If you’re new to editing video, I can understand how that could be very frustrating and just a daunting task every time you make a video, but what if I could tell you that that doesn’t have to be the case? Because I believe, like with anything in life, when you get the foundations right, you can actually grow and succeed in whatever it is. So that’s why in this video, I’ll be sharing my five simple steps to editing any video so that you can start crushing your edits today. Let’s go! You got to just press record.
Hey, what’s up? It’s Omar El Takrori with Think Media, and this channel is all about helping you build your influence here on YouTube. Sometimes we actually do that by sharing the best tools, whether it’s cameras, lighting, or audio, as well as some editing tutorials so that you can level up your edits and get people to stay and watch your video. So if you’re interested in that, be sure to hit that subscribe button.
The first thing I would encourage you to implement into your workflow is to get organized; this is before you even open up the program. Here I have my MacBook Pro, and I’m just going to start a new folder and title it with the date and then the video title. I’m going to title this “How to Start a Podcast”. We’re just getting ready to edit, so we’re going to open up the folder and create a folder inside of it called “A-Roll”. Now, this is going to be all the footage from your talking head, like what you’re seeing right now. This is talking head, so I would throw this clip into my A-Roll folder. If you have B-Roll, meaning footage that shows what you’re demonstrating or anything else other than your A-Roll or talking head video, you would throw it into a B-Roll folder. In this example, I won’t necessarily have B-Roll up front, but I’ll show you how you can get some without having to shoot it yourself.
However, now that I got my folder all situated and ready to go, I can drag my clips in from either my smartphone or my SD card. A quick tip: if you are running out of space on your computer or laptop, I really would encourage you to invest in an external drive, and specifically, I love using SSDs. This Samsung T7 SSD is 2 terabytes large and very small. One of my favorite things about SSDs generally speaking is that they’re just really fast, so I’ll post links to some of our favorites down in the description below. If you are running out of space or want to keep your files on a drive, this is probably the best way around it when it comes to video editing.
As you can see, I just used my desktop to create that folder. Now I’m going to throw my SD card into my computer and drag this A-Roll into the A-Roll folder. I’m going to open up this folder and go to “Private”—I don’t know why Sony does this to their files, but this is what Sony does. Here are my two talking head videos, as you can see right here. I made a video on how to start a podcast, but just in one sitting went through it, so I’m just going to drag this into my A-Roll folder. Once all your footage is dragged over, you can now open up your editing software of choice, and in this video, I’ll be using Camtasia. Camtasia is actually the sponsor of this video, but what’s so cool about Camtasia is not only is it a video editor, it is also a screen recorder. For beginners, if you have yet to edit your first video, you need a simple and easy editing experience. Camtasia works for both PC and Mac, and if you could see yourself using this software, then be sure to check out the link down in the description below to try it for free. If you’re ready to invest in it, you can actually save 10% off; we’ll post all that information down in the description below.
Now the next thing you’re going to want to do is set up your edit. Once your software is open, you’re going to go to File > Save As, and you’re going to save your project into that folder that you actually created in step one. We’re going to go to “How to Create a Podcast” and title it “How to Create a Podcast”. I like keeping all my files in one folder because if I offload it eventually into an external drive or a backup solution, I can just reference this folder and I’ll have everything I need. Once you’ve done that, you can import your media, and in this case, I’ll import my A-Roll that I had dragged over. I got the two clips, so I’m going to select and import them. Once the clips are imported, we can then drag both of them into the timeline, and now you could see in our timeline we have our project.
This is the process in editing that I like to call trimming down the fluff. Essentially, every software has what is called a splice tool or a split tool, and I think it’s really important that you learn the shortcut on how to access that. Here on Camtasia, Command+T on a Mac actually splits the clip, as you can see how I’m doing it right now. Now I’m just going to watch through my video and take out all mistakes like “ums,” pauses, and things like that. One little quick tip that I like to do is I actually like doing this part of editing backwards because usually my best take was my last take. If I took the last part of an idea or something I shared on video, chances are that was the best take. But if I’m editing chronologically, I’m just going to find a lot of my mistakes and think that I actually had a good take when in reality the last take was the best take.
Just to show you an example of what I mean by using this slice/trim tool backwards in your edit, without it trimmed down it’s about 37 minutes long. But if you zoom in, here is the end of my video because I’m editing backwards. I could see that I messed up right here on the fifth step, all right here. But I can see that I started to get consistent audio right about here, so I’m going to hit the Command+T tool on Camtasia which splits the clip. Another thing you actually might want to do is hit the magnetic tool, and I’ll show you what it does. Now I just need to find the moment that goes right before the fifth step in this edit. I think right here is where I’m at, but with that being said, the fifth step is a mistake, so I’m going to just go right before it using the spacebar to start and stop. I’m going to hit Command+T and literally delete this. As you can see, because the magnetic tool is on, it just bumped it up to the front, so here we have a clean edit right here for great valuable content. “But with that being said, the fifth step after you’ve edited your podcast—boom!” You can also click and drag to trim any unnecessary edits you want. I’m going to actually go through this edit and trim it all the way down. As far as I know, this should be about a 9-minute A-Roll sequence, but let’s jump to that moment with the power of editing.
Later on, I just finished trimming down my A-Roll, and I’m at about 9 minutes and 30 seconds. Editing our own mistakes—that’s like 20 minutes of mistakes. See, I’m not perfect, guys, but nonetheless, if you get to this point, you’re actually ready for the next step, and that is to add B-Roll. B-Roll is just the supplemental footage that you add on top of your A-Roll, hence why it’s called B-Roll, which just enhances whatever it is you’re talking about. You can actually shoot your B-Roll yourself and maybe come up with a B-Roll shot list—a lot of the times that’s what we’ll do with our tech gear reviews. But in this case, I didn’t because I knew I wanted to use what is called stock footage. Honestly, one of the coolest things about editing video is that you don’t have to shoot all of your video; you can actually use stock footage. TechSmith Assets for Camtasia is a super cool database that offers over 20 million video clips, templates, songs, and more. When you use both Camtasia and TechSmith Assets, it’s so easy to find the clip you need. Just search using a keyword—in my case, I’m making a video on podcasting, so I just search the word “podcast,” find the clips I want to add into my timeline, and just hit the Camtasia logo. It literally just loads it right into my project. I love this workflow because it saves a lot of time; I just need to focus on delivering good content and I can just add footage over it. Let’s say I’m talking about editing and you want to get better at editing video; you can actually use these clips that I’m using right now on top of my A-Roll, therefore making it B-Roll. This is the phase where you would want to do that throughout your video. If you add B-Roll into your project and you don’t need the audio coming from that video clip, you can simply click on that clip and mute the audio, allowing you to use the video portion without the audio.
Now, the next foundation to editing your video is to add text, and we love adding text here at Think Media whenever we’re sharing tips or talking about a specific product. Not only does it break up the video with a different visual element, but it actually calls the audience to now read the screen rather than just look at the screen. What I love about Camtasia is they make it super easy to add moving text. Usually, you’ll have to add a special effect or something, but Camtasia has different templates where you can just add it on top of your video, put in your text, and then you’re good to go. Another cool thing that you can do if you want to use the same kind of text consistently, whether that be the color and the font and things like that, is save presets. In most editing software, and in Camtasia, it allows you to create a template for your future text so you don’t have to constantly recreate it. We like using a specific font and a white box with black text, or sometimes a black box and white text. Because I can just save it, I don’t have to recreate it in the future, which is super nice and convenient.
Now in your edit, when you get to this point after trimming down your A-Roll, adding B-Roll, and adding your text, I want to encourage you to watch your edit through. Just watch it with good eyes and make sure you didn’t leave a mistake inside of your video or maybe make a spelling error in your text. Just look for those things because the next step is to now render your video. This is when it puts it all together and gives you the final file of your video to then be uploaded to YouTube. When I render my videos, I put them in the folder that I originally created for this project. Sometimes I have different versions because we check, revise, and do other edits, but I just put them all in this folder so I can reference it in the future. A quick tip here is when you are rendering your video, just make sure your settings are consistent throughout. So if you shot a 4K video, you can make sure you export a 4K video. If your frame rate was 24 frames per second or 29 frames per second, just make sure your render matches your project file as well as your video files all the way through, and then you’re going to have a super nice, crispy video. What’s so cool about Camtasia is they actually allow you to export your video directly to your YouTube channel with their built-in integration, which saves a ton of time. You don’t have to export the video onto your computer and then drag it onto YouTube; you can just completely cut down that process to one click.
And just like that, you just edited a great video! You know, when you really boil it down to the foundations, it really could be a lot more simple than it actually seems. If you actually could see yourself using Camtasia, be sure to check out the link down in the description below—it works for PC and Mac. I would just encourage you to just get 1% better with every video you edit. Maybe I didn’t really touch on music in this tutorial, and that’s because I don’t think it’s necessary, but if you want to get 1% better and add music to your videos, you can click or tap the screen and learn how to do so. Thanks so much for hanging out, I can’t wait to see you in a future video. Peace!
