- Wondershare Filmora video editor has come a really long
way in recent years, and is now high on our list for
best video editing software, especially if you're an absolute beginner. So in this video, I'm
gonna show you exactly how to use Filmora and how
you can get up to speed fast with a complete quick start
video editing tutorial. (gentle music) Hey it's Justin Brown from Primal Video where we help you amplify your business and brand with video. If you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button and all the links to everything
we mention in this video, you can find a link in
the description box below. So let's jump into it. Now I've got to be
totally honest with you, not that long ago, I never thought that I would be recommending Filmora as a serious option for video editing. But during our recent roundup
of the best video editors out there, I was incredibly surprised at how Filmora has come. I mean, yes, it's still on
the beginner end of things, but it is really easy to use
and you can quickly and easily get great results especially
if you're just starting out or if you're someone who just
doesn't want to be overwhelmed with too many features and controls or more complicated
interface that you'll find in more professional applications. So right now then we've put together this quick start video editing
tutorial to help those of you looking to get started with Filmora. We will be doing a step
by step walkthrough of all the major features
and how to use them, following along with
our recommended process for editing fast, the Primal Video method. All of this allows you to
edit with minimal wasted time and rework no matter which
editing software you're using. And once we're done with the walkthrough, I'll also share with you a link
where you can grab your copy of the process to
download and follow along next time you're editing. Okay, so this is the first thing you see when you open up Filmora,
now I'm on a Mac, but the PC version is exactly the same. So the first thing you need to
do is to set up your project you need to choose the
aspect ratio of your project whether you're doing a Widescreen, a one by one for Instagram,
portrait, standard or cinema. So for us we're gonna
get Widescreen 16 by nine and we're gonna click on New Project. So we'll do a quick run
through on the interface first just show you where all
the important stuff is. So up here, this is your
settings and all of your menus and all those sorts of things. So you can see here on the Media tab, which is where you can import your media, you've got your Audio
library here, your titles, Transitions, Effects, Elements, and you've also got Split
Screen presets in here as well. We'll dive into these a
little bit more as we go. The next one across is
your playback window. This is where you get
to preview and playback your actual edit, down the
bottom here you've got your Play and your Stop and your Next
Frame and Previous Frame, so you can control the playback here. And down under here, this
is where we can customize a few things up, like it we
can change the aspect ratio again, we've just picked Widescreen in here, if you wanted to change that up, then this is where we
can make changes to that, or actually set a custom
resolutional aspect ratio here as well. So for us, we're gonna
leave it here at Widescreen, but if you do wanna change
this from HD or Full HD, you can go up to 4K or even DCI 4K. Or again, you can create your own by typing in the dimensions
that you'd like your video at. You can also set your
frame right here as well. Now the footage I'm gonna be
working with in this project is actually 4K footage,
so I'll set that to 4K and the frame rate that it was showed at, was 25 frames per second. So you gonna set this stuff up first. Now if you don't know what
resolution or what frame rate your footage was shot at, you
can just ignore this for now and when you bring in your first clip, it will ask you, if you
wanna automatically set it to match the footage that you've created. So we're just gonna go okay here. Next to that is this snapshot button. If you wanna save out a freeze frame or an image from your video, you've then got volume control
here in this little slider, and if you wanna preview
video in full screen, the next one here will let you do that. Back out of that now. What I'd like to turn on
here is the audio bars just by pressing this
and you can see here, this is gonna give us an
indication of our volume levels of our clips as we start editing. So I normally like to leave that one on. Next to that is the timeline zoom slider. So we can zoom in and out
on our timeline using this. You can also use the keyboard
shortcuts Command or Control, Plus and Minus as well. If you wanna see your entire timeline then you'd click the button
next to that and it's going to zoom to adjust so that you
can see everything on there. The next one across is the Audio Mixer this way you can adjust all your volumes and things for all of your
different audio tracks. If you wanna record a
voiceover inside of Filmora then you can do that on the next one here, and record voiceover
and you can add markers and those sorts of things and
notes into your timelines, then that's what the next button does. And obviously, the big
window down the bottom here, this is your timeline. And there's a few other important buttons that you should be aware
of, and they're up here, this is your Edit button. So if you got a clip
selected in your timeline, you can press on this and that
will bring up the settings to let you edit that. The next one across is to
cut or to split your clip to cut them in half, delete, undo and redo are these last two arrows here. All right, so first up, you wanna bring all of your media in,
all of your video files, your audio files, your
music, your graphics, anything that you actually
wanna use in your video, you wanna bring those in. So you wanna make sure that
you're on the Media tab up here, and then you can see
this, you can either click on this folder here and
you can select the files individually or if we back
out of this you can choose file Import Media and you can
choose Import Media folder. And this is where you can select a folder if you've got everything nicely organized. So for me, I do have a
folder here video files, I'll choose Open, that's gonna
bring all of those things in. Okay, so we've got our files, and you can see that they've
got a couple of audio tracks, We've got two camera
angles of the same video, and we've got some
B-roll or overlay footage that we're gonna use in our project. So once you've got all
of your video assets in, you wanna bring your video
footage down into your timeline. Use click and drag and
drag it down on that. You'll see it'll go
through and it'll generate thumbnail images as you
go and it'll also generate the audio waveform or
the visual representation of your audio there. And what it's also doing in the background is it's creating an optimized
version or a proxy version of this video file to speed
up performance on my computer. That's where this green line
is going across here now, it's creating an optimized
version of this clip. Okay, so once you've got your video file down in the timeline, the
first thing you wanna do is to start trimming it down
and removing all the pieces that you are definitely not
going to use your end videos. That's all your mistakes or your bad takes anything that you 100% don't
want to use in the video. So how do we do that? This red line here is
your playback indicator or your playback head,
we can scrub this along just click and drag it along
until we start talking here. So at this point, we can cut our timeline by coming up here to the pair of scissors, we have now cut our timeline in two and now we have two clips. We can select the first
one here, press Delete, and it has been removed and
that gap has now been closed. So our video now is
starting at that point. So we'll come across the
other side of our timeline and go to the end of the video and we'll do exactly the same. We can either click and
play through our video just pressing the Play
button or pressing Space Bar and stopping it at the point
we want our video to stop or we can look at that audio down here, and we can see where I've
actually stopped talking. So instead of just adding a cut, you can also position your mouse cursor over the edge of a clip. You can see that we get that
different arrow head there now. So if we click and drag from there, we're able to shorten or
extend our video clip. So if I drag it back this
way and let it go there, our video clip now finishes at that point. And you can also use a
combination of these things. So you see this big gap in the
timeline here and the audio, just to say that we wanna remove
that, which I would imagine most people would, just come
across here to this point, let's add a cut, hitting the scissors, then grab this edge of that video clip and slide it across to here,
and we have removed that gap. So you can see how easy it is
to do some basic editing here, to trim off the start, trim off the end, then you wanna go through and again remove all of the bad takes, any of
the gaps, any of the mistakes, all the stuff that you 100%
don't want in your end video. Now with all these individual clips that you've got in your timeline now, you can also pick them
up and move them around. So if we wanna move this one to the end, we can just pick it up
and drop it down the end, and then we can close the
gap by either selecting them and moving them across or if
I undo that now we can select the gap and press Delete and
that's going to remove that gap from our timeline. And so once you've gone
through and you've done kind of your first pass and you've removed all of those mistakes and bits
that you don't want in there, now you can bring in any
B-roll or overlay footage to really help you start
to build this edit out. So we've got a couple of
sample clips at the top here, we'll grab one of these and
drop it on our timeline. Now for these clips here, we
don't want any music in this, so I'm just gonna right click
on it and choose Detach Audio, that's gonna split off that
audio from the top clip and I'm just going to
select it and delete it. So we've just got the video
portion of this top clip. So now I'm just gonna scrub through here, and have a look at the
footage that we've got there's a pan across
we might use that one, let's select the clip and
add a cut Command + B on Mac or Control + B on PC, just to
cut off, use those scissors. So let's get this first
part, let's remove that, so come along here, util
probably about there, had another cut there, so
that first clip is good. We might position that
over here somewhere, let's look at what other clips
we've got over that product. Let's cut here and come
across a bit further, and remove that section, maybe
we'll put these two here, side by side, so as we scrub through, it gets to this one here
and goes back the other way, we might actually wanna reverse that clip. So they're just playing
in the same direction. So with the clip selected,
we'll come up here to adjust speed, let's go down to reverse. And now let me scroll
through this section, you see this one's moving that way and we've got this one
going that way as well. Now obviously, I'm going
pretty fast through this stuff. I wanna show you where everything is, so that you can get
creative in your own edits. Okay, so maybe we've had
enough out of this clip here, we'll delete that one, let's have a look inside the other one. Now, instead of just clicking and dragging down to the timeline, the
other thing you can do is to double click on it,
and you're able to see it and preview it up in the
playback window here. And we can also set an in
and out point or specify the section that we wanna use in our edit from up here as well. So let's say we wanna
start that clip about here, we can come over here to the in marker, we can see that we've had an in point of where we wanted to start it. Let's keep going through and
let's say we wanted to finish about here, let's add an out point, you can see we're got an in and out. So now if we go to add
the clip to the timeline, it's just that section
that we have highlighted. Now if you just wanna mute
the audio on this clip without deleting it as we did before, you could just come along
here and grab this little bar and pull it down, this
is your volume level, let's pull it down to the
bottom and now that clip has no audio that's gonna
play back in our video. So go through adding all of your B-roll, all of your overlay footage
to build out the story. And obviously as you're going
through, you might be tweaking and adjusting your clips,
you might be picking them up and moving them around,
again to refine this edit every time you go through it. Next thing to do is to add in any music or any audio into your project. So we'll come up here and
we'll grab an audio track, drag it down and these
actually work exactly the same as your video files and
then you can pick them up, you can move them around,
you can trim off the ends, you can add cuts in them, you
can edit them exactly the same as you would a video file. So I've just shorten the end
of this, so that it finishes at the same time as our video. And now that you got your
music or your audio in there, this is when you'll go through again and do another pass on this timeline. Again, tweaking and adjusting everything and maybe even adding some
edits to the beat of the music depending on the type
of video you're making. Once you've gone through that, you can then go through
and adding any text or titles or graphics. So for that, we're gonna come
up the top here to Titles, and there are heap of
presets in here for titles that you can add and drag
and drop into your timeline. There's also a lot more
that you can download from the Filmora website as well. But let's just go through
here and pick a basic lower third title and click and drag
that down onto our timeline, and let's move it into
the front of the video and associate your title here. To edit that all we need to
do is to double click on it, and that's going to let
us edit the text here. Select the text let's type in Justin Brown and you can see over the other side here, we've got a lot of control over how we can customize this up. Things like the fonts, the size, the color there's a heap of preset styles and those sorts of things in here. So let's just pick something basic, we can come down here and
you can change the position or the rotation, we can
make it bigger or smaller, all those sorts of things,
you can really customize everything up in here. And if you want some more
advance control over this, then all you need to
do is hit on Advanced, and this is where you really open it up in that full title editor
or Title Inspector, as they call it. So for us, we just go
okay, now and let's play through this section. And you can see that
the title animates in, and appears on screen. So these, as I said, are just
the same as any other clip, we can pick them up, we
can move them around, if we want it to be on screen
longer, we can stretch it out, if we want it shorter, we
can shorten it there too. So you wanna go through them
and add in all the titles and any texts that you
wanna have in your videos. And then we're gonna look at transitions. So transitions is the next one along here. Now these you can apply between clips, and essentially it's going to transition from one clip into another. Now this is an area in
particular that a lot of people especially when they're
starting out editing, just go overboard on transitions
and can make their videos look really cheap and nasty. So use these sparingly and only
where they are adding value or adding to the story
that you're telling. But in most cases, it's
just the simple ones that you wanna use. Things like a dissolve or like cross fade. So if we grab this dissolve here, and let's drag it to
the start of this clip. Now as we scrub through
here, it's me talking, and you can see we've just done a dissolve or kind of like a fade over to this shot. And we can shorten that down
so it's happening faster or lengthen it out if you'd like to. So I'll make this one pretty quick and let's just take a look at that now, just a really quick cross fade there. Now these are work between any clips that you have in your timeline, so you could have them
between these two clips here of me speaking, but it's
probably not gonna make a lot of sense in this case, because it's the same
camera angle, same shot. But what I would use in this case instead of an actual transition is
zoom in on one of the shots just to change up the shot a little bit and to make it look a little
bit different for the viewers. But it also helps mask
that there was an edit or something removed at that point. So to do that, all we need
to do is to double click on one of our clips here and then let's come up here to scale and you can see that we are
able to make that bigger essentially zooming in. Now you don't wanna go too high or zoom in too much with this, because depending on your
camera and the recording quality and the timeline that you're editing in, you could actually be losing quality, but normally up to around 112 and 115% the quality loss is
gonna be pretty marginal. Now what I would normally
do when I'm doing this, is try to keep the eye position
in the same sort of level. So it's not as jarring for the viewers with that subtle zoom in. So we can either click
over here and drag down. Let's come back here and play
through and just to check the eye positioning. Okay, so that's pretty
close, so you can see just between these two
shots, this is the first one then it's going to jump
into the next one here. It's just a little subtle
difference to break it up. So this is what I would
use instead of applying a transition between the two
to help mask that hard cut. Okay, so you've gone through,
you've added in your titles, your graphics, you've
added in any transitions or you've zoomed in on any shots. Next, we're gonna look
at your volume levels. So what I would suggest you do here is that you mute your music, so come down and click your music track, you can come over to the
side here and mute it. You see the little button there, and that's now not going to play. But the audio that you
want to adjust first is the spoken piece,
the actual content first and get that volume set right,
and then come and adjust your music volume as a
secondary to make sure that it's not too loud or
too quiet or too distracting. So there's a couple of different
ways that you can do this, you could do it on an
individual clip by clip basis and it can be as easy as just
grabbing that blue line there, lifting it up to increase the volume or lowering it down to lower the volume or just under that now
or you can actually lower or raise the volume on the entire track. Now if all of your footage
was shot, same time, same location, same
microphone, same everything I would suggest that you're doing it on the actual track itself. So you're doing all of
these clips at once really. So you wanna come over
here to the Audio Mixer, click on that one and we
have volume levels here, for our tracks. So you can hit Play down
the bottom left hand corner, and you can see there
you've got your audio bars. So the master volume or
the entire video volume is on the right hand side here, and the individual tracks are on the left. So we can grab this volume
here and lower it down, you can make it here
as quiet as you'd like. But what I would suggest that you're doing if this is your actual voice over, your actual content piece,
you wanna increase it up to the point where it's in the green going into the yellow, but
definitely not in the red. You don't wanna see any red in here. Red means it's too loud
and that is distorting. So you wanna grab this
slide up and slide it up until the point where
your audio is in the green into the yellow but
definitely not into the red, the yellow into the orange
is fine, but yeah, not red. So about there, we go okay on that one. So now that volume is set
for our entire video layer and for all of our content piece. Once you've done that, you can
then come down to your music and obviously here, we wanna unmute it. And then once again, we can
either click and drag here and lower the volume on
our track at this point, or we can go back over
here to the Audio Mixer and adjust our volumes there. Now I do wanna say with the music, there really is no right or wrong with it. This is art, this is a creative thing, it really is about having it to the place where you like how it
sounds and how it flows. In some cases, you might
wanna boost the volume up in certain sections and
have a quieter in others. There is no set volume that
your music should be at x level. We really just wanna make sure though, that is not interfering or distracting from people being able to hear
what's been said in the video and that is not annoying or distracting. So we can press Play just
by pressing Space Bar and again we've got the
audio bars on this side here. And so at this point you're listening, you're grabbing the slider,
you're lowering it down, or boosting it up to find the place where it sounds right for you. Ideally, you're doing this
too with headphones on so that you can really
hear what it sounds like. Now if you double click
on your audio track, you've got some other options
up the top here as well, we can add a fade in at the
start of our audio track so that it starts at zero and fades in. And likewise at the end, if
you wanna fade out music out to quieten it off at the end,
then we can apply that here. This is just the amount of time, so at 0.4 seconds is how long
it's going to fade in over, and for the fading out 0.4
seconds about the same. So let's just say that for the most part, we're happy with the
volume level for our music, but there might be one little section where we want the music louder. There's a couple of ways
that you can do this, you can come down and select the area where we wanna increase
it and we can add a cut in the timeline with the scissors, let's say for this section here. Let's add another cut
there, so for this section if we want it to be louder
we can just add cuts on either side and raise
the volume for that point or all under this now,
let's remove those cuts or we can add what's called key frames. So make sure your audio track is selected, let's get back to where
you want to start it. Increasing and up here we
have our Key Frame buttons, so we can add a key frame at that point. So you see our audio is
going to be playing along at this volume level, at this point this is where it's going
to start to change. So we can come across a little bit further just add another key frame
there, then we can raise this up or lower it, but let's raise it up. So you can see that our
volume level is at this level at this point it starts to
change to where we've set it at that next key point,
maybe want it to go across to about here somewhere,
let's jump across, add another key frame and
then we can take it back down to where we were. Or maybe even a little
bit lower, there you go. So that's how easy it is to
adjust your volume levels using key frames as well. So the next step then once
you've got all of that dialed in where you like it, is
to add your color grade or color collection. So I'll suggest you start with
this, is with the first clip in your timelines, you wanna
make sure that is selected. Now there's a few ways that you can access the color collection tools,
you can double click on it, that's gonna open up this
edit panel at the top, you can see we're still on
audio, we have video here, which was where we were able to zoom in and everything on our
clips, that was audio motion is where you can add
some motion to your clips or the next one here is color. So this panel here is really your basic color collection tools. There are advance tools in here as well, but if you're someone who is not looking for all the advanced stuff, then this is a great place to start. The first thing you should do is grab this little color picker
here and this is setting your white balance, you
wanna click on that and go and find something white in your scene So let's come down here,
maybe this white on the wave and you can see that that's
made a slight adjustment to the color there. It's adjusted by the temperature by four and the tint by one. So that was kind of an auto adjustment. Now for some people that
might be all that you need obviously you can dial
these in even further by using these sliders or undo this. And you can also then adjust
things like the contrast, the saturation and the
brightness here as well. So if your shot is a bit dark
and you wanna brighten it up, you can increase this slider here, maybe add a bit more color, make it look a little bit more tanned. Again, these are subtle increments, because if I boost this right up, yeah, now sunburn tomato. So we wanna come back a little bit, just to the point where
it looks good for you. And again, this is one
of those creative things, there's no right or wrong with this stuff, it's personal preference. Okay, so that's basic color collection, if you're looking for the advance tools, let's just hit okay, let's
come back down to our clip here and let's choose color collect. And this is where you get access to your advance color collection controls. So in here, there's also a heap of presets that you can just apply
just by clicking on them. So obviously, if you're finding something that you'll like the look of here, you can either just run
with it by hitting okay that's applied to that
clip, or you can select the one that you wanna customize up and then come over here to adjust and this is where you can
make all the adjustments to really dial that in. Now know that you don't
have to start with a preset if you don't want to, and at
any time if you wanna preview what your video footage
was like before and after, you can click up here
to show the original. So you can see already
just by playing that preset the clip looks totally different. So let's say we wanted to
adjust this and to make some tweaks to it. The first place I would
say to start is once again with that white balance, here's
just a slider that you drag. So if you wanna add more
blue, you can go to the left, add more yellow and make the
shot warmer, go to the right, and likewise with the tint if
you wanna add a tint of green, or a tint of pink, again, these are really minor
adjustments you'd make but this is where you do it. So start with the white balance, then I would suggest you
come down here to color. And the first setting in here
that I'll be playing with, will be the exposure
so you can brighten up or darken off the shot and get
that set to where you want it and then if you wanted to boost the colors and say your skin tones, then
you can adjust the vibrance and bring that up. So if we just go quick
and before and after now obviously this was using a preset as well you can see that it
looks totally different. So that's where I'd recommend you start, but obviously, there are
so many more controls and really quite a few
professional grade tools in here as well, which is amazing. So once you're done and you're
happy with how that looks, you can actually save
it as your own preset. So if we hit save preset,
let's call this JB, you're okay We can now apply that preset
to any of our other clips in our timelines, or even
in future projects as well. So once you've saved the
preset that you like, you then come across to
any of your other clips, open up that color collection panel, go through and find your
presets and apply it that way. So let's just go custom is
the one that we saved custom, JB and go apply and that is now applied to this clip as well. And the process is exactly the same with your other B-roll clips as well. So if we wanna add a color
grade or a color effect to this one, we can right click
and choose color collection or we come back up here
to that color panel. And you've got all the same settings and everything in here that
you can apply once again. So back out of that now, so once you've gone through at this Point your video should be pretty much done, go through and do any
final tweaks or adjustments to get it how you'd like it
and then it's time to export or to save your video out. And to do that, you
can either come up here and hit this Export button
or you can come to the top and choose Export, Create Video. Now there's also options here
to export and upload direct to YouTube or to Vimeo,
but for this one here, we're just gonna go create video. So you can see in here
you got a heap of settings I'd say for most people,
you wanna be exporting either as an MOV file or an MP4 file, you can see here it's got our resolution set at 3840 by 2160, that
was because the footage that we are editing here
is 4K footage, so that's 4K then you come over here to Settings to dial all of this in
and to customize it up. For the most part, what you find is based on the video footage
that you've been editing in your timeline, Filmora
does a very good job by giving you decent settings
to export your videos. So really at this point, I'd
say in customizing this up for most people, you wanna
look at Good, Better or Best and you can see the
biggest difference here is the bit rate or the actual
quality of those videos, that is changing and as you do that, the higher the bit rate,
the larger the file size. So for us, we're gonna
leave this here at Better and just choose Okay. I'd also strongly
recommend that you enable hardware acceleration for video decoding, if you have that option, it's
going to make the exporting or the rendering a lot faster. And then all you need to do is hit Export, and your file is going to save out. So the only other thing
that you need to do then, is to play back your video
and make sure that everything is how you want it. Obviously, if you've got
changes, come back in here, make those changes and
resave out your video again. But I would also strongly recommend that you are playing it back
on a couple of different devices to play it back on
your phone or on an iPad or at a tablet or something
just so you can see what it's gonna look like on those devices to make sure that you're happy with that. Most people these days
are consuming their videos on phones and tablets
and iPads and things, so it's a good idea to
make sure that you're happy with how it looks on there
because it can differ from computer screen to computer screen or even from phone to phone as well. All right, so that's a complete editing walkthrough using Filmora. Now earlier in the video I
said that I would also share a link for you for where you can download our Primal Video method the
most efficient and effective way to edit your videos down, with minimal wasted time and rework. There is a link on screen
and below in the description for you to download your free
copy, print it out and use it while you're editing your videos. I'll see you in the next one.
