9 Best Guidelines and Rules for Video Editing

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to creativity and video editing is not an exception to the said. However this does not apply to someone who is amateur in video editing. He needs to understand and get acquainted to this particular art, learn and develop relevant skills to emerge as a qualified video editor.

Best videos that reach you most of the times are efficiently edited ones by experts. Else, the raw visual would have looked weird. If you are really interested in audio visual editing but have no clue on how to go about it, then let’s start with some basic guidelines.

• Importance of B-Roll

  While shooting a video, in order to give an enriching feel to the story, most video editors make use of B-roll. It is actually a video footage used to fill in gaps, or patch up the cuts, or make the shift from one scene to another smoothly. For instance, if you are shooting a public event, you can additionally shoot other elements present in the vicinity or around that place like audience, individual expressions of specific viewer, backdrop designs and so on – just to bring a relief in the course of the event coverage. This is in fact one of the basic professional video editing tips.

• Look before you jump

  When you are cropping out certain portions within a visual you should make sure that there is no continuity break. Audience will come to know about the editing if it is not handled properly – such that even though the flow of the story has been retained, there will be visible changes via the positioning of the subject that would be differed in before-and-after portions which you edited. Referred as Jump Cut, this is one of the most common video editing mistakes where people ignore the background elements by concentrating on the content alone. To solve the issue, one must make use of B-roll or fade options.

• Using the 180-degree rule

  Through this rule one will be able to enhance the flow within a visual content by showing different angles of one’s subject; and even shoot various side-profiles of the same. To give a brief about this 180-degree rule; when one is shooting with a camera, one has to imagine a horizontal line between them and their subject and continue to shoot by staying on their side of the line. They can capture everything that falls within the 180 degrees axis and take care not to go beyond this invisible line. This will help to maintain consistency in perspective and also screen flow for the viewer. If you are not resorting to this type of rule then you need to incorporate b-roll technique within the audio-visual editing cuts and you can also retain same perspective throughout without hampering the flow.

• Maintaining 45 degrees

  If you are working on a scene shot which needs to be put together from different camera angles, take care to see that all the shots are not similar to each other and doesn’t look like a jump cut. This can be achieved by editing raw video footage using only those shots which focuses on subject with angles maintaining minimum 45 degrees of difference.

• Different focal lengths

  One of the tips for video editing for shooting big events like a play or wedding is to make use of different focal lengths. It is more feasible to edit close as well as wide angle shots, if there are two shots available for the same subject. You can edit together a close up and a wide shot by having ample scope to flip the order of those shots and retain the flow.

• Count on similar elements

  Try to thread in elements that have visually similar representations, so that it a creative flow to a scene. For instance if you are shooting a wedding, capture the flowers from the background decoration, then fade them into those in wedding cake and even from the ones in bride’s hairstyle – these elements will bring a sync in a audio-visual. We have experts who know exactly how to edit wedding video in best way and hence our company is associated with a lot of wedding studios globally.

• Wipe it out

  One of the most advantageous of creative video editing ideas is the wipe technique. As the name suggests, this can be used to edit in completely different shot when unwanted object or people gets captured by the camera. If by mistake a man fills the entire frame, while editing the visual you can immediately move on to add another scene without disturbing the viewer. This is what a professional indulged in availing video editing service normally does.

• Mix and match

  Consistency within video makes things to appear beautiful. Breaking or discontinuity may cause a feel of missing in images. Various video editing techniques can be effectively and purposefully utilized here to cut, mix and match the photo footages taken separately or out of orderly. This mostly happens when an object leaves a frame in first image and in the succeeding one it has to enter the frame from right side. Or if in a frame the model holds a particular thing and then in very next shot, it should not be ignored. Again, it is easy to fill the gaps with b-roll shots, when one couldn’t find exact matches. There are no set rules for editing video since it all depends upon one’s creativity.

• Enhance the narrative

  One should try to find opportunity in everything; especially while shooting and editing it. You need not worry if you come across any jarring portion or if someone pops into the frame. You can take this positively and make this as a creative relief to come up with a smooth transition to another scene or resort to different camera angle so that you can modify and enhance the flow of the story in your video.

Through this article, we have suggested some of the advanced video editing guidelines. Even though, we don’t believe that there are definite video editing rules that must be followed, we as a professional youtube video editing service provider have our own organised tools and techniques that help us to deliver excellent outputs to our customers