Tips From a Professional Editor | DaVinci Resolve

a lot of you guys have been asking us to talk more about editing so today that is exactly what we're going to do here at our production company we produce and edit everything from commercials music videos YouTube videos infomercials and pretty much anything in between so today I'm going to take you through the process of how we do that give you all my best tips and tricks and to do so I'm going to show you how we edited this commercial the conditions here are rough but along the Norwegian coast of the island of fya Lies hidden [Music] opportunities but you Maria this topic is quite huge it is there's a lot of videos about the technical side of editing and how to do j cuts and L cuts and the technical stuff what's that juts you know when you let the video roll longer than the sound okay I haven't heard about that maybe that's what I should talk about them I try to give you guys tips and advice that you can use for many different types of projects and that you can kind of apply no matter what type of project you're editing and advice that I think I would have liked to known even earlier I need to look at this video afterwards maybe I'll learn something new in this video I'm going to focus more about the creative side of our editing process but we recently made a video all about our workflow and in there we do touch on some of our practical advice when it comes to editing so check that out if you are interested obviously here at our company we are often multiple people working together in the editing phase so this is definitely something that affects the way that I edit a lot so the video I'm going to use as an example today is this commercial we made for a company called seaweed Solutions and then I'm going to break everything down our seaweed grows through the cold winter in pristine subarctic Waters it only needs sunlight and seawat to grow making the cultivation clean and responsible by controlling the whole value chain from [Music] seed to processed seaweeds we ensure the highest quality [Music] product my first tip is to get as much information as possible before you start whether you're working with a client or just with a director it's really important that you're both on the same page and you both have the same expectations of what the outcome is going to be and this is going to save you a lot of hassle as an editor and it's just going to make sure that you avoid any misunderstandings down the line there are specifically four things that I really think you should know before you start editing the first first is what's the approximate length of the video what's the platform for the video who is the target audience and what is the purpose of the video so when I do my selects if I know it's just going to be a 1 minute video I'm not going to select a 30 second clip if it's going to be on social media you have to edit a bit differently you have to capture and retain people's attention much more aggressively does the company want to attract new customers or do they want to communicate more to existing customers AG gender profession also comes into play here lastly all of these things are going to say something about the purpose of the video and this is something I try to come back to if I ever feel stuck when I'm editing and I try to let this determine the choices that I make and also remember that these things can be applied to fictional films and documentaries as well so this commercial we have here is for a company called seaweed solutions they work with seaweed so the task here is to kind of show the whole process of what they do so for this particular project the facts that I knew is that the video should be between 1 and 3 minutes long the platform will be the company's website and their social media the target audience will be people who don't know who seaw Solutions is and the purpose of the video is to establish seawe Solutions as a brand and give some insight into what they do so with all this out of the way let's begin using shortcuts is essential as an editor and it's just going to save you so much time and how you choose to set this up is of course up to you but here are some of the shortcuts that I use on a daily basis and that I think are the most essential so the first up is qwe so Q is the start to play head which is going to trim the clip into the beginning of your playhead W is going to split your clip wherever you have your playhead and then e is end to playhead next up we have Mark all I have mine set to a next up we have trim mode which allows you to change the timing within your clip next up we have Ripple delete i m set to T we have delete gaps i m set to alt D lastly we have move Clips up or down on the tracks i m set to control Arrow up and down of course there are many other shortcuts that we use but these are just some of the ones that really save me a lot of time we have also recently started to use torbox for our editing and it's something that we have been really enjoying and it's making our editing a bit more efficient and streamlined we talk a bit more about this in our workflow video so check that out if you're interested to learn more so there are so many ways to do your selects there is no right or wrong way you just kind of have to figure out what works the best for you and makes the most sense for your projects but for us we mostly make kind of short form videos and after 5 years this is generally the way that we like to do it and the process process that we do for most of our projects first off here we have one of my select timelines for this project usually I'll go in and just remove the most unusable Parts uh but other than that I like to keep just about everything and then I will color code the reason for this is that if you do have to go back and maybe there's some footage that you have overlooked or if someone else is going to take over the edit at some point it's a lot easier for them to go through and just see like okay everything that's in this green color is drone shots and secondly we have this nice editing room here at view so sometimes we will sit here with the client in real time going through the edit you're you're a little bit stressed you know you want to give a good impression to the client and stuff so that way when you can just easily just like okay boom I got it here leaves a better impression I color code the clips that I think are the best into different colors based on whether they are drone shots underw shots Factory shots Transportation or laboratory the moment when I'm done with my selects and I have to start on my first draft is very often the worst for me usually I get really overwhelmed and I'm just so paralyzed by all the decisions that I have to make and I just don't know where to start so this brings us to the next chapter the rough draft my advice to you is to first of all just uh choose a direction and just commit to that at least in the beginning you don't have to make good decisions you just have to start making something decisions just take some of the pressure off because when you just start putting it together you're quickly going to see what works and what doesn't and it's going to be a lot easier to kind of go from there so my next tip is to work nonlinearly uh this is very much personal preference but I often think that the intro and the beginning of the video is often the most difficult therefore I love to just uh jump around in the edit and then when I feel like I kind of have a shape here I will jump to a different part of the video and I will kind of do this until I have some bigger puzzle pieces that I can then start putting together luckily we did have a voiceover script uh early on so I could kind of use this to guide me a little bit when I was putting together my my first draft also a good tip if you have the voiceover script but you don't have the actual voice over yet uh you can try and use an AI voice to just read in the script so that you can actually put it into your timeline this way you can actually start to set the pacing and the tempo for your footage and this is actually something that we did for this video as well by controlling the whole value chain from SE to process sewe we ensure a high quality product making sure your edit is dynamic is definitely a very helpful tip and something that I do a lot sometimes I will look at a draft and it just doesn't feel good it doesn't flow right it just feels uninteresting and sometimes when I take a step back and I look at the Timeline I can actually see that almost all of the clips are the exact same length and it doesn't matter if it's fast-paced or if it's really slow if every single clip is the exact same length you kind of fall into this Rhythm you kind of feel like nothing is really happening a very like practical solution to this is to switch up the tempo a little bit more you have to slow down in order to speed up so as you can see here this is just the first draft but but there's a long portion of very similar length so it's something to to consider maybe shaping up a little bit more and of course Dynamic editing isn't just the editing itself it's also the music and the sound effects and I think for this project um especially that's like a good example of how it just ties everything together and I think elevates it a lot more by controlling the whole value chain from seed [Music] to process seaweeds we ensure the highest quality product one tip is being able to combine entertainment but also Exposition cuz sometimes you have to show but you also have to tell when you're watching a movie you don't want to be listening to one of the characters explaining the plot to you or giving you information you want to be entertained and everybody talks about show don't tell for this exact reason but sometimes you also have to tell tell right so the trick here is to weave the exposition and entertainment together and give the audience the context and the information that they need while they are entertained here's an example of how we did that in the resolve mini documentary that we made so I was sitting in the office editing an early winter morning I was thinking are there better ways to do this can we be more efficient and you know on YouTube and stuff everybody's raving about denture Sol and how great it is and I thought could this be something for us could our team switch to the [Music] win I had made up my mind I was going to make this happen but I needed a plan and I needed a partner in crime another twist to this is to make sure that you hook the audience with more visual shots that give it more emotional understanding of the topic and then you can start feeding them with the information and this is something that we did in the very beginning of the seaweed video surrounded by the Sea for centuries this has been our way of life the conditions here are rough but along the Norwegian Coast off the island of fya Lies hidden opportunities I think if we were to jump right into what they do how they grow the seaweed what you can use it for and so on uh it would kind of loose the audience a little bit but by creating a bit more Intrigue a bit more mystery in the beginning you kind of you get more engaged and you want to know what is hidden beneath the surface and it gives you more questions that you want answered and and that's why you keep watching the video if you want to learn more about this topic I really recommend these two videos a quick tip is to pay attention to the blinking uh this is especially relevant in fiction work but this can be applied to any kind of video really if you see that the personal screen is blinking either right before in the middle or right after a cut this can make your edits much less smooth and it won't flow as well consider either extending the clip or cutting right before um the person starts blinking and this can help you a lot also especially if you want to build tension and drama in a scene the blinking is really important if the character is constantly blinking it can make them seem more insecure maybe and it can kind of say something about the character or the situation they're in but if a character just keeps staring down the camera while they're talking and they're never breaking the eye contact it can make it feel much more intense my eyes start hurting from that fix it and post is a very common phrase in film making and usually you don't actually want to fix it and post if you are able to do it uh in camera but sometimes you have to and actually with the blinking uh I know that in a lot of uh feature films they will actually VFX out the blinking from a scene uh if they're not able to cut it and we actually ended up using VFX in this commercial as well we really wanted a shot of the camera going from a above water and then underwater but we didn't have a clean shot uh above water without anything in the background all we had was uh this shot with this Boat Mart actually went in and uh and removed the boat so that we could have this shot in the [Music] end so here are some other useful tips that I think are just good to know in general uh when you're editing very often I like to just add some of the music even add some sound effect like really early on just to get in the mood and get excited about the project so that's one way I like to do it uh in the in the previous video we made about making a commercial in one day using stock footage and stuff that there I show that we just add things quite early on in the process to get a touch of story and emotions sometimes just try to add total different music or even just rotate some of the shots and suddenly like just one change uh can get open up the whole like you can get ah now I know how to do the whole thing and of course breaks having breaks like if you're stuck have a 30 minutes walk because you're going to get blind your footage and very often you edit late at night you think think it's so good then wake up it's horrible when I'm done my with my selects if I can I like to wait until the next day to start on the rough edit you're a human not the robots so then we had our first draft ready uh we didn't have the final voice yet so Morton our CEO and the director for this project uh just recorded a um placeholder voice so here you can see the very first draft that we made surrounded by the Sea for centuries this has been a way of life the conditions here are rough but along the Norwegian coast of the island of Freya Li hidden opportunities our seed weed grows through the cold winter in pristine subarctic Waters it only needs sunlight and sea waterer to grow making the cultivation clean and responsible by improving ocean quality and absorbing CO2 by controlling the whole value chain from seed to processed seaweed we ensure a high quality product our seaweeds add salty and Umami flavor to a variety of dishes from plant-based Burgers to salads and snacks in addition to food we are always researching searching new ways to utilize this resource already seaweed can be used for numerous applications including animal feed fertilizer and bioplastics welcome to a new era an era where we play by Nature's rules We Believe seaweed is the biomass of the future an echo-friendly crop with a variety of uses for the future for the ocean for the planet so this draft is not too far off uh the final video but uh there's still things that need to be changed kind of hits most of the points that the clients wanted to but it's a little disjointed it could make a bit more sense the first thing that we wanted to change is the music first music that I chose was a little bit to monotone a bit boring and we wanted something that could be a bit more Dynamic the second thing is he wanted to add some more shots of the transportation of the seaweed and also shots from inside of the factory and of course uh some shots were taken out like um some of this uh red shots were taken out which I thought was a shame I quite like them of course Kill Your Darlings is a very phrase uh while editing and and you can't include everything you just can't and then I think in general we just kind of worked on streamlining the video a little bit more and making the process of the seaweed a bit clearer for example I think here in the first draft I jumped into this shot of the baby seaweed that has kind of just been planted it's not in the correct place of the process if that makes sense we have just seen the seawood being taken out of the water but if you do have a hard time in this part of the process the kind of feedback refining the edit I love to just go back to these four questions and sometimes you will kind of realized that like okay this shot is actually not serving the purpose of this video and also go back to your selects that is something that I really enjoy doing because when you're working on an edit and you're getting further along in the process you forget what footage you actually have and again that's why I love color coding because sometimes you'll discover clips that you just totally forgotten about and you're just like oh this fits perfectly in this one section where I'm having trouble making it flow you might be surpris sometimes uh the kind of clips that you discover that will end up kind of helping your edits move along and then you basically just repeat this feedback process until you're done uh so we just kept going back and forth tweaking the clips uh the timing the sound effects of course was like a huge part of this project so here you can see the final result surrounded by the Sea for centuries this has been our way of life the conditions here are rough but along the Norwegian coast of the island of thya Lies hidden opportunities our seaweed grows through the cold winter in pristine subarctic Waters it only needs sunlight and seawater to grow making the cultivation clean and responsible by controlling the whole value chain from [Music] seed to processed seaweeds we ensure the highest quality product our seaweed add salty and Umami flavor to a variety of dishes from plant-based Burgers to salads and snacks in addition to food we are always researching new ways to utilize this resource already seaweed can be used for numerous applications including animal feed fertilizer and bioplastic [Music] welcome to a new era an era where we play by Nature's Roots We Believe seaweed is the biomass of the future an eco-friendly crop with a variety of uses for the ocean for the planet for the future so these were my best tips and advice when it comes to editing I really hope you guys learned something new and if there's anything else that we didn't answer in this video please let me know in the comments below and we can answer it in a future video and thank you guys so much for watching all the way till the end [Music] bye-bye d

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Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024