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7 Video Editing Tips for a Professional Brand Video
You’ve been meeting with your client for weeks. You’ve brainstormed your video strategy and nailed down the storyboard. You just finished shooting all your footage.
Up next: editing your video. How can you transform your raw footage into a professional video your client can share with the world?
There’s a lot to get caught up during editing and post-production. Follow these 7 video editing tips to stay on task and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
1. Back everything up.
First things first, back up your footage! You’re going to make a lot of cuts throughout the editing process. These will be significantly easier to make if you know you have a copy of everything saved somewhere secure.
Save your footage in two different locations. We recommend saving it to your computer, as well as to an external hard drive or cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.
2. Review your footage.
Now the fun begins. Carefully look through all your footage. Don’t get lazy here and tune out; you could miss the money shot! If you need to take a break, do so, but it’s essential that you watch everything with your eyes wide open.
When you find bad footage, delete it. Space is like gold during the editing process! Remember that you can always recover it from your backup if needed, and you’ll really only need a few clips to turn out a successful brand video. Less is more here.
Take notes on the time and clips you may want to use for the next step.
3. Start creating the story.
By this point, you have a bunch of clips to work with. Sync up the audio for everything you decided to keep. Organize what you have into scenes, and start crafting the story with your selected footage.
If you have an interview or a voice-over, allow the audio to structure your video. You’ll obviously want to include footage of the interview itself, adding dynamics with close up and wide angle shots. Beyond the interview, you can carry over the audio to fill in your b-roll of movement shots. These movement shots are essential for bringing dimension to your story, and illustrating what the interviewer is talking about.
If any of your movement shots are shaky, see if you can replace them with something else. You might be able to save some of these in post-production, but you’ll save yourself some time if you can find better-quality footage to work with instead.
4. Bring out the feels with music.
Now that you have a feel for the footage and an outline of how the story is going to unfold, use music to help tell that story. For an excellent selection of royalty-free music, we recommend PremiumBeat and AudioJungle.
When choosing your music, think about the emotion you’re trying to elicit from your target audience. You can search by these emotions. From there, choose a song that has some dynamism to it; a repetitive beat can get annoying in a video. Although, don’t choose anything too dynamic. You want your music to complement the interview, not overpower it.
To make the track fit your video, match your footage with the beat of the song.
5. Make more cuts.
By now, your footage is really starting to look like a video. Unfortunately, that means it’s time to make some more hard cuts.
Remind yourself of the goal of the video. Does the story you’re creating effectively communicate the goal? What can you cut out that doesn’t?
Also take into account the client’s video marketing strategy—where will your client be sharing the video? Chances are they’re planning to use it on social media. If that’s the case, the shorter your video, the better. People lose interest with long videos, and many platforms (including Instagram) limit the allowable length for video content.
Even if you’re not sharing your video on social, the faster you can get to the point with your video, the more effective it will be. Try not to go over 1 to 2 minutes in length.
6. Add in the transitions.
Like the music, the transitions of your video also depend on the expectations of your client’s target audience and the overall goal of the video.
A video with heavy transitions can be exciting for an adventure brand or for an event preview. On the other hand, in an interview-style video, you want to be selective with your transitions. Rely on transitions too much, and the video can get cheesy fast.
At Your Marketing People, we typically limit transitions with interview videos to one or two. It’s enough to break up the video and add some visual interest, without detracting from the overall message.
7. Correct the color.
Color correction is the final and necessary step in a professional-level video. Raw footage is often oversaturated. To evoke the mood of your video, and make everyone look their best, you need to balance out the colors with color correction.
Be judicious here, just as you were with transitions. Overdoing it on color correction can be distracting for a viewer. Instead of focusing on the video’s message, they start wondering why it looks “off.”
In Adobe Premiere, the Lumetri Scopes panel includes several built-in color presets. For accurate color correction, we recommend using one of these as your base and adjusting from there. You can also use the color wheel to warm up or cool down your video as necessary.
Level Up Your Video Editing with Professional Help
These video editing tips will get you started, but as you might imagine, there’s a lot of nuance to professional video editing. To ensure your video comes out the way you imagine it—without having to spend years learning the ins and outs of video editing—hire a professional.
At Your Marketing People, we handle all aspects of video production, from the initial strategy to editing and promotion. Whether you’re looking to hype your next event, share your brand story, or produce social media content, our video marketing services can bring your vision to the screen. Learn more and check out our previous video work here.
