- This is our VSDC Free
Video Editor Tutorial for beginners on Windows. We're gonna run you through everything you need to
know to get started, plus a ton of video editing
tips to get you cutting videos in VSDC's video editing
software like a pro fast. Okay, here we are in VSDC Video Editor. Now, for this tutorial, I am
just using the free version. In the paid one, you will
unlock more editing options, much better hardware acceleration
and audio wave forms, but the free version is still really good. So if you are using the paid version, everything I'm gonna
show you here will apply. This is a complete tutorial showing you how to edit in VSDC. So we're gonna hit the X
here and close out of this. And then what we wanna
do on this opening screen is just select New Blank Project. And then you wanna set
up your project format, so the resolution frame rate,
the width and the height. Now to do this, you can just key everything
in here manually. So you could go through
here and select 4K, 1080p, your framerate and
everything individually, or there's some presets in here as well to help you with that. So I'm gonna leave this here on YouTube. I am gonna set it to 1080p. The video footage I'm using
is 25 frames per second so I'll be leaving this here, but you can see all the
other options you've got 24, 25, 29.97, 30, right
up to 60 frames per second. And so for this, ideally,
you wanna be matching whatever your primary video footage is, you wanna match these settings here. Once you get those in,
you wanna click on Finish, and that's gonna create
our editing project. So a quick overview of the
overall interface here, this is set up kind of
like your Microsoft Office with the tabs across the top for Projects, Scenes, Edit, View, Editor is probably where we'll
be spending most of our time, Exporting, Conversion, Tools, and the Activation area here is because we're using the free version. When you do upgrade, this
is where you can do it. We'll go back to Editor here. This big black box in the middle here is your preview or your playback window. This is where you get to watch
back your editing masterpiece while you're making it. On the right-hand side here,
we've got our Properties Window and our Basic Effects Window. Now, these are where we can really dial in and configure everything up and make changes to all of the settings. Now, these do take up
quite a bit of space here so what I like to do is
hit the little pin button to Auto Hide on both of these. So they're still accessible. They're just on the right-hand side here now under these tabs. Now, if you do come over
to the View tab here, this is where you can turn
those on and off as well. Then the bottom is our actual timeline. This is where we will be editing from. On the side here is our Object Explorer, and this is another one that
I really don't use too much and I set to Hide just so that we've got
more desktop real estate. This menu bar down the
side here we will be using, this is where we can come to add footage and music and everything, but know that all of this
is fully customizable. You can pick up these menu bars
and you can move them around and you can even customize up
the icons that are on here. Now, you don't need to, and it's really not something that I do, but if you are someone who wants to configure everything
up the way that you like, then VSDC gives you that support. All right, so to start this edit, the first thing we're gonna need to do is to import our video footage, and there's a couple of different
ways that we can do this. We can come down here to
the little Play button, this is Add Video. We can then go through
and find our video clips and choose Open. If we just go OK on this, it's going to add the video
to our timeline as well to the position where the cursor is, so From our Cursor Position. We can also specify we want it at the Start
of the Current Scene, End of the Current
Scene, a Manual Position. 'Cause this is the first
clip we're bringing in, we're just gonna go with OK. That's gonna import it into our project and into our timeline. Now, if you wanna see
all of your video assets, all the footage and music and stuff that you are currently using or have imported into your project, you can always hit on this
Resources Window here under View, and that's gonna bring
up a list of them here. Another way we can import footage is that we can use this Resources Window by right clicking on it
and choose Add Resource. We can then choose what
it is that we wanna add. So I can go Add Video, we can pick a second camera angle here, and this is now listed in
here in our Resources Window, but is not automatically
added to our timeline. And the other way we can do it is by dragging and dropping our files in. So we've got a folder here
with some B-roll clips. I can drag that folder in and it says, "Do you want to import all the
files from within that path?" Then we can choose Yes, No, or Yes, including all the sub
directories underneath that. So I'm gonna choose
Including Subdirectories, that's going to import those files for us. So we have three B-roll
clips that were in there. I'm also going to bring in our music into our Resources area as well. Okay, so now that we have
our files that we wanna use imported into the program here, we then wanna make sure
that our primary footage is down on our timeline. So we already imported our primary clip directly into our timeline. But if you didn't, we
can just delete this now, select on it and press Delete. We can just grab our clip from
the Resources Window here, and we can drag that
down onto our timeline. We're gonna go Add as Video, and that clip is now in our timeline. Now, another thing to know
before we start editing is you can actually adjust
all of these video layers, you can make them bigger or smaller. So because we're not gonna have too many video layers in this project, I can just move my mouse
cursor to this line then I can pull this down to stretch it up so that our timeline or
our video footage here is going to be bigger. So now that we've got this set up, the next thing that we wanna do is go through and remove
any bad takes, any mistakes, or anything we don't wanna
have in our finished video. So if we move this playback head here, this red line with a
green marker at the top, we can pick that up and
we can move it around. So I'm gonna move it back to the start, I'm gonna press Spacebar
to playback the video, or I can also press the
little red button here. Okay, so what I wanna do here is remove that start piece
where I'm saying "1, 2, 1, 2," just doing a quick microphone audio check, and have the video start right after that. So I can play it back through the video and I can find that point
right before I start talking, or I can actually pick up
this playback head here and click along to find that spot. Now, I can zoom in on the
timeline here for more control. We've got the plus and minus here, or I can just grab this slider
bar and slide it across. So now that we've got this point here where we wanna remove
everything to the start, we wanna click on our clip
so that it's selected, wanna make sure we're over
on the Editor tab here, and we can hit this button here, this will split our clip into parts. Or you can press Control + K and that's going to add a cut or a split in your timeline at that point. So if we click on this, we can see that it's essentially
made a cut in our timeline so we have two clips, we have a clip on the left
and a clip on the right. What we need to do then is
select the clip on the left. We can press Delete on the keyboard or we can right-click and choose Delete, and that clip is now gone. So if I zoom in even further, move across, what this hasn't done though, is it hasn't closed up that gap. So our video file here
now starts with blank and then I start talking at that point. So we wanna pick up our
clip, we wanna click on it, we wanna click and drag on it and move that back over to the left so that our video now
starts at that point. Now, let's come across to the
very end of our video here and let's find the point
where our video finishes. Again, I can press Spacebar or
hit Play to play through it, or I can just move this marker along to find that point, to about here. Now, I could select the clip and do exactly what we did before, come up here to split
and then delete the clip, or I can actually grab this little handle on the right-hand side of
the end of the clip here. In the middle, you can see
when we put the mouse over, it changes to two arrows. We wanna click and drag on that and we can adjust the
end point of our clip to now be at this new point. Now, let's say that
there was a piece in here that we wanted to remove, again, I can come back over here, I can add a split in the
timeline at that point, I can select say this clip here, I can then drag that clip back to remove however much I'd like to remove, and then I can pick up this clip and move it back to close up the gap. That's one way to do it. Now, let's come back
along here a bit further. Another way that we can do that is by using this playback
head marker at the top. So I can click up here and drag out to highlight this section
that I want to remove. So obviously, you wanna play this through to find out the area
that you wanna remove. These markers, you can adjust afterwards, so I can click and adjust. But the idea is you wanna select here the area that you don't
want in your project, click on the clip to
make sure it's selected, and then come up here
to the pair of scissors, click the little arrow next to it, and choose Cut Out Fragment, or you can press Control + Delete. So if we press this now,
that's going to cut out that segment or that section
that we just highlighted. So essentially, it's created two cuts, it's selected the clip and it's deleted it and it's closed up the gap. So that's a much faster way that you can start to
cut down your footage. Now, let's say, for instance,
that we had a few cuts in our timeline here. I'll just go through and add a few as if these were separate clips. So let's just say that we
wanted to finish this clip here at this point here on this marker. We don't want this end bit. I've already showed you a
couple of different ways that you could do it. But with this clip selected, we can also come up here
to the pair of scissors, hit the little dropdown
and choose Trim End. So this is going to trim
everything off the end of our clip right up until the clip ends. So if I press this now, you
can see that it's just removed everything again up to that marker. Likewise, with this clip here, if we wanted to remove the
start of it to this marker, we could select the clip, come up here and choose Trim Start. That's gonna trim off
the start of that clip. So what you wanna do now is go through and use all of those tools
that I've just shown you. You wanna cut down your video footage to remove all the bad
takes, all the mistakes, so that you're just left
with your primary footage. And you can pick up and adjust
clips and move them around to build out the story that you're after. Okay, once you've gone
through and done that, then the next step is to add in any B-roll or overlay footage. So again, you wanna make
sure that you've imported your video footage into
this Resources Window. And if you're not seeing
that, it's back under View, then Resources Window,
it could turn on and off. So I'm gonna pick one of these clips here, I'm gonna click on it and I'm gonna drag it on top
of our primary footage here, and I'm gonna choose Add as Video. And what that's done is
created a new video layer on top of or above our primary footage, which now has our B roll footage on it. So my footage and me talking is still happening underneath
this when we play it. Now, these B-roll overlay clips are treated exactly the
same as our regular footage. We can pick the clips up,
we can move them around, we can use all the tools
that I just showed you to trim them down or to
remove pieces of them. So we could add a split in
the clip here, Control + K. We can then select the first
clip here and we can delete it. And maybe we want our
clip to finish about here, we can go back over to Editor,
we can select Trim to End. So you wanna go through it now and bring in any of your
B-roll or overlay clips onto your timeline. Now, you can see here that it has brought these three clips in on
three separate video layers. You can pick them up and move them around, they don't all have to
be on different layers. But it's just to give
you further creativity knowing that you can layer
these things up if you need to. Okay, once you've gone through, you've added in all your
B-roll or overlay footage, now, we're gonna add in any
text or titles into our video. So I wanna come back across to the very start of our video here and we're gonna add in a
name, title card for me, or a lower third. So I wanna come over here
to the T, the type tool. We're gonna add text and it's asking us where we
want the text positioned. Because I've already
selected the start here, I'm just gonna choose From
our Cursor Position and go OK. And then now, I can just draw out the area we want our title to appear. So I'm just gonna create
a pretty basic title here. Let's type in Justin Brown, Primal Video. We can select this. We
can customize it all up. We can make it centered. We could change the font, let's go Impact. So we can customize this
up to match our branding. So we might even wanna
select the bottom text here, and we could change the text
color, something like this is gonna be close to
our Primal Video color, and maybe we'll make the
whole thing a bit bigger. Okay. Something really simple. Now, if we take a look
down at our timeline here, we've now got a text layer here as well. This is treated the same as any other clip that we've got on our timeline. We can pick it up. We can move it around. We can adjust the start
time, the end time. So if I grab this end
handle on the end here, I can shorten this right up because we're not gonna want
it on screen for too long. And maybe we'll zoom in on
our timeline here about here. So we'll probably have it so
that at the start of the video, I am talking for a little bit
before the title comes on. Title appears, title disappears. Now, if we select on this, we can come up here to Title Effects and there's some different effects and things that we can add in here. But if you do wanna create
some amazing titles and things that you can use in your videos, Placeit is an amazing source
for that, and so is VideoHive. And I'll have links to those
down in the description. So now what you wanna do is go through and add in any titles and
text to your entire video. Once that's done, we're gonna add in any transitions or effects. So let's say we wanna make
this title transition on and not just appear at that
point and disappear at the end, let's add some sort of effect to it. So let's move our playback head here to the start of the clip and let's make sure the clip is selected. We wanna come up here to Video Effects, let's come down to Transitions, and let's just choose a Wipe. And it asks us where do
we wanna apply this wipe, we're gonna choose From
the Cursor Position, and I'm gonna go OK. So if we hit Play on this now, you'll see that we've now got this
little effect that happens. So the view that we're
currently looking at now is the timeline or the view
inside of that text layer. So this will allow us to, again, stack up or create
multiple effects in here. Let's say that we also wanted
to have that same effect for the title to disappear, we could come back out here
to our main scene, zoom in, so that we're putting our
cursor in the right position. So we're about here, we
want the effect to start. Now, we could go through
the same process here and choose Video Effects, Transitions, and then pick the
transition out that we want. So we could go Wipe. That's taken us back into this Text tab. And again, we get to choose where we want this
transition to start from. Now, I do find it easier to always go From the Cursor Position if you'd set the position
where you wanted to start from, but you could also go, in this case, To the End of the Scene, and that's gonna position this effect right until the end of this clip. But I'm just gonna leave
this here as it is and go OK. So you can see here that
we've got our Wipe 2, which is the transition on, and then it's going to
transition off at that point. And again, these effects are
things that we can adjust. So if I want that effect
to happen quicker, I can shorten that down. Now, to come back to our main timeline, we're clicking on scene zero here. And then if we play that through, this is what it looks like. It fades in and fades back out. So while that process is a
little bit more complicated than some of the other
editing tools out there, it's cool that you so much
more control over the effects and have the ability to layer them up. Now, in terms of other effects and things that you could
add on to your clip, if we select our B-roll footage here, come back up here to Video Effects, in here, there's different
filters and presets and things that you can apply, or you can add blur, you
can reshape and resize, and mirror your clips in here as well. And there's also different
effects like a Glitch and 3D effect that you can apply in here. Now, if you wanna speed up
or slow down your clips, then you wanna select your clip, you wanna come over to
this Properties Window, if it's not already displayed, and down near the bottom here, you've got this setting here for Speed. So it's currently set to 100%, so this is playing back at normal speed. We can slow this down. So let's say that we wanted
to play it back at 60% speed and hit Enter. Then that has stretched down our clip here to make this now a slow motion clip. Now, me recording the computer screen here has really slowed down the video playback, but you get the idea,
that's now in slow motion. Likewise, you wanna speed it up, you're gonna come back to
that Properties Window, you can type in a number above 100, so we could go 120, and
it's now 20% faster. Now, in terms of transitions between our main primary
footage down here, I wouldn't normally add any
fade or transition between clips where they are almost the same. Instead, what we do
with our YouTube videos is that I will zoom in on one of the shots so that as it changes between the clips, it feels like the shot is
a little bit different. It's almost like having
a second camera angle. So if I click on this second clip here that we wanna make a bit bigger, I can then come up the top here and we've got these black
handles around our clip. I can scale this up a little bit. Now, you don't wanna go too much because depending on how you filmed this, you could be losing quality at this point. But you just wanna make
it a little bit bigger to essentially zoom it in,
just to change up the shot. Now, in order to really sell this effect and have it look really good, you wanna try and line up if
you've got someone on camera, that's a terrible photo, you wanna have the eyes
almost in the same position. So this is our before shot. And this is our second shot. It's close, I might move
it across a little bit, again, so those eyes match
up a little bit better. Back to our first shot, you could see it's just a subtle
difference between the two, but this is what we're doing to break up a lot of our footage and help you hide any mistakes that you're making in your videos. Okay, so you wanna go through
add in any transitions, any effects or any zoom
ins on your footage. Once that's done, we're
going to add in our music. So we're gonna come back across here to our Resources Window. We're gonna find the
music tracks that we have. Now, if you're looking for
great music for your videos, I will link a YouTube video down below where we've talked about the
best music sites out there, free and paid. But for us, our top two recommendations are Artlist and Epidemic Sound. So I'm gonna pick this music track here. Again, I'm gonna click on it, drag it down into our
timeline and let it go. And just the same as
all of our other clips, we can pick them up, we
can move them around. We can adjust the start
time, the end time. We can add cuts and all of
that fun stuff with your music, just the same as you do
with your video clips. So now that you've got your music in, it's a good idea to hit
Play and go through, and you might wanna adjust some of your cuts on your primary footage to match the beat or
to tighten up your edit now that you've got your music in there. And then from here, the next step is to adjust all of your volume levels. Now, when you're doing
this, you wanna make sure that if you do have someone
speaking in your video, that their volume is
the most important piece to get set first. Music and sound effects and
everything are secondary. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select our music track here, I'm gonna come over to Properties and I'm going to select Audio Volume here, and I'm just gonna turn it
right down to minus 100. So currently, it's muted. So we're gonna mute our
music so that we can focus on getting our primary content
volume levels right first, and then we can adjust and bring back in the music volume levels afterwards. So with that muted, one way to do this would be to click on our first clip here, come over to Properties Window, and we can adjust our
volumes up and down here just as we saw. If we click on this, we
get the volume slider. We can turn it up little
bit, we can turn it down to dial it in this way. Now, if you're gonna do it manually, I would suggest that you've
at least got headphones on so you can really gauge
how loud it's going to be. But there's also a really
cool feature in here for normalizing your audio and for getting it all set correctly. So what you can do is select
all of your clips here, just drawing a box out around them all, come up the top here, Audio Effects, down to Amplitude and
choose Normalize Audio. Now for this, I like to change
the percentage to 90, go OK, and it's gonna go through
and it's gonna adjust all the volume levels to that 90% mark, giving you a little
bit of a buffer to 100% because you don't wanna
be going over that, that's where your audio's gonna sound distorted and really bad. So now, each of these
clips has been adjusted and all set to the same level. So even if you did have
some that were louder and some that were quieter, these are all now set to the same. Now, you can override each one
of these clips if you want, again, by clicking on them, coming over to the Properties Window. And you can see that the volume level here has been boosted to 3.3, next one here, 2.6, the next one here is 1.4. So it's actually gone through
and done it all for us. So once that's done, we can
come back to our music track, we can select that, and we can
increase that volume level. Now, where you're setting this is gonna come down to personal preference, it's gonna come down to
the video you're making, but it's also gonna come
down to the audio track and how loud that is. So what we find for our YouTube
videos for background music, we're normally looking anywhere between minus 30 and minus
20, depending on the track. But really, it's just a matter
of setting this audio level, pressing Play, seeing what it sounds like, making sure that your music
isn't too overpowering, and then making any
adjustments from there. Now that your music is in and
your volume levels are sorted, next up, we're going to color grade or color correct our videos. Now, if we come back over
to our first clip here and make sure that's selected, one way that we can do this is we can come up here
to the Video Effects, we can come down to Quick Styles and these are different presets
and things that we can use. Think of these like Instagram filters that you can add on to your videos. Now, this really isn't
something that I would use. I'm gonna undo this now. But there is a lot of presets
in there that you can use. But also, under Adjustments, this is where you can get more specific with the tools and the effects
that you're adding here. There are some auto ones, Auto Levels, Auto contrast and Auto Gamma, but in my experience, I've never really had
great success with these, I'd much rather dial everything in myself. So while there are some good
effects and things in here to help you adjust your colors and the look and feel of your video, there's also a really
powerful feature in VSDC and it also lets us adjust
all of our clips here at once if they are selected. So I'm gonna draw out a box across all of our primary
video footage here, just so that they are all selected, I'm gonna come up here to
the Basic Effects Window, and in here, as I make changes to things like the brightness, contrast,
gamma, color temperature, these are actually going to
apply to all of our clips. So I'd normally adjust
the brightness first, then the contrast, then come
down to the color temperature. So you see if we move this one way, we're adding more warmth to our shot, and back the other way, we're
gonna cool it back down. And then saturation, we
can either add more colors, we really don't wanna go
overboard with this one, or we can remove the colors. So this is how much color is in your shot. So you really don't wanna
move this one too much. Okay. So this is looking pretty good. Now, there are more advanced
tools in here as well, like your RGB Curves and
your Hue Saturation Curves and YUV Curves down the
bottom here as well. But for probably most
people watching this, these tools up here are probably gonna do everything that you need. So we've gone through now, we've tweaked the colors
in our primary footage, you can also make adjustments to your B-roll and overlay footage too, just following the same process. Once you're done with that, it's then time to save
or to export your video. So you can come up here to Export Project. Once again, there's a ton
of different presets in here for you to choose from. So if you do have a specific platform that you're looking to upload
to like Instagram or Facebook, you can start with their presets and customize up from there. So for us, I'm gonna
leave this here on YouTube and it's gone ahead and
it's picked a profile for us or output settings for us. We can customize this up. There's other presets in
here that we can choose. We're currently on Ultra Quality. We can choose High Quality
and Normal Quality. So if you do need a smaller file size, then you can customize this up here. But I'm gonna leave this
here on Ultra Quality. We can choose where our file is going to save to our computer. We can change the file name
down here if we need to. I'm just gonna leave this
here all as defaults. And then, we just wanna
hit Export Project, and our project is going
to start exporting. Now, again, all of this has
been with the free version. If you do want faster exports and better timeline performance, that's something you can access
in the Pro Version of VSDC, which is ridiculously cheap. But that is a complete end-to-end tutorial on editing using VSDC. Now, to help you level
up your video editing in any video editing application, we've put together a free PDF guide. There is a link onscreen taking you through the
ultimate step-by-step process so that you know you're
editing videos down in the most efficient way. And this is the process that we just took you
through in this video. So don't forget to
download your free copy. And I will see you in the next video.
