10 Mistakes NEW Video Editors Make

- I'm gonna run through the 10 mistakes

that I see most new video editors make,

wasting a ton of time and killing the quality

of their videos.

And I'll also share how you can easily avoid them

with a ton of video editing tips for beginners

thrown in along the way.

Hey it's  Sulaiman ali  here from Pakistan,

and I will help you amplify your business

and brand with video.

If you're new here,

As a beginner, video editing can be totally confusing

and it's easy to fall into some of the mistakes

and the bad habits that can cost you a ton of time,

and kill the quality of your videos,

making the whole process much more painful

than it needs to be,

and believe me, we've all been there.

So while video editing can be one of the most daunting

aspects of the video creation process,

the good news is, is that with some simple tips

to fix your workflow,

it can become one of the most rewarding parts

of the creative process.

Okay, so mistake number one is not considering your edit

or your editing project at the time

of actually filming your content.

So when you're filming your content,

you wanna make sure that you are asking yourself,

"Am I definitely going to be using this?

"Is the length of time that I've captured of this shot,

"is that enough, or do I need to get more?"

You don't wanna have extra footage for footage sake,

because more footage means more footage you need to edit,

so it's gonna slow down your editing process

because you need to go through

and cut down more video footage.

So when you're filming, be mindful of what it is

you're actually capturing and whether you've got enough,

or whether you're actually going to use it

in your end video project.

This can save you a ton of time, not just in your filming,

but also everything that flows on

into the editing beyond that.

Mistake number two is jumping straight into

your video editing without having a plan in place

for the end video that you're looking to create.

So what are the goals of the video?

Why are you making it?

What do you want it to achieve?

What do you want people to think, to feel, to know,

or to do after watching your video?

Having a plan and some goals and everything laid out

around what you want your video to do

and why you're actually making it in the first place,

and the feeling that you want your viewers to have

while they're watching your video

is, again, going to make your editing far more targeted,

far more streamlined, and much more efficient as well,

because you know, with clarity,

what it is you're creating and why.

Leading on from that then,

the third one is not having a process in place

to edit your videos down.

We see so many people that jump into

their editing applications,

that'll dump their footage into their timeline

and they'll just color grading, or tweaking the audio.

You really need to focus on the content first.

You wanna make sure that you've actually got enough footage

to tell the story.

You wanna make sure there's nothing wrong

with the footage that you've captured,

so that you can tell the story.

Jumping straight into color grading,

or to tweaking the sound or tweaking the audio,

making it look or sound pretty,

is the stuff that you need to do later in the process.

Adding all of that stuff in and doing that up front

is going to slow down your editing system,

it's gonna slow down your computer

because it's gonna have to process

all of those things that you're doing,

but also you might find that you actually don't have enough

to finish the video or there's extra stuff that you need.

So you really should be, first and foremost,

focusing on the content first,

but also following a process:

Step one, import your footage;

Step two, drop it down into the timeline,

make sure it's all there;

Step three, remove all the bad takes.

Now, if you're interested in our process

that we teach for the most efficient way

to edit your videos down,

with minimal wasted time and rework,

I will have a link at the end of this video,

where you can download a PDF version

and follow along with that process

while you're editing your videos.

Mistake Number four is file management or file organization.

You wanna make sure that you are organizing everything

that you are using in your editing project

into a logical place,

and ideally, all in the one place, in the one folder.

Now, spending that little bit of time up front

and making sure that everything is organized

is gonna make it much easier for you,

while you're in the thick of editing.

If you quickly need to find something,

it's going to be in a logical place.

So what I mean here is having a folder for your music,

for all of your sound effects, for all of your footage,

for all of your B-roll, whatever it is that you're using

in your project, put it all in a logical place

where you can find it while you're editing,

but also, it's gonna make it much, much easier for you

if you've ever got to come back to this project

at a later date and try to find everything,

it's gonna be all in one logical place,

or if you're ever gonna be working with another editor,

or at some point, if another person needs to open up

your editing project, it's going to make it so much easier

for them to find everything if it's all filed away

in a logical place and, obviously,

if it's all in the one place,

instead of looking on external hard drives

and different drives for different bits and pieces.

So make sure you're just taking that little bit of time

and just put everything in a logical place.

Mistake number five is not taking the time

to learn some of the simple keyboard shortcuts.

Learning and understanding the keyboard shortcuts

are going to speed up your editing 10 fold.

Simple keyboard shortcuts like being able to play forward,

backwards, and stop, learning how to trim the top

of your clip or the tail of your clip,

or ripple edit left and ripple edit right.

If you're not already using them,

these are gonna change the game for you

and make your editing so much more efficient,

saving you with what you would do

with multiple mouse clicks, with just a single key press

on your keyboard.

So if you're not using some of the keyboard shortcuts yet,

I would strongly recommend that you go up to

the help area in the editing software that you are using,

look for keyboard shortcuts,

or even do a quick Google search

for your editing application and keyboard shortcuts

to start to get familiar with some of those

because they are definitely going to speed up

your editing and make you a much, much faster editor.

And the top ones that I think you should look at

are J, K, and L.

So, controlling the playback of your video,

but also look for ripple edit left, ripple edit right,

it may also be called trim top and trim tail,

you'll thank me later.

So that brings us to mistake number six,

which is all around using music in your videos,

specifically, using the wrong music in your videos.

Having music in it that is the wrong fit for your video

and the feeling that you want your viewers to have

being mismatched with the music

that you're putting in there.

The music is the easiest way to make your viewers

feel something while they're watching your content.

So the mistake here is having your wrong music

in your videos,

or having the music in your videos much too loud

so it's distracting and it's annoying for your viewers

and making it hard for them to actually consume the content,

because it's too overpowering.

So in regards to the volumes and the best places to set it,

it is gonna come down to an individual

video per video basis, again, coming back to the goals,

what do you want your viewers to think and to feel

and to do after watching your video,

and how does the music help or add to that?

If it doesn't, turn it down or remove it

if it's not adding to the video.

Mistake number seven is over editing your videos,

making way too many cuts, removing out every little pause

or every little breath, just adding cuts

for the sake of adding cuts,

or going the other way and adding in

way too many transitions and too many effects,

and all that does is annoy the viewers

and make it distracting and hard for them

to keep watching your content.

If anything, stick to simple cuts, remove the mistakes,

tighten up stuff if it needs it.

For the most part, the more you simplify your videos,

the easier they're going to be for you to edit,

but also the easier for your viewers to watch,

without them just being overwhelmed and distracted

by a whole lot of unnecessary noise

or distractions in your video.

Mistake Number eight is not saving backup versions

of your timeline or of your editing project

as you progress your edit.

So what most people do, especially beginners,

is they'll just be working on the one timeline

from start to finish,

or the one project from start to finish,

but this doesn't give you anywhere to go backwards

if you need to, if something's happened,

or if you're looking for something that you had

in the last version, you'd then have to go back

to the original raw footage to find it,

if you didn't have those backup versions of your timelines.

So what I would recommend you do here

is as you progress through,

every now and then or every time you hit a milestone,

or ideally every time you moving into one of the next steps

inside of our Primal Video method editing process,

which, again, I'm gonna link to at the end,

then you've got the ability to quickly go back

and find stuff, or to open up a previous version

of your project if you need to,

if something bad happens, if the project gets corrupted,

or you lose it somehow.

Sometimes stuff happens.

Mistake Number nine is a real procrastination point

for a lot of people, but especially beginners,

and that is thinking that the video editing software

that you are currently using isn't the one

that you should be using,

or that there's something better out there.

This is a huge thing that is slowing down

and stopping a lot of people.

"The grass is always greener on the other side,

"maybe some other editing application will let me

"edit faster, or give me so many more effects

"that I can use in my edits."

What I wanna say here is,

the best video editing software for you

is the one that is the fastest and the most efficient

for you to do everything you need to do.

Video editing software, they're all just tools

to edit video down.

Yes, some have more advanced features.

Yes, some of them may render faster than others,

so you really wanna find which one is the best one

for you moving forward.

And then if or when you start hitting the limits

of what you can do in that software,

that's when you should really consider

looking at some of the other options out there,

but not before then.

Focus on creating the content,

focus on really learning editing as an art form

and as a process, that way you can apply that

and apply the fundamentals to any video editing software

out there, not just one specific application.

I hope this blog will helpful for you and you 

will not make  any mistakes.

So that's it for now , Peace.