Five video editing tips in five minutes to work smarter, faster and tell a better story

For anybody who edits video, it’s a process that constantly changes and evolves. We’re always learning new things, new and better (sometimes worse) ways to do things than we did before. There are always new techniques to experiment with to see if they fit our style, our workflow and the videos we’re trying to create. But it can be a slow and inefficient process sometimes.

But in this video, Mark Bone gives us five great tips to not only work a little smarter and faster but to also help us tell better stories with our edits. And while he touches on some topics that have been covered before, like shortcut keys, Mark takes things a step further to tell you which shortcut keys specifically are the most advantageous to learn and remember while you’re editing to speed up your workflow.

• 0:20 – Use more real-time moments – Stop with the slow-mo
• 1:00 – Specific shortcut keys you need to learn
• 2:15 – Kill or be killed – Choose appropriate music
• 3:33 – Don’t start slow – Give it some punch at the beginning
• 4:35 – Use sound bridges – These tie your scenes together

The shortcut keys one also includes a bonus tip to have a shortcut key set to bounce between the editing application UI and a full-screen view of your playback window so that as you adjust and edit things, you can watch it back the way a viewer will. Nobody watches movies or videos inside an editor UI except editors. So, why wouldn’t you preview it the way it’s intended to be watched? Personally, I just dedicate a separate monitor that just has a full-screen preview all the time while editing. DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro and most other editors should offer this feature (if yours doesn’t, find a better editing application).

One thing I really need to learn to do more of in my own videos is that last one. Using sound bridges. This is using J cuts or L cuts to have your video and audio switch at different times. You can have the new audio come in before the video switches in order to set up the scene or you can have the video switch first while the previous one finishes playing out over the speakers before switching the audio to the new scene. These tie scenes together and can be very handy when you need to jump to a completely different place or time.

What do you struggle with the most when editing video?