Videos have become a common type of content. Whether you want to market your brand, educate your audience, or have a YouTube channel you aim to attract more views and make money, you must create and post high-quality videos.
Besides, the majority of online users spend much of their time watching online videos. That’s not all. About 74% of customers buying online want to see a specific brand video before buying. That’s why you need to create quality videos to convince more customers to buy your brand.
While every project is different, there are basic steps you need to focus on and maintain a logical structure in your video editing process. Check out this article and discover how to edit a video in no time.
Step by Step Guide to Edit a Video
Organize Your Clips for Easy Access
Video editing is a tedious task. But with well-organized files, it becomes quicker to edit your footage. If you neatly store and label your video files, you browse and find them easily, making the editing process faster. But where do you begin to organize and manage your content files?
Well, you can get an external hard drive. That helps protect your files in case your device breaks down or gets lost. Once you have the hard drive, you can move your clips off the camera after shooting. Ensure to label and date your files clearly.
You may also want to come up with an organized folder structure. Here, you should develop sub-folders for your clips. There can be different folders for every video project or folder, depending on the date. You may also create separate folders for your audio and picture files.
Have Clear Video Plan
What would you want your final video to look like? So, as you figure out how to edit a video, you should have a clear goal for your video. That helps to know the video type to create, fonts to choose from, video graphics, and music to add to your video.
Remember, every good video should tell a story. And every story needs a start, middle, and end. Therefore, having a plan for your video helps decide on the story to tell. When editing, you should keep that story in mind. Have you figured out what your finished video will look like? Make sure to follow your plan to bring your video to life.
While planning, don’t forget to figure out ways to make your video texts and transitions more consistent. You can even make some notes to ensure you won’t forget anything as you edit your video. Having a great video plan helps you avoid or solve any issues that arise when working on your video project.
Preview Your Media
By now, your video plan should be clear. You can review your clips to make an early selection of what to use in your project. Ruling out any media that doesn’t match with the video flow in your mind saves you time when importing your materials into the project. However, you shouldn’t be too quick to disqualify any clip you like due to a few flaws.
With a good video editor, you can improve the clips that appear out of shape for your project. An advanced video-making tool helps stabilize images, which can salvage your shaky video. More to that, you can use your editing software for color correction where exposure isn’t promising. All that allows you to create quality videos.
Get Right Video Editor
You’ll only bring your video idea to life if you can put your clips together into something that flows smoothly and tells a story. You can get a good video editor for cutting and organizing your clips to achieve that. Many video editing tools are available online, and you are assured of getting the best software for your project.
If your budget is limited, you can go for a free online video editor. However, make sure you choose a tool that offers a wide range of features like an audio library, templates, and color correction to make your video super. When new to video editing, you would consider a video editor that offers free tutorials on how to edit video. That way, you will get into your project with enough knowledge to produce a quality video.
Upload Footage to Video Editor Tool and Make Rough Cuts
While keeping a video plan in mind, upload your clips to the video editing software and maintain them in their right sequence. That helps you feel how every individual clip fits each other in your video. If any section of your footage doesn’t seem to work well as you thought, cut it off and make a change.
But as you edit your video, avoid being too stingy. You can put in too much and eliminate it later than having too little and get caught up with wanting to go and shoot more clips to add to your video after doing a lot of editing. If you have a good editing tool, rough cutting is a super easy task because you can use an inbuilt storyboard. Apart from that, your video editor allows you to layout your clips like photos on a table, and you can rearrange your content at will.
Fine Editing
At this level, you can begin working on the details of your video if you’re satisfied with the rough sequence. Cut your video clips to the exact content you want. Make sure you have good and consistent transitions from one clip to the next. Cute video transitions make your project more interesting.
Poor transitions can discourage your viewers from watching. So, you should have a dissolve transition as your video moves to the next scene or segment. However, you may choose fades or straight cuts to smoothen the transition between scenes. Having too flashy transitions in your video distracts your viewers. You may use them sparingly.
Does the video flow appear how you want it, or according to your plan? Your next step is to add music, titles, and effects. More to that, you can change colors when seeking to emphasize a specific mood in your video. But ensure to employ creativity.
Export Your Video
This is another vital step when learning how to edit a video. You are through with editing, and it’s time to deliver your content to the viewers. When using a good video editor, you access templates that make delivery easy. You enjoy the right frame rate, frame size, and a suitable video format.
Conclusion
Follow the above steps and begin editing your video like a pro. It doesn’t matter the type of video you want to create; you can use the basics of video editing to come up with high-quality content your viewers can’t resist. If you’re marketing your brand and want videos for your YouTube channels, you are assured of many views after creating and editing your video to come up with compelling content.
