- I'm gonna run through the 10 mistakes that I see most new video editors make, wasting a ton of time
and killing the quality of their videos. And I'll also share how
you can easily avoid them with a ton of video
editing tips for beginners thrown in along the way. Hey it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video, where we help you amplify your business and brand with video. If you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button, and all the links to everything
I mention in this video you can find linked in
the description box below. So let's jump into it. As a beginner, video editing
can be totally confusing and it's easy to fall
into some of the mistakes and the bad habits that
can cost you a ton of time, and kill the quality of your videos, making the whole process much more painful than it needs to be, and believe me, we've all been there. So while video editing can
be one of the most daunting aspects of the video creation process, the good news is, is that
with some simple tips to fix your workflow, it can become one of
the most rewarding parts of the creative process. So in this video I'm gonna run
through the top 10 mistakes that beginner video editors make and how you can avoid them right now. Okay, so mistake number one
is not considering your edit or your editing project at the time of actually filming your content. So when you're filming your content, you wanna make sure that
you are asking yourself, "Am I definitely going to be using this? "Is the length of time that
I've captured of this shot, "is that enough, or do
I need to get more?" You don't wanna have extra
footage for footage sake, because more footage means
more footage you need to edit, so it's gonna slow down
your editing process because you need to go through and cut down more video footage. So when you're filming,
be mindful of what it is you're actually capturing and
whether you've got enough, or whether you're actually going to use it in your end video project. This can save you a ton of
time, not just in your filming, but also everything that flows on into the editing beyond that. Mistake number two is
jumping straight into your video editing without
having a plan in place for the end video that
you're looking to create. So what are the goals of the video? Why are you making it? What do you want it to achieve? What do you want people to
think, to feel, to know, or to do after watching your video? Having a plan and some goals
and everything laid out around what you want your video to do and why you're actually
making it in the first place, and the feeling that you
want your viewers to have while they're watching your video is, again, going to make your
editing far more targeted, far more streamlined, and
much more efficient as well, because you know, with clarity, what it is you're creating and why. Leading on from that then, the third one is not
having a process in place to edit your videos down. We see so many people that jump into their editing applications, that'll dump their footage
into their timeline and they'll just color
grading, or tweaking the audio. You really need to focus
on the content first. You wanna make sure that you've
actually got enough footage to tell the story. You wanna make sure there's nothing wrong with the footage that you've captured, so that you can tell the story. Jumping straight into color grading, or to tweaking the sound
or tweaking the audio, making it look or sound pretty, is the stuff that you need
to do later in the process. Adding all of that stuff
in and doing that up front is going to slow down your editing system, it's gonna slow down your computer because it's gonna have to process all of those things that you're doing, but also you might find that
you actually don't have enough to finish the video or there's
extra stuff that you need. So you really should
be, first and foremost, focusing on the content first, but also following a process: Step one, import your footage; Step two, drop it down into the timeline, make sure it's all there; Step three, remove all the bad takes. Now, if you're interested in our process that we teach for the most efficient way to edit your videos down, with minimal wasted time and rework, I will have a link at
the end of this video, where you can download a PDF version and follow along with that process while you're editing your videos. Number four is file management
or file organization. You wanna make sure that you
are organizing everything that you are using in your editing project into a logical place, and ideally, all in the one
place, in the one folder. Now, spending that little
bit of time up front and making sure that
everything is organized is gonna make it much easier for you, while you're in the thick of editing. If you quickly need to find something, it's going to be in a logical place. So what I mean here is having
a folder for your music, for all of your sound effects,
for all of your footage, for all of your B-roll,
whatever it is that you're using in your project, put it
all in a logical place where you can find it
while you're editing, but also, it's gonna make
it much, much easier for you if you've ever got to
come back to this project at a later date and
try to find everything, it's gonna be all in one logical place, or if you're ever gonna be
working with another editor, or at some point, if another
person needs to open up your editing project, it's
going to make it so much easier for them to find everything
if it's all filed away in a logical place and, obviously, if it's all in the one place, instead of looking on external hard drives and different drives for
different bits and pieces. So make sure you're just
taking that little bit of time and just put everything
in a logical place. Mistake number five is not taking the time to learn some of the
simple keyboard shortcuts. Learning and understanding
the keyboard shortcuts are going to speed up
your editing 10 fold. Simple keyboard shortcuts like
being able to play forward, backwards, and stop,
learning how to trim the top of your clip or the tail of your clip, or ripple edit left and ripple edit right. If you're not already using them, these are gonna change the game for you and make your editing
so much more efficient, saving you with what you would do with multiple mouse clicks,
with just a single key press on your keyboard. So if you're not using some
of the keyboard shortcuts yet, I would strongly recommend
that you go up to the help area in the editing
software that you are using, look for keyboard shortcuts, or even do a quick Google search for your editing application
and keyboard shortcuts to start to get familiar
with some of those because they are definitely
going to speed up your editing and make you
a much, much faster editor. And the top ones that I
think you should look at are J, K, and L. So, controlling the
playback of your video, but also look for ripple
edit left, ripple edit right, it may also be called
trim top and trim tail, you'll thank me later. So that brings us to mistake number six, which is all around using
music in your videos, specifically, using the
wrong music in your videos. Having music in it that is
the wrong fit for your video and the feeling that you
want your viewers to have being mismatched with the music that you're putting in there. The music is the easiest
way to make your viewers feel something while they're
watching your content. So the mistake here is
having your wrong music in your videos, or having the music in
your videos much too loud so it's distracting and it's
annoying for your viewers and making it hard for them to
actually consume the content, because it's too overpowering. So in regards to the volumes
and the best places to set it, it is gonna come down to an individual video per video basis, again,
coming back to the goals, what do you want your
viewers to think and to feel and to do after watching your video, and how does the music
help or add to that? If it doesn't, turn it down or remove it if it's not adding to the video. Now, if you want some
help on how you can find the best music tracks to
suit the types of videos you're making, check out the
video linked up in the cards on exactly that topic. Mistake number seven is
over editing your videos, making way too many cuts,
removing out every little pause or every little breath, just adding cuts for the sake of adding cuts, or going the other way and adding in way too many transitions
and too many effects, and all that does is annoy the viewers and make it distracting and hard for them to keep watching your content. If anything, stick to simple
cuts, remove the mistakes, tighten up stuff if it needs it. For the most part, the more
you simplify your videos, the easier they're going
to be for you to edit, but also the easier for
your viewers to watch, without them just being
overwhelmed and distracted by a whole lot of unnecessary noise or distractions in your video. Mistake Number eight is
not saving backup versions of your timeline or of
your editing project as you progress your edit. So what most people do,
especially beginners, is they'll just be working
on the one timeline from start to finish, or the one project from start to finish, but this doesn't give you
anywhere to go backwards if you need to, if something's happened, or if you're looking for
something that you had in the last version,
you'd then have to go back to the original raw footage to find it, if you didn't have those backup
versions of your timelines. So what I would recommend you do here is as you progress through, every now and then or every
time you hit a milestone, or ideally every time you moving
into one of the next steps inside of our Primal Video
method editing process, which, again, I'm gonna
link to at the end, then you've got the
ability to quickly go back and find stuff, or to
open up a previous version of your project if you need to, if something bad happens, if
the project gets corrupted, or you lose it somehow. Sometimes stuff happens. Mistake Number nine is a
real procrastination point for a lot of people, but
especially beginners, and that is thinking that
the video editing software that you are currently using isn't the one that you should be using, or that there's something
better out there. This is a huge thing that is slowing down and stopping a lot of people. "The grass is always
greener on the other side, "maybe some other editing
application will let me "edit faster, or give
me so many more effects "that I can use in my edits." What I wanna say here is, the best video editing software for you is the one that is the
fastest and the most efficient for you to do everything you need to do. Video editing software,
they're all just tools to edit video down. Yes, some have more advanced features. Yes, some of them may
render faster than others, so you really wanna find
which one is the best one for you moving forward. And then if or when you
start hitting the limits of what you can do in that software, that's when you should really consider looking at some of the
other options out there, but not before then. Focus on creating the content, focus on really learning
editing as an art form and as a process, that
way you can apply that and apply the fundamentals
to any video editing software out there, not just one
specific application. Now, if you are in that
position where you are looking for, maybe different
video editing software, or you just wanna make sure
that the one you're using right now is the best one for you, then I'll put links
below in the description for our recommended video editing software on Mac and on Windows right now, but please don't use this
as a procrastination point. And now number 10, this one
is actually more of a pro tip that's gonna help you edit faster, instead of really a mistake, but it'll make sense to
you when I explain it. So what a lot of people do
with their video editing is they're going through
and they are working through from start to finish, based on how they recorded their content. And if you're cutting down
a piece to camera video like this, where you're
presenting to camera, you're going through all the bad takes and you're trying to find
those good takes in there. In a lot of cases you
might even be cutting sentences in half, where you've got the first half was really good, and then you're grabbing the
second half of the sentence from further down your timeline and you're piecing those together, there's nothing wrong with that, but that's a really slow way to edit, and, obviously, to create content. And if you're all about systemizing and putting a process in
place around this stuff, you can actually speed up your editing back in the filming, by doing a couple of things
that I'm gonna run through now. The first one is that
you can leave yourself markers or notes. So if you wanna leave a note
or a message for yourself while you're filming
that you can review later in your editing, you
could put your hand up towards the lens, you could clap (claps) so you've got those audio
spikes in your audio waveforms when you're editing, something that's gonna
grab your own attention when you're editing your videos down to then be told that message, or to remind yourself of something. So it could be that
you're actually saying, "Actually, we'll use the first
tape not the second one," or, "I forgot to put this
piece back over here, "so when we're editing,
can we move this back?" It may sound silly, but just
adding those notes to yourself while you're filming is gonna make it much, much faster for you to edit, and it will save you trying
to sit there and take notes while you're actually
recording your content. So that's one thing that you can do, but what we do with our videos
is take that one step further and I will only ever move
on to the next dot point, the next paragraph, the
next section of the video when I am happy with the last take. So the tip here is to make the last take while you're presenting, the best one, and then when you jump
over and do your editing, you know that that last
take is always the one that you want to use. That's the best one. So then instead of
editing from left to right or start to finish, you're actually able
to edit from the back. So, go to the very end of your timeline, and that last thing that you have said is the one that you want to use, then you're going backwards through and you're hitting those best takes first, so it's much much faster
for you to edit down a piece to camera piece
of content like this one, where there's someone
just presenting on a topic or reading a script, you
can do that much faster if you've actually presented
it to camera in the way where the last take is the best one. This tip is an absolute game changer and it will totally change the way you're creating your content and make it so much more efficient for you to get content out there faster. So those are the top mistakes that we see beginner video editors making, and, obviously, how to
overcome those things as well. Now, earlier in the video I mentioned our video editing process,
the Primal Video method, which is linked on screen now and it's also below in the description. You can click on that and get
access to the exact process that we use and we recommend
for you to edit your videos down with minimal wasted time and rework. It's literally "step one
do this, step two do this," and this is going to allow
you to create content much, much faster, in
the most efficient way. So grab your copy, and I'll
see you in the next one.
