The 50 Most Useful Video Editing Tips You Will Ever Read

• March 27, 2014

• Film Editing Pro

The 50 video editing tips that follow are a product of many years of video editing, many hours of research and learning from countless mistakes. I hope that you will be able to apply these tips to your own editing projects to improve the quality of your work and increase your speed and efficiency.

If you prefer to download the tips as an e-book in PDF format, you can access them here .

Please enjoy!

1. Keep the pace appropriate — too fast and you’ll lose people, too slow and you’ll bore them

As a general rule, it’s better to cut a scene too fast than too slow. There’s nothing worse than boring your audience. That said, confusing people by playing a scene too fast is a close second.

2. Determine what drives the scene and start by editing it

When begin to edit anything, figure out what element is going to propel it forward and use it as the backbone of your piece. Sometimes it’s the rhythm of the music, sometimes it’s a dialogue conversation, sometimes it’s a sequence of shots and other times it’s a motif like an insert shot of a ticking clock that appears every few seconds. Whatever it is, lay the “driver” into your timeline first and let it inform the rest of the editing process.

3. Use reaction shots

Reaction shots do more than just show what a character thinks or feels about a particular event. They also suggest what the viewer themselves should be feeling – whether it’s fear, shock, lust etc. Additionally, reaction shots allow the viewer a moment to digest things as they occur. If the footage just showed two boxers slugging it out in a ring without cutting to the occasional audience reaction shots, the viewer would quickly become either overwhelmed by the constant action or simply immune to it.

Neither is good. This applies to comedy, horror and just about every other genre