Advanced Video Editing for Beginners

Shooting Video and Its Most Common Mistakes

Editing footage to make an engaging video is not easy. In order to start editing a video, you need quality footage in the first place. Clearly, for quality video editing, you need quality footage in the first place. However, nowadays, when smartphones and action cameras like GoPro are catching up with more expensive digital cameras in terms of image quality, and even surpassing them in some areas such as image stabilisation, it is often no longer necessary to invest in expensive equipment.

It is much more important to focus on the style and technique of the shoot itself, working with light, creating creative shots, and editing the video. Some of the most basic and common mistakes include shooting video in portrait mode, inappropriate frame rates, and overly long, static shots. Although it might seem that higher frame rate footage would be of better quality, this is not true. The most commonly used frame rate in the film industry is 24 frames per second and broadcast television uses 30 frames per second. Any higher frame rate should only be used when shooting slow-motion footage. Static shots can be enlivened by moving the camera towards or away from the subject or by interesting angles.

If you want to edit, and create videos, you’ll need the right software. The most well-known and best video editing programs are undoubtedly Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro. While Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS, only users of the latter will install Apple’s Final Cut Pro. It’s also worth noting that Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is the only one to offer a free version, which differs little from the paid one and is sufficient for the vast majority of professionals.

The organization of the video material and the preparation part is very important for the subsequent editing of the video, especially in terms of clarity, orientation and time saving. It’s best to import all the files you want to work with into your project and clearly organize them into folders. This applies not only to the video material itself but also to the various audio tracks that will be used in the final video. You can then select individual videos from the clearly organized folders and add them to your timeline.

But how to know which part of the source video to use? The absolute basics is to trim everything except the parts of the video that actually make sense in the final cut. A very common beginner’s mistake is the urge to use all the source material, regardless of its relevance and composition. Not all footage will work, and not all of it fits into the storytelling of your video, removing it will prevent an uninteresting and lengthy result.

Now it’s time for colour correction and styling. However, adjusting various video attributes such as contrast, color, saturation, black level and creative use of color filters for specific hues is a very difficult discipline and one that professionals have been studying for years. The unequivocal advice for beginners, however, is “less is sometimes more”. Green skies and purple trees may be interesting, but unless the video is dealing with the clinical effects of psychedelics, it’s better to stick to a more realistic rendition of the colours. It certainly doesn’t hurt to replay the result, go through it and tweak the details before exporting. Believe me, the time and effort you put into editing the video will greatly reflect in the final result.