Editing Video

A working course in the craft of editing. Why your first cut runs two seconds long, how proxies let an ordinary laptop edit 4K, the grammar of cutting on action and J and L cuts, why clean audio matters more than a sharp picture, correction before grading using scopes rather than eyes, captions for a muted feed, codecs and bitrate explained properly, and a folder structure that still opens six months later.

1. 1Your first cut is two seconds late9 minTrim every shot to the frame where it stops giving new information, and cut to the reaction more often than you think.
2. 2Your laptop is probably not too slow10 minCamera files store frames as differences, not pictures, so edit a proxy and let the export go back to the original.
3. 3A bad cut is felt before it is seen10 minCut on movement, keep the camera on one side of the line, and let sound cross the join before the picture does.
4. 4Bad sound kills a good picture11 minGet the mic within 30 cm, keep peaks near -6 dBFS, record thirty seconds of room tone, and use less noise reduction than you want to.
5. 5The music you found is not free9 minEvery track needs a licence you can produce on demand, and "royalty free" is a pricing model, not permission.
6. 6Make it right, then make it feel like something10 minNeutralise and match every shot against the scopes first, because a look applied to unmatched shots produces unmatched results.
7. 7Most of your audience has the sound off9 minBurn captions in for feeds and upload a real subtitle file as well, and never publish an auto-transcript you have not read.
8. 8Why the upload looks worse than the file11 minThe platform re-encodes everything, so upload a generously encoded file at the source frame rate and mix near -14 LUFS rather than louder.
9. 9The project that still opens in six months9 minLearn JKL and three-point editing, name folders by date and version, and back up the project file separately from the footage.