For the first seven tips read 7 Video Editing Tips To Help You Save Time.
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8. Supplement Video Editing with Pictures
You can add a lot of punch to your videos by having nice slides for the credits, transitions, or ending. You can even add pictures and screenshots over your video or with a picture-in-picture effect to make your video more visually interesting. You can get large stock photos from sites like Shutterstock and PhotoXpress. Learn how to use whatever picture editing software you have. You will need to use large size pictures and graphics if your finished video will be HD; otherwise your slide will be blurry.
or Supplement with Photoshop and/or After Effects
Two programs that most video editors also work with are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Aftereffects. Adobe Photoshop is the world’s most popular graphics editing program. Being able to create and edit graphics is important for creating title screens, for creating images to add into videos and for creating DVD covers and boxes. Adobe After Effects is a powerful motion graphics program. Unlike a video editing program, a motion graphics program specializes in special effects. It works much like Photoshop, with layers and effects, except it works on a timeline. In After Effects, you’ll be able to create just about any special effects you can imagine, export it and add it to your video editing program. You usually can’t create very many special effects in an editing program. Likewise, though you can edit in After Effects, you’ll usually want to edit in an editing program instead. (It’s much faster.)
9. Learn the Basics of Color Corrections
Learning how to use tools like White Balance, Levels and Curves can make your video look much sharper and more color balanced. Because of lighting, sunlight or just the way your camera works, your film may come out with more blue, red or green than it should have. The whole clip will have a “cast” of color overlaid over it. Color correction allows you to remove this color cast and restore the clip to how the colors look.
In addition, color correction will allow you to increase and decrease brightness and contrast to create a video that really pops, rather than a video that might have slightly dull colors or light. Learning to use these tools well takes just a few hours to half a day of reading tutorials and experimenting.
10. Background Music
Background music can really add “vibe” to a particular clip. In an intense moment, playing suspenseful music can help really get the adrenaline flowing. I personally don’t like music that continues through the whole video; just to highlight certain parts. The trick to background music is to select the right music, but make sure it’s subtly in the background enough that it doesn’t interfere with the conversation on screen and isn’t consciously noticeable by the audience.
You must use royalty free music – especially if you want to make money from your video.
11. Stick to Basic Fonts
Unless you’ve studied typography, it’s usually much safer to stick with proven fonts like Times, Arial, Tahoma, Garamond, Helvetica, etc. It’s also easier for people to read when they are watching a small video on a mobile device. Selecting type is an art and science in and of itself. Beginning editors who use outside the box fonts usually end up making their videos look amateurish rather than creative.
But what about the creative fonts you see in the opening of Spiderman or The Matrix? Those fonts were constructed from scratch by professionals to match the vibe of the movie. Yes, creative fonts can really add spice to a video – But there are so many things that go into choosing and creating fonts, that unless you really know what you’re doing, it’s safest to just stick with proven fonts.
12. Computing Power
How much computing power do you need? It depends on what kind of editing you’re doing. If you’re just cutting clips together to create a whole video and you aren’t editing regularly, you’ll probably be able to get by on 1.5 GHz processing and 1GB RAM. On the other hand, if you’re running Photoshop, FinalCut, After Effects and Maya (3D animation) simultaneously, you’ll probably want at least 2.2 GHz processing and 2+ GB RAM. Duel-core processing is a huge plus.
The more hard drive space you have the better. The amount you need depends on your video source. If you’re taking videos from your iPhone, then the video sizes will be relatively small, taking up about 1 GB per hour. On the other hand, raw video footage from a high def camera takes up 13 GB per hour. You should have enough room for at least 4 hours of video. In other words, if you’re editing iPhone videos, you should have at least 4 GBs free. If you’re editing high def, you should have at least 50 GB free.
13. Making Notes in Your Edits
For any projects that take more than a day or two, you should carefully note what’s what with markers. Markers are little bits of text you can put above your timeline. For example, you can put “Mark talks about zebras” in the part of the speech where Mark is talking about zebras.
This can help you find the exact spots you’re looking for on your timeline much faster. It doesn’t matter as much for short videos, but once you’re getting into complex projects the many hours spent trying to find the exact moment in a clip where something happens can end up taking a lot of time.
14. Understanding Compression
When you’re first getting started, it doesn’t really matter if you understand compression. But if you want to produce videos to the exact quality and file size you want, then understanding compression becomes quite important. It’s not just a trade-off of video quality to file size. You also have issues like whether you want square pixels (for computers) or rectangular pixels (for widescreen TV.) You have issues like interlacing or not, which can change how certain things in your video looks.
Most people will usually only need to produce to one or two formats. In other words, you’ll primarily be editing for web videos, or primarily for DVDs, etc. You really just need to learn enough to find the one or two compression settings that you can use regularly.
If you follow these tips, and the previous 7, for editing video, you’ll be able to create high quality, professional-looking videos yourself without having to spend thousands of dollars on the project. And if you really don’t want to edit you can find somebody to outsource it to.
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