- This is the complete guide to video editing for beginners on Mac. I'm gonna run through a
full video editing process step by step using free
video editing software iMovie so that you can follow along and learn how to edit
videos that don't suck in just a few minutes. Hey, it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video where we help you grow an audience and scale your revenue with online video. If you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button, and all the links to everything
we mentioned in this video, you can find linked in
the description box below. So let's jump into it. So video editing is one
of the biggest challenges we hear from you guys in the comments. And I get it, it can be really daunting
just starting out. But the good news is, you can significantly
reduce the time spent in your video editing software, with just some simple tweaks
to your editing process and a solid understanding of the fundamentals of editing a video. And the even better news is, you're gonna get all
of that in this video. Now if you already have your preferred video editing
software locked down, that's awesome, the same key steps and principles are gonna apply to you as well, just follow along with
whatever software you're using. If you don't have any software yet, then we're gonna run through a full video editing process
here step by step using iMovie. Because it's an awesome video editor for someone who is an absolute beginner, right through to an intermediate level. I'll also be dropping in a bunch of video editing
tips along the way, including simple ways that you can quickly ramp up your quality with things like animated
titles and cool effects. So I would suggest watching through this from start to finish now. And then you can come back
and you can follow along when you're ready to
edit your first project, just hitting pause after each step while you go and put it into practice. And once we're done, we
won't stop with this video, you'll also get access to
a free downloadable guide that you can follow along with, next time you're editing a video so that you don't forget anything. So let's bring out that progress bar. And let's get into it. All right, so we're over here in iMovie. And this is what you'll see when you first open up the application. So you wanna hit this big plus button here to create a new project. We're gonna press on that now. And we wanna choose movie not trailer. So this will let us create a custom edit. And this then is the iMovie interface. This is where all our project files and everything appear in here. This is where we'll be able to see and playback our video that we're editing. And this down the bottom
here is your editing timeline where all the editing and
all the magic happens. So the first thing you wanna do then is to import all of your media, all of your video files, your music tracks and everything you
wanna use in your video. So to do that, you can just press on this
big button here, import media, or you can come up to File Import Media. You'll navigate through and find the files that
you want to include. And you just hold down the command button, then click on the files that you wanna bring into your project. And then all you need to do is just come down the bottom here and select Import, selected. And those files are now brought
into your editing project. So once you've got your files in, the first thing you wanna do is to find your actual video content, the main content or the main
story piece for your video, and to drag that down the
bottom here in to your timeline, because that's gonna form
the basis of your video that you're gonna edit. Now if you've got multiple clips, then you can bring them
all down the bottom here, and you can rearrange
them by picking them up and just moving them around
down here in this timeline area. But for us, we're just gonna
work off this first clip here. So I'll just select these two and press the Delete key on
the keyboard and they are gone. So now that we've got
our footage in there, we're gonna start trimming this down and cutting this down and
building out that story or the edit for our video. Now over the top right corner here you've got a little slider, this will help you zoom in
or zoom out on your timeline. So the further you zoom in, the more detail you're gonna see and the more you'll be able
to refine and tweak your edit with more precision. So in other words zoomed in or scroll back across to the start. And really here, we just wanna go through and we wanna trim off or remove any of our bad tykes
or any of our mistakes so that we're just left with
the good footage at this point. Now there's a couple of different
ways that you can do this, as with any video editing software, there's lots of different
ways to do the same thing. So I'm gonna show you a
couple of different methods that you can use to start
cutting your footage down. So let's just say that all of this stuff at the start here is mistakes. You can see I'm just getting ready, I haven't actually started presenting yet, until about here. So we actually wanna
make a video start here. There's a couple of different
ways that we can do this, I could just come across back here and grab this arrow and
drag it back to that point. And our video is now gonna start there. So there's one way that we can do that. Now I'll undo that now, pressing Command + Z to undo that. Another way that we can do that is to select the clip by clicking on it, you can see we've now got that
yellow box around the outside coming across to where we wanna
add a cut in that timeline. And we can press Command and B, Command + B to blade or to
cut out clip at that point. And you can see now we've
split off that first piece, and we've got two clips
here in our timeline. So then all we need to
do to remove this piece is just press Delete on the keyboard, and that is done. And likewise if we come across to the other end of our video file, then we wanna remove the ending, we can find we want the video to finish, we can again press Command +
B to blade it at that point, select the end and press Delete. Or if I undo that now command + Z or Zed, I could also just come across here and grab the end of the clip and drag it back to where
I want it to finish. And when I let go of dragging it, then that is where the clip finishes. So the idea here in this first step is you wanna go through
and add different cuts using Command + B in your timeline here and remove these sections to remove any of the bad
takes or the mistakes, the things that you don't
want in your finished video. So now that we've gone through, and we've cut down our video footage, next up is where we can add in any B-roll or any overlay footage, any additional clips you
wanna add into your edit. So let's just grab one of these
up here of the switch pod. And I'll just click and drag
it down into the timeline. And you can see that we've dropped it on top of our other video clips. So I'm still playing and
talking in the background there. But we've overlaid or played on top of
the clip of me talking, this other footage here as well. So again, we've got the same tools to be able to trim this down. I can just grab the ends, and I can slide it across to where I'd like it to start and finish. Or I can cut out a
section from the middle, just using the Command
+ B to blade the clip or to cut the clip at that point. So we just want this bit here where Caleb is putting down
the switch pod and the camera. And once these hand moves away, then we'll cut it about
here using Command + B, and we can remove the rest of this, I select it and press Delete. So now we've got this extra
little clip here that again, we can pick up we can move it around to be shown at that point in our video. So we ant to go through and bring in any of your
additional clips that you wanna use any B-roll footage to help build out the story for your edit. Now to playback your video, you can do that just pressing
the space bar on the keyboard, or you've got your playback
controls up here as well. And if you wanna make it fullscreen, then you can press these two arrows here to really get a full screen
playback of your video, press Escape to get back out of that. Okay, so we've gone through and we've edited down our core footage, we've added in our B-roll
or our overlay footage. Now I want you to note here that our B-roll footage
actually has some audio in it. we can see based on those audio waveforms or the visual representation
of the audio in those clips. Now let's say that we don't
want the audio that's in these we wanna turn down. You can see that when I
put my mouse over that line across here, we get the arrow up and down. And that's turning into
volume adjustment mode. So if I click and press at that point and pull down and up, then I can increase or lower the volume. So I'm just gonna mute it, I'm gonna pull it all the way
down to zero and let it go. And do the exact same
for this next clip here because we won't need any audio that was recorded with those two clips. So the idea here with your editing as we're going through these steps is that you're constantly refining and sharpening up this edit. So you might find a little later on when you play through this, that you may not need this section here. So you're tightening that up. Or that an extra take at the
end here may not be needed. So you can just close up that gap as well. Or you might find the wanna
swap around some of these clips. So they're in a different order. Video editing is supposed
to be an iterative process, where you're just constantly tweaking and adjusting and refining your edit until you're happy with it. So at this point, once you've
got your core footage in and your B-roll or overlay footage, if that's what you're gonna be using. And then next up, we'll
add in some titles. So you wanna come up
the top here to titles and there are a heap of
different presets in here for you to use. And if you put your mouse over them, they'll give you a little
preview of what that looks like. There are some really basic ones in here, and there are some more
advanced ones as well. So for this example, I'll
just pick a basic one here. And let's drag that down into our timeline where we want that to appear. And just like any other
clip in our timeline here, we can stretch it out if we
want it to be on screen longer. Or we can pick it up and move it around to have it start and
stop when we'd like to. We need to make adjustments
to this or to edit the text, we just need to double click on the title layer down the bottom here. And then we can come up to the top here and we can edit the text. Let's type in Justin Brown. Let's go Primal Video. And we can customize up
what that looks like. So we might change the
font to something bolder, and same for the top one. And if you wanna add
an outline around that, we can press the outline button here and we've got a bit of a border on it. So you can really customize
is up to match your brand. And let's say they might
even center this one just so it's white text on my black shirt, so it stands out a little bit more. And then once we're done customizing this, we just need to click off
it click anywhere else, and that will be applied. So if we come back and
have a look at this, now it will play through. And then at this point
the title will appear on and then at the end here, it will disappear. Really simple. So then this step you wanna go through and add in any text or any titles that you want
to have in your videos. So maybe we shorten this
one back down a little bit. Now if you wanna add in any transitions or effects in your edit, then you would do it now in this step. So you wanna come up with
top here then two transitions and there are some built in transitions that you can easily just again, drag and drop onto your clip. So say for example, we want this cross zoom
from one clip to another, we just need to click on that and drag it down into our timeline where we'd like that to be a
transition between two clips. And you can see now
between this first clip, and then transitions
here into the next clip. Now for a video like this, where the clips are pretty much the same, I wouldn't normally use a
transition like this here. So let's just click on that and press Delete on the keyboard. So that's removed. But what I would normally do is if I had a hard cut like this, where maybe I'm cutting
a sentence in half, or maybe even finished a sentence, and I'm moving on to the next one, if there is an edit made that then I probably just instead
of using a transition, maybe zoom in on one of the clips, just to break it up a little bit. So let's select this second clip here. And then to zoom in on that clip, we wanna come up the top
here to this crop area. And then instead of having it on fit, let's choose crop to fill. And then we've got this white box that has appeared around the outside. So all we need to do now is to scale down this
box just a little bit, and we can pick it up and we
can reposition it if we'd like. But this box or this frame, once we apply this, will then become our shot. So we've actually zoomed
in on it a little bit here. So I'll click off this now
and you'll see what I mean. So I've actually now
zoomed in on that shot. So if I look at the first
one now he was the first one. And now the second one is zoomed in on. Now in order to add this sort
of jump cut or zoom cut in and have it look really effective, you wanna try and keep the
person in your footage, you wanna try and keep their eyes in around the same sort
of position in both shots, see how my eyes are moving quite a bit between the two different shots, we'll quickly make some
adjustments to that to see if we can get
it a little bit closer. So again, we'll select this clip, we'll come back up to the crop. And we might reframe it a little bit and see if we're any closer now, that's much better between
those two shots there, it's a lot less jarring
for your viewers to watch. And it's more of a subtle
change in the shot, instead of just having a hard cut. So now is where you wanna go through and add in any of those transitions or any of those zoom
edits to your footage. Once you've got those done, it's now time to bring in any music or sound effects into your edit. So we'll come up the top here to My Media. And we'll find where we
imported our music tracks. Now if you've already got
audio saved on your computer, then it might be showing up
under audio here for you. Or again, you can import
it into your project by going Import Media. So I'll go back over to My Media, let's pick one of these music tracks, all I need to do is to click
on one of these music tracks and again, drag it down into the timeline, let's put it down the bottom
below our video footage. And you can see that we've
got our music track in there as this green layer across the bottom. And just like all of our other clips, we can select it, we can pick it up, we can move it around, we can adjust the start and the end points just by dragging it around. And if I zoom out, we can shorten this right down so that it's about the length
of our video project here. And then we can zoom back in
to make further adjustments. So again, you can either use
this slider up here for zoom, or if you've got a trackpad, then you can just pinch to zoom
in and out on that as well. So now that your music track is in, it's a good idea to
play through your video. And if you're gonna try
and match any of your clips or any of your edits to
the beat in the music, then this is where you
might be going through and again making some further adjustments to your video footage so that it all flows nicely. And you can see that by
making some adjustments here, we will need to adjust our audio so that it finishes at the
end of the clip as well. So now that you've got
your music in there, we're gonna go through and
we're gonna adjust our volumes on both our music and on our spoken clips or our core footage to make sure that
everything is sounding good. And then our music isn't too loud and distracting for our viewers. So the first thing I'd say to do here is let's just mute this
bottom music track here. So we can come up again and put our mouse over that line, we'll get the up and down arrows. And let's just drag this right down so that that clip is muted, because we wanna make
sure that our spoken piece or our core video footage, volume levels are correct first. So to do this, let's go over to the first
video clip in our timeline. I'm just gonna zoom in on
this by pinching to zoom. And let's center this backup, again by scrolling across. So what we're looking at
here is this audio waveform, this visual representation of our audio down the bottom here, and you can see as I grab
this audio volume bar and move it up, then all of that lifts up and as I lower it down,
then our audio gets quieter. So the idea here is that we are raising or lowering our volume so that we are not seeing any red. You can see if I go too far here that some of these parts
here go above yellow and into the red. We definitely don't want any
of our audio hitting the red it means it is too loud and
it's going to be distorted. So we wanna bring it back down until we adjust in the yellow or even just below the yellow. So this is looking pretty good here. We've only got these couple of points here which are just touching into the yellow, but they're definitely not in the red. Now we can either go
through each individual clip and manually adjust this or if You get the first one right, and the rest of them are consistent. So they're all filmed
with the same microphone at the same time. So they should be pretty close, we can select this first clip, and we can copy it. So we can press Command
+ C on the keyboard, or we can go up to edit, copy. And then what we can do is let's zoom out. And let's select all the other clips that we wanna make that
same adjustment to, and then we choose Edit, Paste adjustments, and then we just wanna paste
the volume level adjustment. And that will go ahead then and apply that same level
of volume adjustment to the remaining clips so that we don't have to
manually adjust each one. So once we've got our
core volumes dialed in, next, we're gonna look at the music. So really, when it comes to music volumes, this is a creative thing. This is art, there really is no right or wrong with it. But I will say you wanna make sure that your music isn't too
loud and too over empowering that you're not able to
hear the core content or that is not too loud to be distracting and
annoying for your viewers. Now your audio tracks are
all going to be different, some of them might be really quiet, some of them might be really loud. But the idea here is that
you set it fairly low and you're playing through
with headphones on, ideally, listening to see
how it sounds for you. And then if it's too quiet, you might boost it up a little bit. Or if it's too loud, you might
pull it down a little bit. Now there might be sections in your video where you might want
the music to be louder or quieter than others. So to do that, we can add cuts inside
of this bottom music clip or music layer. And we can then adjust the
individual pieces that we've cut to be separate volume levels. So let's say that, for example, at this point here in our video, we wanted to lower the music volumes more. I'd come across to here and make sure that that clip is selected. And I'd press Command + B to blade it or cut it at that point, you can see now we've
got two music tracks. Let's come across to the
end of that clip here. Again, select it, Command + B. So we're really chopped this music file into three different sections. Now this will play back seamless. There won't be a gap in our music here, this will play through continuously. But what this lets us do now is that we could lower the
volume for that section just a little bit to play through here, at this volume level for this clip, it's gonna be a little bit lower. And for this clip here, it's going to be a little bit higher. Now one last thing that I wanna show you when it comes to the audio is that you can fade in your music or your audio tracks
on your clips as well. So if you come across to either the start or the end edge of one of your clips, you'll see that little circle up there. So if we put our mouse over that, you can see that we're
moving that circle in, and what that circle is, is
the last point in the clip where that fade in or that
fade out is going to finish. So what we're seeing here now is that our volume will start at zero, so nothing it's quiet. And over the period of this amount of time we're fading in until our volume level is at that maximum point. So that's a simple fade in
of our audio to that point. Now you can do that for your
actual spoken clips as well with the fade in and fade out just by again grabbing the circles at either the start or
the end of your clip. So we're faded the music in, maybe we'll wanna fade the music out at the end of the video as well. We just drag that circle and
bring it in a little bit. And our music will be at
the constant volume level until we hit that circle, and then it's going soften off to zero at the end of that fade. Very simple. Now that all our volume levels a done, we're gonna look at color grading or color correction for
our video clips here. So let's go across and
select our first clip. And we'll set up the
colors on this one first, because then we can apply it
to the remaining clips as well. So we'll select that first clip. And then coming up the top here too, I've got a heap of different settings around different ways
that we can configure up the look and feel of our video clips. So the first one here is all around some automatic settings to automatically adjust the
colors or to match a color, if you've got two different clips, you can match the colors with this one, you can adjust the white balance here or the skin tone balance. So for example, if I
hit skin tone balance, and I select my skin tone here, then it's gonna do an
adjustment on the entire shot, based on correcting my
skin tone color here. So you might find that some of those settings are all you need. But I'm gonna cancel out of this one now. So we can go back to the raw footage because even though those
settings are in there, and they might be okay for you, I wanna show you how you
can customize them up to get the best out of
the colors in your videos using iMovie. iMovie does also have in-filters under these three little circles here. So if we choose clip filter, then there are some
presets or some filters, think of them like Instagram filters that you can apply on your clips as well. Now I'm not a big fan of these
but obviously once again, if you find something that is the look that you are going for, then by all means use these here, but we'll cancel out of this one. So what I'm talking about
here to adjust your colors is coming across this
color correction tab, and in here is where you can
tweak and adjust your colors. So where I would suggest to start first is with this white
balance adjustment here, to adjust the temperature of your shot. So if it's too warm, so
too yellow or too orange, then you can grab this slider and slide it across to the left, you can add a bit more blue
tinge or a blue look to it. Likewise, if it's too blue, and you need to warm it up a little, then you can slide it back the other way. And again, this is really
personal preference, you're adjusting the look
and feel of your shot for how you'd like it. So I'd do that first. And then I would jump
across to this panel here. And this is where we
can adjust things like the brightness of your shot. So really simply, if you want to adjust the
dark areas of your shots, so my T shirt here, I could grab down this one here, which is to adjust the dark areas. And I can slide this to
the left or to the right to make those adjustments. So I will brighten that
up a little bit there. So I'd get that to where
I like the look of it, then I come across to the next one here. And this is this is where
you can adjust the contrast to increase or decrease the difference between the
light and the dark areas. So grab this next slider here and move it to the left
and right a little bit just to kind of again, make some minor adjustments
to how the shot looks, come across to the next one here. I might wanna brighten those up. So these are the mid tones. And again, we can adjust
the contrast on that. So we can add a bit more color, or we can soften it off or fade it out a little bit if we'd like. And then we can play with the highlights or the brighter areas
of the shot at this end. This was the dark end the
black and the dark colors. And this is the brights or the whites at this end. So if we grab this and we adjust this, you can see the all the
whites and bright areas, we can make those brighter or darker, just again by sliding this along. So we just tweak these a little bit until we're happy with how it looks. And then if you wanna actually adjust the amount of color in your shot, and that's what this next one here is. So if we grab this next slide and we move it across to the left, we're taking out all the color. So it's black and white. And if we boosted up the other way, then we're going to
over saturate the colors or add more saturation in. So normally don't wanna
move this one too much. But you can tweak and adjust your shot again, just using this slider as well. So let's leave it around there somewhere back around the middle. And let's come down Have a look. So this is our adjusted clip right now. And this was app clip before. So before and after. And again, once you've
got the first clip done, we can copy that using Command + C or coming up the top
and choosing Edit, Copy, select the remaining clips
that we wanna apply that to and choose Edit, Paste adjustments. And then for this one, we're going to choose color correction to apply that same color effect or adjustment across all
of our remaining clips. So you wanna go through and make any adjustments
to any of your clips. Same with your B-roll or
your overlay clips as well, you can select on them and adjust the settings up the top here. Now I wanna quickly show you a couple of other quick features in iMovie that you might find useful when
you're editing your videos. This is like one of these
B-roll clips up here. And we come back up the top here, I've shown you the color correction stuff, I've shown you the
cropping so we can zoom in or adjust the framing of the shot. This next one across here will let us stabilize your footage. So if you've got shaky handheld footage, then you can use this section here to stabilize your footage. The next one across
here, this little graph, this will help you remove
any background noise. So if you've got wind,
or air conditioner noise or a fan or something in the background, then you can apply this setting here. And this will help you take that out. If you wanna speed up
and slow down your clips, then you can do that here. So you just select this here, then you have to adjust your speed or to reverse it to play
your clips backwards. So those are some other
handy tools that you can use while you're editing down your videos. Now the other question
that we get asked a lot is why in your editing process, do we do the color correction or the color grading last? And it really is because if
you're applying this stuff, first off in your videos, then everything you're doing
in your editing timeline, it's going to have to preview
those effects and those colors and everything that you've added throughout the entire
process they're on in. So every time you play back your clip, it's gonna have to process
and render all of that. And that's why this is done last. So I'd suggest that you
stick to this process and don't just jump in and make your clips
look good, straight out, do that last, that's gonna make your
editing much, much faster and much more efficient, especially if you're running
on a less powerful computer. All right, so once you're
happy with your video, and you're finished editing it down, you wanna come up to this Share button up the top
here to save it out. Now we've got presets in
here for things like YouTube, for Facebook, for Vimeo. But what I would suggest is
that you save it out as a file that's on your computer. And then after that you
could upload it to YouTube or to Facebook or
wherever you wanna put it. So let's hit, File. We can give this a name, my test video, we can give it a description
and some tags if you'd like. Normally, I just ignore those. Come down here to format, you wanna make sure that
it is video and audio, then you can adjust here the resolution or the quality of your video
that you wanna save out. So if you're already editing a 4K video, you've got 4K footage, and you wanna save out a 4K one then you can select that here, if not 1080, 720 or 540. Now I'd say for most people, you're probably gonna be picking 1080P, you can then adjust the quality of your video in here as well. So you can see that the example
we've got here is 128 meg, with the quality set on high. If we go best, then we've
got a much larger file here, 792 megabytes. So if you want the highest quality video
saved out of iMovie here, then best is gonna be it but it might be a really large file. So depending on your video, you might find that just
leaving this on high, is going to give you good enough results. And then under compress, you've got two choices for
faster or better quality. If you want your video
file to save out faster, then you can select that one, if you want slightly better
quality of your video, is gonna take a little
bit longer to save it out, then you can select a better quality. So for me, I normally
leave it on better quality unless I really need to get something out really, really quickly. So once you've got those selected, you just want hit next, give your file a name,
we'll leave it at that one, choose where you wanted to
save, let's put it in documents. Hit, Save. And you can see that that saving out in the top right hand corner here, we've got that little pie
chart that is filling out and if we click on it, it will give you some estimate of how long your export has left. Once your video is finished saving out, I would suggest that you play it back. And obviously if there's any
changes that you need to make, you can come back in
and make those changes and then save your video file out again. Now ideally, I would recommend
playing your finished video back on a phone if you can or on a couple of different devices so that you're happy with how
it looks and how it sounds on those different devices. Because what you'll find is, that a lot of people will probably be consuming your content on their mobile device. So you wanna be happy that's
gonna look good, sound good on those devices as well. So that is a complete end to end editing Tutorial for Beginners in iMovie. Now earlier in the video, I said I would share with you where you can download our
free video editing guide, stepping through the
entire editing process, so that you can print it
out or have it on screen, next time you are editing your
videos to follow along with. So you can click the link on screen now to download your copy. And while you're editing, if you wanna get an awesome new animated
video intro for your content, then check out the tutorial
linked on screen now for a step by step run through
on exactly how to do it. And I'll see you in the next one.
