5.1 The principles of video editing

The IN PRACTICE activity below shows a tutorial that you might like to share with your groups to help them familiarise themselves with some of the main principles of video editing.

IN PRACTICE: Introducing the principles of video editing

A good way of introducing the principles of video editing is to illustrate the idea of a video cut by ‘splicing’ together two pieces of till roll with scotch tape, where one piece of till roll represents a wide shot of a garden, the other a close-up of a person.

Show the same process on OpenShot (or whichever editing software you are using) by dragging a shot onto the timeline, bringing another next to it, and playing the resulting edit.

There are online tutorials to help you get to grips with the technical aspects of editing with software like OpenShot. The video below is one example you might find helpful.

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 4

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Transcript: Video 4

SPEAKER:

Hello, and welcome to my beginner OpenShot tutorial. I prepared some short video files and music file and a watermark image. And we're going to make a little video out of them. Before we add the files, let's make sure we have a right profile.

I'm going to use the standard resolution HD 720p 30 fps one. You can pick any other. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I think this is a good start. Now I'm just going to drag the files I want to use in this project. And because I have a bit too many tracks, I'm just going to remove some of them. Here I think three is good. Let's make a little bit more space. And we are going to start with the signing video.

We can zoom in with this slide bar or with the Control button and scroll wheel of our mouse. And we can always play back our track using space and also pause it. So now I'm going to add another video right behind it.

And now I want to-- I can't zoom any further, but I want to split this video right before the people start clapping. But to do that, we're actually going to have to do something else. We're going to have to copy it. Copy the clip. Paste it somewhere else. Put it on top of the other clip.

And we're going to have to move this one, the left edge to the right. And whoops. And here we're going to have to move the right edge to the left. And then I want this to appear in between them. And then I want it to continue.

And we can actually drag it on top of each other to create crossfades. Let's see what it looks like. Unfortunately, my computer is quite slow.

[APPLAUSE]

OK. So this is a weird issue with the audio playing strangely but hopefully that'll be resolved. All right, now I would like to add a watermark. So I'm just going to drag the image which I already prepared. And I'm going to stretch it to the length of the whole video. And there we go.

Let's give our clips some more space. If we right-click them, we can go to Properties where we can do things like disable the audio, for example. And now that we removed the audio, I would like to replace it by dragging a music clip to another track. And I want to shorten it so it fits the video clips.

So now let's just try to export it. I'm going to press the Export button, going to call it OpenShot test. And we want the h.264 encoder. We want 720p 30 fps, high quality. And let's just stick with the defaults and export. Now that the exported video is ready, let's take a look.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All right. Even though there were some issues in the interface with the audio not stopping, it seems to work in the end product. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to get the exact length of clips. But if you really need to be exact, you can always go to Properties and set the end value, for example. In this case, you would have to calculate them exactly though so that we can coordinate all three tracks exactly since the zoom level is limited.

There are also other transition effects and video effects you can use, quite a lot of transitions actually. And there are some very cool features like animated titles which get rendered in Blender for you. Unfortunately, the previews don't work for me. But when I try to render them, they actually do work. So this is quite cool. As a bonus, let's take a look at the bright color theme of OpenShot. Here it is. The timeline stays dark, but the rest of the UI is bright.

So I hope this tutorial helps you getting started. Please like and subscribe. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. And see you in the next video. Ciao.

End transcript: Video 4

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Video 4

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Video editing software has a timeline with tracks for sound and visuals, a play-head, which allows you to scroll manually over the shots, and a window in which you can preview the video you are making. The timeline allows you to slide one shot next to another and add layers of sound and pictures. If you have multiple video tracks, the play-head only ‘sees’ the topmost one, so only one shot will show at any one time. As it develops, a timeline starts to look like a chequerboard.

Figure 8 (top) Frame-grab of what OpenShot editing software looks like on the screen; (bottom) Adobe Premiere timeline source and record windows

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The top image shows what OpenShot editing software looks like on the screen. The bottom image showing someone using Adobe Premiere timeline source and record windows.

Figure 8 (top) Frame-grab of what OpenShot editing software looks like on the screen; (bottom) Adobe Premiere timeline source and record ...

In the editing process, young people will be working with the shooting script they developed earlier in the workshop. This will help them decide which content to include, and in what order. A good way to start is by creating an ‘assembly’ – placing all the footage they’ve created roughly in order, without worrying about style. This will let them make decisions about which take to use, or if a scene needs to be moved. Importantly, it will let them know quickly if there is a technical problem that means a shot can’t be used, like noise or bad focus, or if something is missing altogether.