Many art forms do not have any rules. Even video editing does not have any rules, but a few theoretical and practical practices can improve the look and feel of videos.
The perfect video edit is just as crucial as what takes place on location, but video editing can be a tricky procedure. Collecting all the tricks, tips, and information is one of the most significant parts of the procedure.
You need to follow several essential steps when editing professional videos for smoothing out the workflow and elevating the results. Going by the video editing steps, tips and tricks religiously will help you raise the standard of your content.
Maintain an effective workflow and speed up the video editing procedure by breaking it into five essential steps. They are as follows:
1. Choose the Right Video Editing Tool
There’s a reason why choosing the right video editor takes the first position in the five essential steps you must take for editing professional videos. Without using the right video editing tool, it will get challenging to edit your video and give it a professional look.
While there are several video editing tools, all of them will essentially produce the same results. But that’s not true to a certain extent. Some video editors have advanced features and tools that make the video editing procedure a breeze.
Of course, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but the most advanced ones will surely elevate your video production results. As a beginner, you must avoid going for complex tools with steep learning curves.
Go for the simplified versions suitable for beginners in video editing. It is worth trying out many video editors online before deciding on the one you think will suit your editing requirements.
2. Organize Everything
Many video-making enthusiasts keep filming their videos for days and even weeks. This means they have several hours of footage, which can be useful as much B-roll footage and primary clips can help users produce quality videos in the end.
However, the main problem is sorting through all the footage during the editing procedure. This can be overwhelming. So, the best editing tip to avoid this situation is organizing footage.
Even before starting to piece the footage together, it works to watch every clip and name it appropriately. You can create spreadsheets with different columns to put in detailed information about all the clips for more detailed organization. Name the columns by clip name, clip length, and so on.
One column can be about a brief description of the clip, while a separate column for comments can be used. Try organizing all the clips on the spreadsheet in order of significance or the order you want them to appear in the final cut.
Of course, it might be tempting to delete irrelevant or low-quality footage. But do not delete them. Instead, label them as low-grade or poor footage so that you do not need to waste time watching them all over again while editing the video. And you can still have easy access to these clips if required.
Organizing all the clips for making a video is one of the most useful editing steps for beginners. It helps streamline the editing procedure, reducing a lot of burnout and increasing productivity, allowing the makers to churn out more videos quickly.
Not to mention, you will continue engaging the audiences over time with perfectly edited professional videos.
3. Keep Varying Shots
It is not recommended to shoot a one-shot video. While this might be tempting for the vlog channel owner or those who spend most of their videos speaking directly to the camera, one-shot visuals might harm engagement.
These videos include uncomfortable and awkward pauses while leaving a lot of room for mistakes that can easily turn away the viewers. Can you imagine yourself watching a 15-minute long video with the same camera angle throughout? Will it not be boring?
So, keep varying the shots and try shooting footage from different angles like a wide shot, point of view shot, medium shot, and close-up shot. This will increase viewer engagement.
Adding images and B-roll footage over the sound is yet another effective way of varying your content without the need of reshooting clips. However, if you are not doing anything, try adding transitions between the clips or using special effects like zooming in on the main subject of the video.
Remember, viewers these days have a very short attention span, and if you do not give them anything to engage within a video. They will quickly click to the other visual. Adding variations to your clips will keep the viewers engaged in some way and even get them to watch more of your content.
4. Transitions and Effects Are Important
The viewers these days love high-quality and clean videos showcasing professional transitions and effects. While applying effects in the post-production stage might appear challenging, using a video editing tool will streamline the process.
Try adding more elaborate glitch effects, crossfades, and distortions to your video using a video editing tool. This will bring great results even if you are not a pro at video editing.
Using clean transitions and visual effects throughout your video will make your content interesting, engage the viewers and boost overall engagement.
5. Pay Attention to the Color
Color is an essential aspect of professional video editing, but it is not given a lot of significance. That’s because people usually do not notice the color scheme until it has inevitable color correction mistakes.
Remember, seamless color grading makes a video look professional and polished. An online video editing tool is an easy way of implementing top-quality color correction in your video.
Such tools make it very easy to stylize, enhance, correct, and balance the color throughout a video. Additionally, these tools come with professional-grade color-correcting attributes like split-tine tools, color controls; color-matching controls; precision coloring, color-replace effects, and color-splash.
Conclusion
This 5-stage video editing process will make sense when editing any video to give it a more professional and polished appearance. You have the flexibility of changing some steps and putting in your steps, but that entirely depends on the footage you are editing.