Speaker 1: It's been a long time since I've been out in the open, so I'm excited to see what's going to happen today. I'm going to go to the park to see what's going on. mplaying ball playing ball playing bad Playing with cat Playing with cat With hearts With hearts With hearts I'm out in the parlor, parlor This is cool Pacing is one of the most important things to get right for your edit, but it's also a little tricky because there's no formula I can give you and pacing really varies from project to project. So what I'm gonna do in this video is just share with you a bunch of techniques that I've picked up over the years and that I use in every single one of the videos I edit. We're gonna be talking about where to place your individual cuts down to the frame that you cut on, but also looking at the broader structure of your video, the length of different sequences within your video to have a natural flow that keeps your viewer interested throughout the entire thing and feels very natural. Before we jump into that, one of the biggest misconceptions about pacing is that it's basically just the speed of the cuts in your video and it's not. While the speed at which you cut can impact your pacing, there's a lot more to it than that and a lot more subtleties to be aware of. Pacing is even important before you start cutting clips at all. For example, with music, it's super important to choose the right track to put behind your video so it fits with the mood and you can achieve the pace you're going for. So for the intro to this video, I chose to use two different tracks, one of which was very slow and classical in style to reflect that older, kind of distant-from-the-city feeling in Central Park, and then I also chose a darker, moodier hip-hop track to go with that darker, more modern vibe in the second half of the edit. If I were to keep the entire edit the same but just swap those two tracks, it wouldn't work at all. It would just feel off. So no matter how cool that track you found for your video is, make sure before you throw it on the timeline that it really fits with the pace and the mood of the video that you want to create. And once you've done that, we can get into actually cutting some clips up. One of the biggest pieces of advice that I can give you for cutting your clips is to not always cut directly on the beat of the music. This gets really monotonous after a while and it'll also encourage you sometimes to not cut in the right place because it's always best to cut in the spot in the clip that feels best for the edit, and that might not necessarily fall on the beat. If you cut too early, then you're cutting off action and making that first shot feel incomplete or interrupted by the next one. And if you cut too late, you're leaving empty air after the action has already taken place. One good technique is to cut on motion or impact. So, for example, with this shot of the helicopter blade rotating around, I chose to cut right after it swept past the camera and left the frame. This way, it's not like I'm interrupting that motion halfway through, but it's also not like I'm letting it happen and then leaving an extra half second afterwards. So, that way, by cutting at just the right time, it feels like that big motion is kind of carrying us through to the next shot. If you're struggling to figure out where to place your cuts, one thing I'd recommend is actually watching your video without music or sound. And that might sound a little ridiculous, but I actually edited several sequences in the intro to this video without having any sound. I just took my headphones off and edited based entirely on what I was seeing. And this is a good way to prevent yourself from being distracted by the music and the sound and just focus on the flow of the visuals. Now, of course, sound is incredibly important. It's 50% of your video, but this is just a good exercise for not getting caught up in that monotonous beat of the music and really focusing on what feels right. Another thing to be aware of when you're cutting clips is to avoid an abrupt change in speed or energy. For example, if you have a hyperlapse and then you place a static shot with no motion before or after that, it's gonna be a pretty abrupt cut between those two clips. Whereas, if you put some other shots in between those two where you can kind of slow that motion down gradually, then you have a much smoother sequence. For example, there's a subway sequence in the intro to this video where I needed to get from a shot of the subway moving past the camera at full speed to a shot where it's completely stopped and people are getting on. So, how do you do that? Well, I took a few different shots. I took one where the subway was moving, but you could see that it was coming into the station and kind of slowing down, but still moving quickly, and I put that right after the shot of it going at full speed. And then after that clip, I put another shot where you can see it visibly slowing down almost to a stop. That way, instead of just cutting from the subway moving quickly to it not moving at all, we have those two shots that allow you to see it gradually slow to a halt. This way, we're going from a high energy shot to a much lower energy shot, but we're not doing that abruptly and breaking the speed and the energy of the video. We have that smooth flow throughout. And this subway sequence is also a great example of having kind of a smaller subsequence within your video. Sequences like this are not only a great way to organize your edit narratively, but they're also a great way to tie together very fast cuts. They're especially effective in that way when you tie the sequence together with something like a sound design or a similar motion. So, for example, in the helicopter sequence within the intro to this video, I have that helicopter rotor sound behind all of the shots in that sequence, which ties them all together, even though they're quite fast cuts. And then, if we look at two other subsequences within the intro to this video, the horses and setting up the camera on the bridge, then we can see that I've actually animated in a scale-in effect on all of those shots. So, we have that motion pushing in throughout the entire sequence, which really just blends them together to feel like one shot. So, when you see that and you hear that same sound behind all of them, or you see that same motion, even though it's a bunch of different shots really fast, you kind of internalize it as one fluid motion. That's why, especially when you have to condense a ton of footage down into a short video, subsequences like that are absolutely essential for structuring your video naturally. But, if we want to talk about structure, there's also a lot more to it than just those short, fast-paced sequences. We also have to talk about the broad structure that encompasses the entire video. Now, of course, broad structure may not impact flow and energy quite as much as those individual cuts between your clips, but it's super important for keeping the viewer engaged throughout the entire video and not breaking their attention with an awkward change in pace. Most films or videos have different sections. So, for example, the intro to this video has two sections. That lighter, calmer sequence in the first half and then that darker, moodier sequence in the second half. And I would always recommend spacing these sequences out somewhat evenly. If a sequence is too short, then the viewer gets dragged on to the next one before they were even able to get immersed in that first one. And if it's too long, they get bored of seeing the same thing over and over again and they lose attention in your video. That's why I would recommend trying to keep them at a pretty consistent length throughout the entire video. I usually try to go for at least 30 seconds, but not longer than 60 for a given sequence. A really good way to keep track of this when you're editing is to use solid layers or text layers on a layer above your clips. And then you can basically just drag that layer to encompass the entire sequence and it gives you a visual representation of how long that part of the video actually is compared to the others. If we use my Faces of NYC video from last year as an example, we can see that it has five very different sequences, but they're each about 30 to 40 seconds long. So you don't get particularly bored of any one of them by the time it's over, but you also have just enough time to get into it by the time you move on to the next one. Whereas if the first sequence of the video is 20 seconds and then the next one is a minute and a half and then the other three are all 20 seconds, it's a much more awkward video to watch because you're getting very bored of that long sequence, but then you don't have enough time to even understand what's going on in the short ones and it's just a mess. And once you've got that right, you also might even want to take the opportunity to change the pace of your video in between two of those sequences. A paced transition like this is a really good way to keep the viewer engaged in what they're doing, but if you mess it up, it's also a huge opportunity to break that pace in a bad way and completely lose your viewers attention. To give you a really bad example of a paced transition, what if you're watching a video and it's very slow and calm and then all of a sudden it just cuts to, like, heavy metal? I don't know. You're gonna be thrown off by that because it's abrupt and it interrupts the pace. But if you have a more subtle transition and it's done smoothly, you kind of build slowly up to it and you're aware that a change is happening but it doesn't take you out of the video, you're a little more accepting of it. You're like, okay, we're changing things up here. I like this. A good way to subtly change the pace of your video is by doing what I would call taking a breather. So, having a moment where everything kind of builds up and then stops entirely and you have kind of a moment of rest before you move on to that next sequence with a different pace. So, for example, in the intro to this video, after that first sequence, the song kind of builds up and then stops and there's, like, maybe 10 seconds of very quiet, like, almost no music while that second track builds up and then we get into that second pace. And the key here is that you become aware that the first sequence is ending before the second one starts. So, you're not just immediately transitioning to something new. You're aware that a change is gonna happen so you can broadly transition into it and be more accepting of it. A change in pace should also be motivated by another change in your video, like location or music, as we talked about before. So, for example, in that intro edit, we not only switched the music but switched from a very light gray theme visually to a very dark gray theme visually. And we also switched from the very central park, kind of away from the city, nature type vibe to a very, like, heart of the city, Times Square, very modern feeling. Whereas, if we transition to that much faster, darker pace but what you were seeing on screen was still Central Park and the horses, that's just gonna be a little confusing because why did we transition to the same thing, you know? So, don't do that. And finally, let's talk about perhaps the most important transition in your video, which is the ending. It's important to wrap everything up properly because a bad ending in a video is basically like taking this really long inhale and then you just don't exhale it. Very unsatisfying, very awkward, very not ideal. And a super common mistake that might result in you having that long inhale with no exhale feeling in the ending of your video is just ending too abruptly, where the viewer has absolutely no idea that you're gonna end the video. They don't see it coming at all and then it just happens. Like, you just ran out of footage, which probably a lot of times is the case. What you could do instead is build up very noticeably to the ending or what I like to do with most of my videos is have a good amount of time at the ending so we have that last long shot that allows the video to kind of slow down and end rather than just cutting off. I think I'm gonna get a lot of comments about talking with my hands in this video, but that's alright. But now that we've talked about the best way to end your video, I think it's time to end this one. So, I hope you've enjoyed it or especially learned something new from it. And if you did and you do, take some techniques from this and apply them to your own workflow. Feel free to share that work online and send it to me. Tag me in it and I'd love to see it. But that's all for today. If you enjoyed it, feel free to share your support by leaving a like on the video, sharing it with your friends, or even subscribing to my channel. I upload new filmmaking tutorials every week or so-ish. I've got some big projects coming out in the next month or two that I'm incredibly excited to show you. So, subscribe for that, keep creating, and I'll see you in the next one.