Speaker 1: All right, I've got a question for you. Is your video editing absolutely as effective as it could be? If your answer was no, this video could help, but it might not be in the way that you think. Often when we think about getting better as video editors, we think we need to learn a bunch of super fancy and complicated tricks to get there. But what really makes great edits is a firm understanding of some pretty simple basic editing concept. And then, of course, practice, practice, practice. So in this video, we're going to go over eight super easy editing techniques and concepts that you can use to become a better video editor today with one extra little bonus at the end. Once you've watched through the whole video, head down to the comments section and tell me which of the tips you didn't already know about. If you can honestly say that you knew all of them, you'll win a little something special. So secure the cup and let's dive in. At its most fundamental, video editing is taking a bunch of clips, cutting them, and putting them together. But how do you know when to cut them and where to attach them together? Well, one option and our first editing technique is to cut on the action. If you have two matching clips of the same action with different angles, you can combine those clips together seamlessly by cutting during the action in each shot. For example, if you have a wide angle shot and then a close up, you can show the beginning of the action in the wide angle and then in the middle of the movement, cut to the close up to finish that action. As long as the movements in both takes are convincingly similar, cutting on the action rather than before or after it can subconsciously hide the cut from the viewer so they feel like they legitimately watched the same action happening from two different angles. But beyond just making the cut smooth, it can also intensify the end of the action for things like punches in a fight scene. If you make the cut right before the big hit is about to happen, it gives a certain importance to the punchline of that action. Pun intended. Similar to cutting on the action, our next concept is to cut to the beat. If we have music in our scene, we can use that to our advantage by making some of our edits fall on the beat of that music. This technique doesn't necessarily hide the edit since you could be cutting between anything, but it does help to make the edit feel purposeful. If an edit doesn't feel like it has a purpose, it can distract the viewer from what they're watching and make them aware of the editing. Most of the time, we want to avoid that at all costs, leaving the viewer in their happy little audience bubble and not thinking, wow, look at that edit. Like cutting on the action, cutting to the beat can also emphasize the cuts in a way that gives them importance. Using builds and big hits in your music as points to show important subjects or actions can make them really hit home. Now editing isn't just about how you place the video clips, but also what you do with the audio. And that brings us to the J cut. This edit is named after the way that it looks in a video editing software. Let's say we've got clip A and clip B. Instead of just butting them both up directly against each other, we would extend the audio of clip B earlier to overlap the end of the visuals from clip A. Basically, the audio of the clip that you're cutting to comes in before you actually see the video from that clip. This works great as a way to transition between scenes, and I guarantee you've seen it a million times in movies and TV. But this also works the other way as well, and we call that the L cut. As you can probably guess, it looks like an L in the editor. The audio from clip A gets extended at the end of the clip so that it keeps going while we're seeing the video from clip B. It has a similar effect to adding a bit of an extra transition between the two clips, but it might be used in slightly different ways. One common way to use this edit is during dialogue scenes where character A is talking, and before the end of their line, you cut to the reaction from character B while still hearing the audio of character A underneath. In conjunction, the J cut and L cut can be used to help make a scene full of cuts feel a little bit less choppy. Real quick, I want to say a huge thank you to Envato Elements for sponsoring this video. Envato Elements is a service that offers an absolutely staggering amount of different asset downloads to make your life easier. They've got stock footage and motion graphics, video templates for all the major editing platforms, music, sound effects, graphics, fonts, LUTs, titles, transitions. They've even got presets and other assets for photographers and things like email templates to build your business. This is actually a one-stop shop for everything you could possibly need, and the best part is it's all under one affordable subscription, and you get unlimited downloads of their library of millions of options. So instead of getting a subscription service for every single type of asset that you might need, you can find everything in one place, saving you a ton of money in the process. And you never have to worry about licensing either. A lot of licensing services only provide assets for personal use, and if you want to use them for commercial purposes, you have to pay extra. But with Envato Elements, you can be sure that everything you download is covered for personal and commercial use both during and even after your subscription ends for the projects that you made while you were a subscriber. So if you think having access to millions of useful assets at your fingertips sounds like something that would be good for you, head to the link in the description and check out Envato Elements today. Huge thank you to them for sponsoring this video. The next concept is more about choosing the clips that you're going to use rather than it is about what to do with them once you've already chosen them. And it's called eye trace. Basically, eye trace is guiding the viewer's eye through the frame so that they don't have to be searching the entire frame to figure out what they should be looking at. So for example, if the main focal point of shot A is on the right side near the top, you might want for your next clip, shot B, to have a focal point in a similar place rather than on the other side of the frame. This way, the viewer's eye is already looking there when the second shot comes up. If it's something like an action sequence or a fight scene where there's a lot of movement and the clips are sometimes less than a second long each, using eye trace to our advantage can sometimes make things more enjoyable for the viewer. If you do need to switch the placement of where the viewer is looking, holding on a shot just a little bit longer to give them the time to visually sort it out can be helpful. But if you've got two shots that are close but not quite right, you can consider reframing one by zooming in a bit and then moving to match it better. And speaking of making things match better, our next technique is called the match cut. This is when we go from one clip to another where something matches in both clips, connecting the two together. It can be visual, it can be audio, or it could be movement. For example, a visual match cut might be that in clip A we might have a specific shape in our scene that we could match to the beginning of clip B. An audio match cut might be something that happens at the end of clip A that also works together with whatever is happening at the start of clip B. And a movement match cut would have some kind of matched movement in your clips, like someone running through the frame in the same direction in both clips. The power of the match cut is that it creates a stronger connection between two clips that might not have had an inherent connection to start with. Staying on the topic of matching, the next tool is to match camera movements between clips. If your shots have camera movement in them, choosing clips that move in the same direction can help to meld that edit together and be easier to follow. If in clip A the camera was moving to the left and then in clip B the camera was moving to the right, the transition between them can be a little bit jarring and cause the cut to be more obvious than we'd like it to be. This is one of those things where you may be limited by the clips that you have to choose from. So hopefully the direction of the camera movement was thought of beforehand, but there are a couple of things that you can do to finesse this into your edits as well. If your clip is of a generally static object or location and the camera movement is in the wrong direction, you may be able to get away with actually reversing the clip and moving it in the opposite way. However, if your clip has anything in it that would be obvious if it were going backwards, like moving water, cars, or people walking, then it won't work. Alternatively, for left to right movements, you can horizontally flip the image to create the right direction for your camera movement. As long as there isn't any text or imagery that would be obvious if it were mirrored, you should be fine. Camera movement can be used for all sorts of different reasons in a shot. But what happens if you get to the editing phase and realize that a shot without camera movement would be better if it had some? This is where, as an editor, we can add fake camera movement. Using the zoom and position tools in conjunction with something called keyframes, we can add camera movements in the editing phase. Let's say we want to gently push in on a character to add importance to the emotion that they're feeling at that time. By adding a keyframe at the beginning of a clip with the zoom set to normal and then another one at the point where we want the zoom to be at its maximum, our software will create a smooth movement between the two keyframes. Or if we wanted to mimic the camera trucking to the left or right, we could do the same technique with the position. But remember that if you do this, you're also going to have to zoom in to give yourself the space to actually move. And if you don't just want a linear move with your keyframes, you can add something called easing to make them gradually start and stop the way that you might want them to. And one of my favorite ways to add camera movement as someone who regularly films themselves using a tripod is by adding a fake handheld look. In DaVinci Resolve, this is super easy because they have a plugin that you can add onto your clip. But if you do a quick YouTube search for fake handheld movement and your editing software, there are lots of tutorials out there showing different ways to achieve this. Now, I promised you a bonus idea, so here it is. Don't cut. Just stay on that shot for a little bit longer. It can be really tempting when you're editing a video to be cutting things down as much as possible. We're used to trying to make things move quickly, make things as short as possible for our ever shrinking attention spans. But in the midst of all that, holding for a little bit longer on a specific shot can give it an immense amount of importance. So if you have a shot that you really want to draw emphasis on, don't cut. Just hold a little bit longer. Getting the feel for this is a matter of practice and experience, but it can be a great way to draw the viewer's attention to a specific shot or moment. One super big thing that I want to make sure I mention is that knowing when to use these techniques is important, but knowing when not to use them can also be super important. Most of the tips that I shared here were to make your edit feel less distracting and to make things easier on the viewer. But if the goal of the scene is to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and off balance, then not using these can be as effective as using them. It all depends on what you're hoping to accomplish. And on top of that, none of these are rules necessarily. When you watch back your video, whether you've used these or not, if it looks good, if you're happy with the way that it turned out, then you did it right. Now, time for the audience participation part. Head down to the comments and let me know which of these tips you already knew, and more importantly, which ones you didn't. And on your way down there, make sure to hit that like and subscribe button, hit the bell notification so you don't miss out on future videos. Huge thank you to Envato Elements for sponsoring this video. Huge thank you to you for watching, and I'll see you next time.