Video Editing

Video editing for beginners

Video editing is a core part of producing a video mandatory for anyone wanting to go into media to at least get a sense for editing even if you do not want to specialize in it so it will be easier to work with colleagues by understanding terms and jargon. Video editing is about changing the footage that people have filmed, fitting it together, making it presentable as a final video, for example a documentary will have 30+ hours of footage and the job of an editor is to cut that down into 1-2 hours of footage, fitted together with transitions and color corrections, effects, etc. to make it open to the public. All modern editing work is done digitally with editing software so before you try editing, find the software you want to use, and get a feel for it and try techniques on test videos by doing cuts and such, molding footage together to make a video, the video editing software i use is adobe premiere and i have developed my techniques through test videos such as the one i will leave below called Lemon Steps

In that video it shows cuts and was a montage, with music put in the background through audio editing.

In editing you have to be organized due to the large amount of footage you sift through so you rename clips you will use appropriately by naming the shot, location, and take so you know how to find it at a later date when you need it for things such as putting the final production together an example of an appropriate name would be 031_performance_1. see the screenshot below for an example of how it should look.

You should also sort the order of the files after you named them, keeping it tidy will help with organisation and keeping track of your work so its quicker to access, you should sort them by the number of the scene like the screenshots below

When you have sorted all of this out you can load the scenes into your editing software, for this video we are making, it made sense to put the scenes into two different categories, performance and narrative. You can sort them into the two categories once they are imported into the editing program file you are using and should look something like this.

this could cut down your editing time tremendously since you know where to look for what you need and since you named and organized them before you can pick out precise scenes but just quickly looking through the lists in case you need to re-edit a scene.

Now that you have everything structured you can get onto the practical stuff such as getting the right aspect ratio for your video, Aspect ratio is the proportional size and width of the image displayed on screen, in the beginning, the first films were displayed in the aspect ration 4:3, these numbers represent the width and height of the screen respectively. you can shift the aspect ratio halfway through a movie for effect, like the way The grand Budapest Hotel does, it goes from modern aspect ratios 1:85, to an older ratio, 1:37. In our film The Lemon Trilogy it uses the aspect ratio of 2.35:1. See screenshots below for us working on our latest project, a music video.

If your footage is not looking the colour you want it you can use a tool called colour correction to change the colour to what you want it to be through manipulation using the software tools, for our music video we added a tinted layer to ours, and gave it an yellow tint at about 20%, to give a warmer affect for the music video during the outside shots.

Once we have finished our post production editing through assigning aspect ratios and colour correction etc. you will want to render your file to see what the final product will look like, and whether or not you want to change it again if it does not look good enough to you, if you are using adobe premier, you must select all used footage, go to the sequence tab and select "Render entire work area" and let it do its function.

After you have rendered everything you want, you will need to export it as a single file to make the film final. once you are ready you need to go to File > Export > media , pick your film, and the place you want it to be exported to and start exporting.make sure to pick an appropriate named exporting location such as "music video" or "media Project".