Knowing all the best video editing tips and tricks will benefit you hugely as creative making videos. As you know, a good edit is as just important as what happens on location, but editing can be a tricky process. This means collecting all the information, tips, and tricks you can is a crucial part of your process – to help smooth out your workflow and elevate your results.

Here are 3 video editing tips and tricks to help you out in making video content that apply to all sorts of videos, including fiction films, personal vlogs, and documentaries, and should help you raise the standard of your video content.

Speed it up

There’s a reason that TikTok became so popular in 2020. In our busy, social media-heavy world, people’s attention spans aren’t what they used to be. The most common criticism aimed at amateur films, and many professional ones, is that they’re too long.

That doesn’t mean you should cut your half-hour masterpiece down to 30 seconds, but you can certainly improve it by removing anything extraneous. Be brutal with your own work – if a line or a shot doesn’t add anything not stated elsewhere, try taking it out and see if the video flows better without it.

Cut on action

When cutting from one angle on a scene to another, the cut can look jarring. This often happens when you’re using different takes, but it can even be a problem when you have two cameras on the same take. One way to make edits look smoother is to cut midway through an action, rather than when things are static.

Learn to use colour

There are two colour editing processes: colour correction and colour grading. Colour correction is adjusting your clips for basic consistency. Shots from two different cameras or ones taken in different lighting conditions can look jarringly different when placed adjacent in an edit. This can often be fixed by adjusting brightness, contrast, and white balance.

Colour grading is the next step, which is giving a scene a particular “look.” If you’re serious about this, certain high-end editing applications have detailed grading interfaces, but many also make it easy for newcomers with LUTs, which apply a preset style. Think about how your video’s tone changes if you give it a colder or warmer look, for example.

Video editing can seem a daunting task at first, but keep these video editing tips and tricks in mind as you go, and you’ll soon be editing like a pro. You’ll also find it’s an incredibly satisfying process, especially when you watch your finished masterpiece.