10 editing questions beginners always ask (answered by a pro)

10 editing questions beginners always ask. Answered by a pro. Hey, are you currently learning how to be a video editor and struggling with a few of the concepts? Well, first up, sweet. Welcome to the club. Secondly, don't stress. We've all got to start somewhere. And thirdly, let me answer some of the most burning questions about video editing I could find on the internet and we'll get you huming away in no time. The number one question I get asked and what I see in various places across the internet that new editors are lurking is, "What software should I be using? " The answer is incredibly simple. Whatever you have access to and feel most comfortable in, the software is a tool for the job, not the job. If you have no idea where to start, though, and you're coming in completely fresh, then check out Da Vinci Resolve. It's by far the best free option that you have, uh, it might take a minute or two to get up and running in it, but if you're serious about editing, then learning in a program like Resolve is going to be key to a long, fruitful career in the craft. It's totally fine to start out with something like Cap Cut. However, you will grow out of it if you want to get serious about video editing and then you'll have to move on to something like Resolve. Uh, which means that you're just learning two programs. So, instead of learning two programs, start in something professional, learn the basic tools, learn the basic workflows of editing and then go from there. If you have access to Adobe through Work or have the cash to splash on a subscription and want to work across After Effects, Photoshop, etc., then jump into Premiere Pro. There's lots to be said about working in the one ecosystem. Now, that's not to say that you can't work between Da Vinci Resolve and After Effects, for example, because that's pretty much what I do. So, where did I start? Well, I started in Premiere Pro CS6 when I was 14 years old before YouTube existed. I brute forced my way through learning the basics in a program that was not geared to beginners at all. But it did mean that by the time I roughly knew what I was doing in the program, um, it meant that I kind of knew my way around a professional piece of software. So, when I entered the workforce, I could tick that box that said, you know, I have X number of years in Premiere Pro. The TLDDR is try the free version of Da Vinci Resolve if you're starting from nothing. Moving on. How do I make my edits look more professional? I'm going to answer a visual question here by suggesting that you focus on audio. If you're controlling the audio, i. e. shooting video and recording audio yourself, then you want to make sure that you're getting the audio right. People will forgive a piece of content that looks like it's been shot on a potato so long as they can hear the audio and can follow the story. If you shoot your piece on an AR Alexa LF with some dope anamorphic lenses and a veteran gaffer, but record your dialogue on the scratch mics of the camera, then it will be basically unwatchable, even if it looks beautiful. And if you're not controlling the recording and are just purely in the edit, then knowing your way around the audio editing and polishing tools is super valuable. And we'll actually get to that a little later on in this video. There's more questions about audio. So, on the audio front, make sure your audio is the best you can make it and the visuals will sort of fall into place. Then, on the visual front, confident cuts. Know when to give something some breathing room. Know when to let your characters linger on screen, but also know when to cut them off and move on. Ultimately, editing is a set of tools employed to help tell the story. So, to be a great editor, you need to be one with the story and know your audience. You can use as many fancy transitions as you've got seconds in the edit, but if it's not in service of the story, well, what's the point? This video is brought to you by Invato. Get all of our AI tools and every asset category from video to music, fonts to templates, and everything in between. Check out Invato today. Every type of asset for any type of project. How long should your video be? Well, how long is a piece of string? For real, though, the video should be as long as the story needs it to be. If we're talking long form in the sense of YouTube, then that story could be 3 minutes, 8 minutes, 22 minutes, an hour. It doesn't matter how long it actually is, does the runtime give you enough space to tell the story the way that you want to tell it uh in the most efficient and effective way for your audience to understand it? Of course, there is some obvious best practice when it comes to apps like Tik Tok and Instagram in terms of hard limits on short form content, but for the majority of online content, I'm always of the opinion that the video should be as long as the story needs it to be and not a moment longer. If you watch your final cut through, as you should be doing, and you find your attention waning even for a moment, then it's too long. Make the cut. If you're bored of a part of your video, then I'm guessing your audience is going to be bored as well on that. How do I cut faster without losing important stuff? Well, how do you know what to cut? That intuition comes with time. If you haven't already, go and check out my beginner's guide to video editing course, and I'll link it below. In that I take you through my approach for importing rushes, making selects, then crafting a story from those selects. And you'll see that this is essentially a process of watching everything that you have, then cutting it down, then watching that cut, then cutting it down some more, then watching it again, more. And basically, you just rinse and repeat that process until you are done. Also, really think about what is important for the story and for the platform. This part of the skill set takes time to develop, and you'll get more intuitive with it as you go along. It's also important to go back and watch your old work with your current brain and see what's working and what wasn't. You might be surprised at how much you've

grown in such a short amount of time. What's the best way to edit Tik Tok and YouTube shorts? Well, jumping off of the how do you know what to cut question when it comes to short form content? Honestly, cut 90% of what you think needs to be in the video. You've got roughly 2 seconds to hook someone into your concept on shorts versus say 20 seconds on regular YouTube long form. If it's not important, get rid of it. even if it sort of breaks the story. Short form content is not really storytelling in the traditional sense anymore. They're snippets, segments, shots versus scenes. They don't need wider context. They don't need introductions. Start at the point and go from there. Don't start at the beginning and eventually get to the point. How do I add text or captions that look good? Well, looking good is subjective, but adding text and captions is super easy. pretty much any professional editing software these days will have at least some form of basic text editing and animation kind of feature set built in. Um, not to mention what you can achieve with After Effects, for instance, with proper motion graphics and that workflow. But a great way of starting out in creating highquality motion graphics for your videos is to begin with templates from Inbato and they're ready to download right now. You can bring them into your projects, customize them exactly to your needs, and then bam, you've got yourself a full set of motion graphics to complement your high quality, super punchy edit that you've just created. And in general, a rule of thumb for motion graphics work in video is to make sure it's readable. You want to aim for high contrast, legibility in the fonts that you choose, uh making sure the duration of text on screen is adequate, and so on and so forth. And if you're animating them, ease your key frames. That's the quickest way to go from low to pro quality. All right. How do I choose music without getting copyright strikes? It's a very common question and I honestly didn't put this one in here just to spru in. Choosing the right music for your project is super important. We talked about sound right at the beginning of this video and how important it is to have high quality audio. Music is part of that. I'd love to just put commercial music in a lot of my work, but for obvious copyright reasons, we can't do that. If you're working on a narrative short film or something along those lines and it's really important for the character to be listening to a specific well-known commercial song, then you can of course look into licensing that track. But depending on what it is and who owns it, that could end up costing you an absolute fortune. For most corporate, commercial, or even just sort of fun personal YouTube channels, for that kind of work, you'll see people using music from stock sites like Invato. And there's a reason for it. The way it works is that you download the track from Invato, which comes with a license. And then once you put that video up on YouTube, the Content ID system will either pick it up or not. And if not, that's fine. You just go about your business and keep the license handy in case you need it down the line. And if it does pick it up, then that's also no big deal. You'll get a note in YouTube Studio that you need to address the copyright claim, and you simply add the license details to that claim, and all is well. A really great feature with Invato's music is the new sounds like search as well. So, remember before when I said maybe your character in that short film really needs to listen to a specific sort of music for the story. Well, if for whatever reason you're not able to license that track, you can bring that track into Sounds Like Search in Invato and the system will pull up a bunch of stock tracks that have a very similar vibe uh that you can then obviously license through the platform. Perfect. All right. How do I fix bad audio? So, I mentioned Resolve being a great place to start your editing journey, and their AI audio tools uh are kind of things that I use every day now in my professional work. Things like AI noise reduction to clear up noisy filming locations, as well as a new AI audio assistant function, which basically takes your whole timeline, dialogue, music, SFX, the whole shebang, and does a pretty professional audio mix on it with a click of a button. It's pretty remarkable. There are of course a whole bunch of other traditional and emerging professional audio tools in these programs, all of which have their specific use cases, but basically if you can try to get your audio recorded as cleanly as possible on set, and if you can't, then dive into the tools to help you clean it up in post. 10 or even 5 years ago, I would have never said anything like, "Don't worry, just fix it in post. " Regarding audio, but honestly now, uh, I can shoot in pretty much any location and have no worries at all about being able to get crispy, clear dialogue whilst just melting the background away. How do I make my cuts feel smooth instead of choppy? Well, this is an interesting one because I feel like for the most part, the editing styles are getting choppier these days. But if smooth transitions is what you want, then for sure fall back on something that was drilled into me in film school editing classes, which is cut on the action. So, cutting on the action is basically exactly as it says on the tin. If you're cutting from one shot to the next and they both involve some sort of movement if it's the same movement or even just camera movement, cut in the middle of that movement and you'll kind of get this nice flowing transition. You'll see this in countless feature films, commercials, corporate work. Now that I've pointed it out, you won't be able to avoid it. And if you're working on talking heads kind of content like me talking to the camera right now, make sure you cut out those awkward pauses before someone starts to speak. We all joke about the millennial pause and being hard in the millennial camp. I get it. But as an editor, you can help us poor millennials out. Cut out the pause, please. And finally, we come to the end of this list with a question about easy tricks. And I hope that if

you're still watching this one, you'll realize that there is not one or two or three easy tricks when it comes to editing. It's an amalgam of techniques, both technical and creative, that come to you over time. The easy trick is to follow the advice in this video. Honestly, cut out the fap in your videos. Don't employ flashy editing techniques just for the sake of it. Make sure that it's servicing your story. Make sure everything you do services your story. Uh, know your audience. know the platform that you're going to be working on. Uh cut to the platform in terms of best practice. Make sure your audio is crystal clear. Get some help from places like Invado to polish up your work quickly. And honestly, the number one tip is just to practice. Keep slugging away. Edit things, show your friends, publish them, read the comments, watch your old stuff, make notes, and learn by doing. And also pick apart content that you enjoy watching. If you like it, ask yourself why. What was it about that video, the editing, the motion graphics, the information, the story? What was it that hooked you and how do you replicate that in your work? So, I hope this little Q&A has been helpful. Let me know down in the comments if you agree, if you disagree, if you have more questions. We can definitely keep that conversation going on down there. And until next time, happy cutting. It's