Editing and Publishing Your Video
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In our final article on the path to better video, we now look at the steps to closure of your video project. The first step is the editing to completion, and the second step is the encoding for viewing, often called publishing.
Picking an Editor
I used to always recommend using the best editor available to get started with video and proposed DaVinci Resolve at all times because there is a free version for Windows and Mac that has most of the functionality of the Studio version. I use Resolve for all my work. However I began receiving feedback that Resolve was making new editors nervous because it is SO powerful. It has a superior colour engine, and the best, in my opinion, audio engine (Fairlight) out there. It also incorporates elements of Fusion which is a superb alternative to Adobe’s After Effects.
Thus, even though Resolve is available at no cost, it may be more than regular folks need and so we should look at simpler to use alternatives such as iMovie and Premiere Elements.
In fairness, if your computer is a Macintosh, there is no better place to be than iMovie. Like Garageband for music recording, most personal video projects can be well addressed completely and quickly in iMovie. There are tons of tutorials and the software is included at no cost with every Macintosh.
Not everyone uses a Mac, and some households have only Windows machines, or perhaps Windows and Mac, and in either case, simplicity and efficiency are king. For these folks I unhesitatingly recommend Adobe Premiere Elements The user interface is built for people who are not by training video editors, and there is a lot of free online training available as well as strong tutorials to get you started. Premiere Elements is available for Windows and for Macintosh.
Editing
The first step in editing, is to get your editor set up and to put all the clips that you want to use into one place from wherever they are. In many editors this is called the bin, but names vary from editor to editor. The name is less important than having all your clips in one place to make it easy to find, use and reuse the clips as you wish. Most editors work in the context of a project, and it is best practice to ensure that your bin is complete within the project file itself. While some projects contain all the files in a single large package and others store them as a folder of separate files, that methodology is less important to the normal person.
Once your clips are in the bin, you start to arrange them in the order that you will have them playback. This is done on the timeline. You are not looking for tight edits at this point, you just want to get a decent running order established.
As you have your timeline come together, you can now open individual clips into the clip editor. The editor lets you do the simple yet important work of trimming the clips for impact. It is here that you will trim away unnecessary time at the front and the end of the clip to keep it concise and the messaging strong. If a clip has a bad section that you want to remove, you can do so here by using a tool to split the clip, and then remove the section that you no longer want. While this may sound complex, it is surprisingly quick once you get into the swing of things.
Once you have your first pass of edits done, it is time to tighten up the timeline. This is easy because you just drag the clips into the timeline to butt up against each other. Once you have your clips all tight with no dead space between them, watch the entire sequence to determine if you are happy with the flow and the overall timing. Don’t be afraid to be aggressive in your editing, in video, viewing is mostly a passive activity with only nominal viewer engagement, so don’t assume that what fascinates you will equally fascinate the other viewers. If you consider that less is more, you are not in a bad place.
At this point you have your sequence mostly complete and its time to start building the packaging.
This is the process of creating titles, credits and text inserts. Fortunately most editors provide templates for these elements so you don’t have to learn to program that complex but short running section. Try to avoid making the current trending mistake of title and credit sections that take far too long and put viewers off.
All these elements once created are simply dragged and dropped onto the timeline and you move the clips sequence around to satisfy your requirements. It is going from titles to main sequence and from main sequence to credit rolls that you can be more inclined to use transition effects. Keep them simple. A video of a pastoral country walk is not improved by transitions that involve spinning exploding diamonds. There is reason that fades and to a lesser extent wipes are so popular, and that is it is because they work.
You may, depending your content want to add informative text to sections of your sequence. This is most easily done with an element called a lower third. These are prebuilt elements where all you do is change the text. You will put them in a video track above your main sequence. This way the third sits over the main sequence and whatever it does not cover comes through. Again, keep them simple to avoid taking attention away from the primary sequence.
If you made your video without an audio track recorded in camera, as is good practice when starting out, you can now drag from your bin, your music track and if you have one a voiceover track. Most editors allow you to record a voiceover in real time and all that you will need for this is a USB microphone. Remember that by having voiceovers, in camera audio and music each on their own track that you can control their presence independently for volume and even use audio tools called ducking to reduce the volume of lower in the stack tracks when there is something in an audio track above. As noted previously, if you have a basic understanding of Photoshop style layers, you understand how tracks layer over each other.
Encoding
You now have a video ready for encoding. Encoding takes time, because your video now needs to be packaged for how you will play it back. You will have multiple options, with MP4 standalone being a fairly common mechanism. However, if you want to share your finished video, you may prefer to use the editor to encode and upload your finished video to a sharing site that you like. YouTube is likely the best known option. Commercial users may choose a service like Vimeo, which is not free but has no ad injection. Monetization is stronger on YouTube although the return to the creator has dropped a lot in recent years. Instagram stories is also a popular location. I cannot give you good advice on free sharing sites like YouTube or Instagram as I do not use them, but my use cases are possibly different from yours.
The editor will typically have presets already built so for example to prepare for YouTube, you would simply select YouTube at whatever resolution you want (if in doubt choose 1080) and provide your YouTube ID and password. It will prompt you for the other information it needs such as title, creator, how you want your rights protected and such and then you let it do its job. The editor will create the encoded video, and upload it to YouTube as a single process. Some people prefer to encode for YouTube or whatever and then do the upload manually. Use whichever method is most comfortable for you. At this juncture, that choice has no real upsides or downsides.
Once your video is published, you will get a URL that you can share with friends and family or to embed on your personal website or portfolio where people can go watch your video. It really in the long run is not more difficult than editing a still and posting it to your portfolio, web site or online showcase. The principles are exactly the same.
Conclusion
Congratulations! If you have been working through the articles you have gone from the steps to recording video all the way through editing and publishing. The first times will feel a bit awkward because it is new, but you have already proved able to handle that in your stills work. This is just a different content mechanism.
EDIT
For folks looking for a clear basic workflow tutorial on iMovie, have a look at the work of Nancy Theo, here
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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.
