

4 Watch The Video With The Sound Turned Off

This is one of the tricks professionals use to see if the video sufficiently conveys the story or message to the viewer, even if they watch it with their audio turned off. Many people scroll through their social media feed with the sound turned off, so your video should look interesting enough to be watched even without the audio. If you are able to understand what’s happening in the video, then your video is successful. In addition to this, you can spot the dialogues that contain no value to the video and remove those clips with the sound. 

 

5 Get The Right tool

If you are starting out, it is vital to choose a good video editor tool. Picking the right one can be tricky; some video editors with advanced features can cost a lot, and you may not even use most of the tools. So, in the beginning, try out some simple and easy to learn video editors. Many of them come with trial versions, so you can try them out without investing your money until you’re sure. One of the video editors which can be used for making amazing edits . 

 

You can use this tool to edit your videos without worrying about your system’s performance, as the whole application runs from cloud computing. In addition, you can access your editing from anywhere in the world using it, so you can resume editing your video from a different device seamlessly. 

 

6 Speed It Up

There is a reason why TikTok became so popular; people want to consume tons of entertaining content in a short time. Now there is a new form of criticism, and that is videos being too long. Attention spans of viewers on the internet are getting shorter and shorter, and so your video needs to capture their attention within the first few seconds. Thus, remember to keep your videos short and filled with useful and interesting content. 

 

7 Choose The Right Angles

You need to make the camera work and dictate the shot. A shot can tell a story on its own; for example, shooting a video from the shoulder angle of the two persons in conversation will show viewers how they understand each other and have harmony between them. Try to select the angles before shooting and test out new angles to see if you can add them to your video. 

 

8 Cut Out The Mistakes

Chopping out the technical and speaking errors is a crucial task that can be done with the help of a good video editor. You can cut the action between two frames and add a smooth transition to give viewers the impression of continuation when they are watching the video. 

 

9 Organize Your Media

One of the frustrating things about shooting and editing videos is not being able to find certain clips or pieces of media. While editing your videos, you must be able to find the files instantly. So before you start editing your video, start with organizing your media. If you are not sure how to get your files sorted, a good rule of thumb is to do it in chronological order or by the data in which the videos are shot. The main goal here is to keep the media files in one place and sorted. So when needed, you can find them quickly and add them to your video editor’s project timeline.

 

10 Take Longer Video Clips

You can chop them off in post-production, but when you are shooting the video, take as much material as possible. This gives you more material to work with and helps create a video that shows every aspect of the information. 

 

11 Keep Things Simple

As a beginner, you will love to try new filters and editing effects in your video, but the secret to winning the viewer’s favour is to keep things simple and not add too many transitions, graphics, and other effects that can make the video hard to watch. 

 

12 Maintain Appropriate Pacing

Create a tempo based on the time of your cuts; this concept is quite similar to the way a song progresses from the start to the very end. Just like that, you need to set the pace of cuts you will give to a single scene or a section to match the tone of the video. 

 

13 Relax

This is an important one. You can quickly experience fatigue when working on the same project for a long time. It is easy to become desensitized to the main motive of creating the video. Take a break during the edits, and come back with fresh eyes. This will help you stay focused and allows you to have an audience’s perspective while watching the video. 

 

Wrapping Up

Video editing is not easy and requires lots of time, effort, and skill. Follow these tips and elevate your video editing skills to the next level.Â