- Video editing can be on
of the most daunting aspects of the entire video creation process, but it definitely doesn't have to be. In this video we're gonna
break it all down for you in a full video editing
tutorial for beginners using Windows or PC. And we're also gonna drop
a ton of editing tips along the way to get you up to speed and to make your editing much faster. (upbeat music) Hey it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video, we help entrepreneurs and business owners amplify their brand with video. If you're new here then make sure you click that subscribe button, and all the links to everything
we mention in this video, you can find linked in
the description box below. So let's jump into it. We're always asking the
Primal Video community for suggestions on the types of content you'd like us to cover. And you may not be surprised to hear that one of the biggest challenges that really takes the number
one spot for a lot of people is video editing. The good news is you
can significantly reduce the amount of time you're spending in your video editing software with an understanding of the
fundamentals of editing a video and just some simple tips and tweaks to your editing process. And the even better news is you're actually gonna get all
of that inside this video. Now before we jump in, I
wanna hear from you guys in the comments while
you're watching this video, what is your number one tip
for editing better videos? Or to do it faster? We always learn a ton down there so make sure to take a look at what everyone else is sharing as well. Once we're done, we won't
stop with this video, you're also gonna get access
to a free downloadable guide you can follow along with next
time you're editing a video so that you don't forget anything. All right so first off
let's look at the software. Now if you're interesting a video covering all of the options for video
editing software on Windows, I'll put a link to a video where we've covered that up there, but I'm personally using Adobe Premiere. I know that this is gonna be a lot more complex and complicated
than a lot of you out there, especially if you're just starting out. Now if you're new, then grab
a copy of something like Shotcut or VSDC and start
running with that for now. You can come back in a few months when you're editing like a pro,
when you're ready to upgrade or to check if you're ready to upgrade to see what the other options are. Now for this video
covering the fundamentals of video editing, we're gonna be running through in Shotcut. Now because we are
covering the fundamentals, it doesn't mean that you need to be using that piece of software, because these fundamentals
are gonna flow through to any video editing software out there. So follow along in either the
application that we're using or in your own video editing software. All right so here we are in Shotcut and this is the first thing
you see when you open it up. So to start off with, you'll wanna bring in your video footage and all the video assets
that you're going to be using in your editing project. So open up an explorer window and we'll find the files
that we wanna bring in. So we'll select those three. And we'll drag them into
our playlist window here. And you can see now that
we've got our three clips here inside our video project. So the first one that we
imported, this top one here, is just some B roll or overlay footage. The second one is a music file that we're gonna use in the edit. And the third one is
our actually video file of the content of the video. Just a really quick
overview of the interface. This is the playlist area. This is where all of our files
and everything are displayed. You can also scope it out
out here for properties, to see click properties. So you can see that these are 4K files. And then you've also got your
filters down here as well or your effects. Over here is the playback window. This is where you can see what
you're gonna be playing back or the file that you're actually editing. And on the bottom here is your timeline. This is where you'll actually
do your video editing. So we'll come back over here to playlist. We'll select our actual
video file here, our content. Click on that and we'll drag
it down into our timeline. Then you can see what
that's done automatically. It's created our audio wave forms, or the visual representation
of our audio file or of our audio that's
spoken inside the video. So as we click here
and scrub through here, (digitized speaking) You can see the parts where I'm speaking have this graph shown, and the parts where I'm
silent is completely flat or close to it. So that makes it really easy
to go through your video to find the parts where
you're actually talking and remove anything where you're not. Now we can zoom in and
out on the timeline here using the minus and the plus buttons. Or we can also use the keyboard shortcuts for minus and plus on the
keyboard to zoom in and out. So I keep pressing minus now, you can see that we've zoomed right out and we can see this entire file. Before we get too much
into the actual editing, it is a good idea to set
up your project first. So if you come over here to Settings and choose Video Mode, and you can choose the quality of the file that you want to actually create. So ideally here you're
editing in the same quality that you're filming at. So if you're video recording was at 1080p, 25 frames per second,
you would pick that here to keep the quality as high as it can be. So our footage here was shot
at 4K, 25 frames per second so we will pick that here. So now that we've got your video files in and we've got your project created, it's now time to start
trimming down your video clips. So import all of your video content, you see we've just got one file here, but if you've got multiple file, then drop them all down into the timeline, then we're gonna start trimming them down. So where you start off with this is come back to the start of your clip, we'll zoom in on this
section of our timeline either dragging this up or pressing the plus
button on the keyboard. Then what we wanna do is
position this playback head or this white line at where
we want our video to start. So you can see it's gonna be just before I start talking here. And then we wanna add
a cut in the timeline. You're gonna essentially
just remove this first part that we don't want. So we can right click on our clip here, and we can choose Split at Play Head or press the keyboard
shortcut S on the keyboard, it's gonna do the same thing. And that's created a
split there at that point. So we've now got two clips. So we press the delete key on the keyboard and that clip is gone. And then to remove this gap
we can right click on the gap and choose remove. And now our video is actually gonna start back at the start where
we just added our cut. That is now the first frame of our video. So if we zoom back out again now, we'll do this for all the
clips that we've imported. And we'll trim off the end
of this video file as well. So we'll come across the end of the video where want it to finish
which is about here, you can see with the audio
that's where I stop talking. We'll again press S on the
keyboard to add a split. Click on that clip there and
press delete and that's gone. Now if we're undoing that, pressing Ctrl+Z a couple of times, one to undo the delete,
one to undo the cut. And another way to do it is
to move your mouse cursor to the end of the clip, you can see it goes red there, we can actually then click and drag and change that endpoint of the clip. And whenever we let it go, it's actually adjusted our
clip to finish at that point. And obviously if you remove too much, then you can drag it back out
and go the other way as well. Until you get it right where you need it. So once you've gone
through and trimmed off the start and the finish of each of the clips in your timeline, then the next step is to go through and start the actual editing process. This is where you're gonna
go through your video from start to finish, and you're gonna remove
all of the bad takes, any of the mistakes, or really anything that you don't want in your actually video file, you'll be going through in this step. So we'll start at the start here. You can either use the S key,
you can delete the clips. You can then right click
and remove the gap. Another way that you can
cut down your footage too, is by pressing S to split
the clip where you want it and say we wanna remove
this little section here while I'm not talking, we can move our mouse over
here 'til it goes green. With this mode enabled, which is the ripple, trim and drop mode, which means it's gonna
automatically close that gap for us. So if we click on this green part here, we slide across to the right, and we're changing the start
of that clip until I let go. So that first part of that
clip here has now been removed. So exactly the same, if you wanna remove this
little section here, come across here and
press S to split the clip and then grab the green handle here and we'll swipe it along
until that gap is closed. That's how easy it is. Okay so once you've gone through and you've added all your cuts, you can actually reposition all your clips right in your timeline, and
move them around as you need to. So you can just pick
them up, drag the around, maybe swap the order
of them if you need to to help build out the story
of the flow that you're after. And then if you've got any additional B roll or overlay footage that you wanna show while
you're talking as well, then you can add a new video layer. Come over here to these three lines which is a settings menu, and choose add a video track. You can see we've got
an additional layer here on top of our core content here. So if we come up here
to our B roll footage, we double click on that 'cause we may not want this whole thing. This whole clip here is pretty big. So let's just say we pick this part here where we're playing with
some camera settings. We can press I on the keyboard,
that will mark an endpoint. You can see that now our
selection ranges move from this whole clip to just right here. Let's choose where we want this to finish, probably around here somewhere. I'ma press O on the keyboard so we've only got this small selection of this much bigger clip. Then you can either
drag the clip down here or come down here and
press the plus button to drop that down into our timeline. You can see it automatically put it up on the layer above for us. And just like any other
clip, we can pick it up, we can move it around to where we want it, we can adjust the start
and the end point on it by using these green and red handles. So we can stretch it
out a bit if we wanted, if it wasn't long enough. And then what happens is when we're playing back our video file in this section, this top clip is shown over the top of the other one. So if I mute these tracks now, just while we're editing here, if I click and drag from here
you can see that we've got the talking head, we've got me talking and as we get to this clip here, then that clip is now shown
over the top of the other one. Now playback's a little bit slow here because of the screen recording, but you can see what's going on. Okay so once you've added all your B roll or your overlay footage to your timeline, next step is to add any titles or effects. So if we wanna add a name title that says Justin Brown Primal Video onto
the start of the video here, we'll come back to the start, we'll add an additional
cut into our timeline here for the length of the title that we want. So we might play along here. Say we want the title to come
in a couple of seconds in, we'll add a cut there, press S, and we'll play out our clip again, so maybe we want our title
to come on for probably yeah about that sort of distance,
that's sort of time there. We'll press S. So we're gonna add a title
to this small section of that bigger clip. So adding these cuts here
hasn't changed our actual video, it is nothing noticeable
that there are any cuts 'cause we haven't made
any adjustments to it, but this lets us apply a title just to this section of that bigger clip. So with that selected,
come over here to filters. We go in to add a filter, press the plus, and then you wanna pick is video filters. Now if we scroll down here and
go down to text, there it is, we can click on that
and that is now added. You can see we've got the
default which is time code added to our frame here. And to change out the text, we can change the time
code to say Justin Brown, add a new line, Primal Video. And then in here you get to change things like your font, the color,
we'll made that light blue. Oswald bold. You can also scale down
the actual box up here, so we can click on that
box and drag it down. So you can go through and
customize up your titles to say anything that you'd like. Now if we were actually
creating this title here, what I would probably do
is split these out in two. So I've got Justin Brown on one line, I would then copy that
filter and paste it in so we've got two text. And I will call the bottom
one, paste that back in, Primal Video so that we've got two there. And that way you can
really control the position of the two individual layers. I'll probably bring that in about here. And the other one if we click on that, we can move that across as well. So very simple titles
that we can add in here. So now if we come back
to the start of our clip and play through, you can see that at this point here, our titles appear, Justin
Brown Primal Video, until the end of this clip here when they're going to disappear. There they go. So that's pretty straightforward. Okay so once you've gone through and added all your titles
in for the entire project, next step is to add in
any audio, any music, to your project. So once again we're gonna
add in a new audio layer, so come up here to this menu and choose add a new audio track. The audio track has appeared
there below our video track. So we just come up here to our music track that we imported earlier, we can click on that and drag
it down into our timeline on that new audio track. And just like our video tracks, we can pick up the clips,
we can move it around, we can drag the ends
to adjust the end time, we can drag the start to
adjust the start time. We've got the same amount of
control over the audio files as we do with the video files. So we'll pick this up, and let's move it back to
the start of our video. So that the music starts
when our video does. So you see here that this music file is much shorter than our actual video. So here you could add
in multiple music tracks or you could add in the same one and then set it up so that
it repeats seamlessly, so that your viewers don't know that the music track is changing. But you've got a heap of control in here around your music files. You clearly see on that
audio wave form there, that drawing diagram, that the music drops off to nothing at the end of that track, and then picks up again at
the start of the next one. So you might wanna add in
some sort of cross fade. So if you pick up this track and slide it along over
the top of the other one, now obviously you'll have
to work here a little bit to make sure that the beats and everything will work out perfectly, but when you let go it
actually adds a cross fade between the two. So this first one will
fade into the next one that's starting. Now obviously you can get a
lot more advanced than this, this is just a quick run-through, but let's just see what that sounds like just with such a simple
cross fade between the two. (upbeat music) So it's probably usable. One of them finishes and it
is kind of a soft fade then into the next one while
it's starting as well. And what' well do too is trim
off the end of that audio file so that it finishes at the same time as the rest of our video there. If you wanna add an audio fade to the end, then you can come back
over here to filters, you can add a filter with
that bottom track selected, you do wanna go over to audio filters, and we'll go down to fade out audio and when we click on that the last part of our audio track here, if we zoom in, you can see here there's
got that gray triangle there that shows that it's fading the audio out over that last section. Okay once you've got all your music in and any sound effects and all
your audio files in as well, next step is to go through
and color correct your video. We'll zoom in a bit, click
on the first clip here, it's always a good place to start. Click on the plus, we're
back under filters, click on the plus, make
sure that we've got show video filters selected, and you've got quite a few options in here in regards to color correction. The color grading is probably
where I suggest you start out so I click on that one. And in here you've got a heap
of controls over your color. So you can see here we've
got our standard color wheels what you see in pretty
professional video editing software to change the color and the
brightness of the shadows, the dark tones of your shot, the mid tones or the mid
color areas of the shot, and the highlights, the bright white areas and the bright colors of your shot. So you can see here as we
adjust the shadows here, if we lift this up, that the shot is getting brighter, or the dark areas are getting brighter. As we bring it back down,
they're getting darker. And as we move these
color wheels around here, you can see that the colors in the shot are changing quite a lot. So the trick here while
you're tweaking your colors is not to move it around too much, but just to move it
around until you're happy with the look of it. Or until you can correct
any issues that are wrong with your shot. So the color grading filter
is a good one to start with, but another one in here
that is quite handy as well, is to add another filter and
come down to the white balance. So if we add that one, then in here you can either
pick your neutral color, so it should be a white or a gray. So we can say that
something white in our scene is probably this bright bit up here if we press that, that's gonna make an automatic adjustment for our color based on that
point there being white. And then if we wanna
make further adjustments, we can grab this slider
here to the left and right, you can see that we're making
it more warm or more yellow and if we come up this other way, it's gonna make it more blue or cooler. So now there's no real
right or wrong with this, it is all personal preference. Creating videos is a creative process, so it's all about creating the look and feel that you're after. Now once you've got your filters applied and you're happy with your color grade, then you can apply those to
the rest of your clips as well. So what you're gonna select
here is copy the filters. And then come across to the clips that you wanna paste it onto. Select the clips and then
you can just choose paste and that's gonna paste those
effects onto the next clip. So this one here also has
our title on it as well, but has now also got our color grading and our white balance
filter added as well. That's how easy it is
to go through and apply whatever your color grade or whatever your color settings
are to your entire project, by pasting them onto each clip. Once you've finished
editing down your video and adding all your
effects and everything on, it's time to save the video file out. So you just come up here to export. So as you can see there are
a heap of options in here, but if you're not sure where to start then I would suggest you
start with H264 Main Profile. When you click on that, it's
loaded the default settings or whatever your project was creating in, or whatever footage
you've had in by default, so in our case it was a 4K resolution at 25 frames per second. So these settings are all good to to. Obviously if you wanna change anything up and you know what you're doing here, then feel free to make any adjustments. And likewise with the codec, you can go through and
customize everything up. If you really don't know
what you're doing here, then you can almost leave
everything as default, but the main one that you wanna
look at here is the quality. So the quality it's
defaulting to here is 60. I'd probably recommend 80 or 90, but again you're gonna end up with a bigger file size at the end. And the same for the audio, you can see the default quality is 50. I'm probably gonna push
that up to around 80. But again if you obviously need higher, then push it up to 100. Once you've got your settings there sorted then you can press export file, choose where you wanna save your project, so we'll just put that
one there on the Desktop, named it JB, press save. Then up in the top right hand corner here, you can see that it is exporting
that project out for us, and it looks like it's
gonna take a little while. Hopefully that's just because I'm doing the screen recording at the same time. But that's how easy it is
to edit your videos down using Shotcut on PC. Now Shotcut is also available
on Mac and on Linux as well and obviously there is a lot more features and a lot more control
that we can get into, than in this really quick
beginner walkthrough. I just wanna show you how to get up and running really quick in Shotcut so that you can start
editing your videos down and start seeing some success with that. So that's a complete
walkthrough of the fundamentals for video editing that
you can apply and use no matter which video editing
software you're using. Now I've also put together a free guide, stepping through the entire process, which is linked on screen, so that you can download
it and print it out or have it one screen to follow along next time you're editing. So click the link on
screen to download it now. And while you're editing, if you wanna get an
awesome new animated 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 soon.
