Intro
In today's video, I'm sharing with you editing tips that I wish I knew when I first started out. And I also asked some of my editing YouTube friends if they could share some tips as well. So you're definitely going to want to watch till the end to see all of the tips. Also a special thanks to our friends over at Storyblocks. I'm going to tell you more about their awesome new plugin later on. For now, let's go ahead and jump on.
So the first tip is nesting clips.
Nesting + Basic 3D Effect
For example here inside of Premiere Pro. I want to apply a 3D motion effect to the screen recording, but you can see I have two clips and then I also have this graphic yellow arrow as well. And I want the 3D motion to affect all of these clips, but I don't want to have to apply the same effect to each individual clip. So this is where nesting comes in handy. So I can last one select all of the clips right click and select nest and then press. Okay. Now all of those clips are nested as one layer. So now I can go up to effects and search for 3D basic and underneath perspective. We can double click to apply it to the nest and now we can animate the basic 3D effect. But first let's go ahead and scale in a bit and move the position over so it's more centered in screen.
So once we get the position in the scaling correct we can go down to swivel and let's change the swivel amount to around minus 57. So it's at a nice angle and then we can choose a starting point for the tilt in this case. I'll leave it at zero and tilt over time. So let's enable keyframes by clicking on the stopwatch and then we can move forward towards the end of the clip and then we can slightly reduce the swivel.
Let's say to minus 51 and then we can reduce the tilt to minus nine for example, and now between these two points were seeing a change to the swivel and the tilt and we can see that it affected that animating arrow, which was a separate clip and now we have this basic 3D effect on this singular nest and we didn't have to apply it to each clip and now we have some wise words from Valentina V director and filmmaker and cinematographer, but also a pro in Premiere Pro.
Valentina and Loop Playback
All right, Valentina. What is your tip? The loop playback feature is huge and I only discovered it a few years ago. Basically, if you want to keep re-watching the same little part of your edit to make sure it flows well or what have you, you can set in and out points on your timeline. And if you have loop playback enabled, it will just loop that section over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again instead of having to manually go back, click your mouse, put your playhead at the beginning, play it through, stop it, and go back, play it through. So it just saves time.
Conversion Luts
Another tip that has saved me so much time is conversion LUTs. So if you shoot in log footage or you're editing log footage, rather than playing around with all of the different sliders to bring back in the color, you can use a log to Rec. 709 LUT. Now, if you go to my website, there's a blog called free log to Rec. 709 conversion LUTs. And if you click on download free LUTs, it'll take you to this awesome site by bounce color where you can scroll down and it provides all of these free conversion LUTs for all these different camera profiles. So after you download it, you'll get a folder of all of these dot cube files and that is a LUT which stands for look up table. Essentially, it's basic math that basically converts the log footage into the correct Rec. 709 color space, which is what you're used to seeing. That's more vibrant and has more contrast from Lumetri color. You can go to basic correction input LUT. Now, I've already imported all of these correction LUTs, but if you don't have them preloaded here, you can click on browse and go to that folder and find the Panasonic V-Log to Rec. 709 and hit open and bam. Look at that. It just looks so much better. So this is the after before. All right, here's Becky from Becky and Chris.
Becki and Chris with J and L Cuts
If you're not following Becky and Chris on YouTube, you are missing out on their photography and helicopter adventures and home renovations. All right, Becky, give us your tip. The J-cut and the L-cut is an editing technique that you can implement right now for better video pacing and better storytelling. So here's how it works. Say we're playing our b-roll montage to music and then the next clip is a talking head kind of like this one. The J-cut is if we start playing the audio from the talking head before we actually see the talking head. So you're going to see your b-roll clip. You're going to hear the a-roll, but you're not going to see the a-roll until a few moments later. So if you look at that in the timeline, it looks like a J. That's the J-cut. The L-cut is kind of the opposite of that. It's when your a-roll's audio continues on even after the b-roll starts playing. If we look at that in the timeline, that looks like an L. So that's an L-cut. If these video editing tips are helping you out, be sure to give this video a thumbs up.
And if you're watching this and you're like, oh, I have a tip to share, don't be shy. Leave a comment just down below and share it with the community.
Storyblocks Plugin Time Saver
So when I first started editing, there wasn't an unlimited marketplace, a place that I could go to and search for anything and download it. That's why I'm super glad that Storyblocks is the sponsor of today's video because it's exactly what I wish I wanted during that time. You can see here on the website, you can browse by all of the stock video. You can search by backgrounds.
You can also search for templates as well as music, sound effects and images as well. And better yet, they now have a plugin for Premiere Pro and After Effects. So while you're inside of Premiere Pro, you can search for aerial stock video clips if you need them. And when you need to download it, you can click download and choose the 4K or the HD, for example. And after you click it, it'll download directly into your project folder so you don't have to go to your downloads folder and move it inside of your project. It saves you that extra step. You can access all of the assets that you would on the website here inside of the panel. It's an unlimited access subscription and the subscription has a predictable cost because you just pay that flat fee per month and there's no other hidden fees. The licensing is easy. You can download and use any of the assets in any type of project that you're working on. So you can head over to storyblocks.com/gal to go check out Storyblocks. All right, here's the man that you probably recognize holding his handheld microphone while dropping tons of dope music video effects.
Olufemii and Mogrts
This is Josh Olufemi. Utilizing MoGuards. I use MoGuards when I make tutorials because it allows me to basically have a set animation that I've made that I can then edit and use over and over again without even having to go in After Effects.
MoGuards used to kind of suck because they were very heavy as far as the processing power that they required. But now with this new update in Premiere, they're literally two times faster. It's amazing. I use MoGuards all the time. I have specific series on my YouTube channel that require the exact same type of animations and composites that I just completely transformed into MoGuards and I just use them over and over again. I don't even have to touch After Effects. It's crazy easy. You can do this for either media replacement MoGuards or just the regular text MoGuards.
So the next tip is a huge time saver that I wish I knew when I first started and it's applying color changes at the source master level.
Effects at Source Level
If I go up to Lumetri color, you can see right now I have the clip selected but right next to that is the source. If you click on this, this will affect the entire source clip itself, even when there's cuts applied. So what I can do is click on auto which is a auto color AI feature and if I select this it'll move these sliders to the best possible image that it can be and you can adjust the intensity of it. I say around here is good. I'm going to reduce the highlights just slightly. All right. Next up is Javier Mercedes.
Javier Mercedes and Timeline Shifts
He also runs a fantastic YouTube channel giving all sorts of great tips in Premiere Pro and After Effects. All right, Javier. What is a tip that you would give your younger editing self? Let's say I want to take this section of clips right here. This light blue section and flip-flop it with this orange section. I'm going to grab all of these blue clips hold command and click and drag and if I'm not holding command and notice how it creates this wall of arrows. If I were to drop it right here, it just put the clip right here and shuffled everything down the timeline. Now, if I highlight all of these clips and let's say I wanted to flip-flop these two sections if I hold command and option at the same time then click and drag now we get this little like I don't know reverse. Cursor thing going on and I'm going to bring it to this side of the orange and hopefully when I let go you will see that it flip-flops the two it keeps everything where it needed to be and it flip-flops all of the clips. So my next tip is about sound mixing when I was first starting out.
Sound Mixing Levels
I thought that I knew everything about sound but I didn't know I was just going based off of my ears being like, oh that sounds good, but I didn't actually know the science of it. So dialogue it should average around -6 decibels and it shouldn't peak too high because then it's going to sound distorted. So between -6 and -12 on average is good. Now if music is playing behind the dialogue, it should be around -18 to -25 decibels.
Now the good thing is that you don't really have to memorize these amounts the essential sound panel in Premiere Pro can make it easy for you. For example, here I have this clip of me talking and you can look at the decibel levels here. It's a little bit quiet. It's between -15 and -12 so I can go up to essential sound go to dialogue and if you're editing for broadcast and you want to make sure it's at the correct loudness level you can click auto match and it will adjust the loudness the loofs of your audio clip, but in this case, it's still a little low. What you can do is adjust the clip volume level so you can increase this up a few decibels. Video editing tools that can actually save you a ton of time. So that's a little bit better right because it's between -6 and -12 on average, but let's say you want to add music. Now it just sounds way too loud against my dialogue. In today's video, I'm going to share with you some video editing. So what we can do is select the music clip and now we can go to essential sound and select music and when we select auto match it automatically drops the waveform down and it sounds so much better. In today's video, I'm going to share with you some video editing tools that can actually save you if you need it to be a little bit lower. You can always adjust the clip volume here. One last tip for the audio. You can go to the audio track mixer and from the track level if we open this little carrot up because our dialogue is an audio track one we can go down and apply a special mastering effect to give a little bit more clarity. So presets subtle clarity and we don't want too much reverb. So maybe around five and we can also increase the output gain. So if your dialogue is still a little quiet, you can make this one for example in today's video. I'm going to share with you some video editing tools that can actually save you a ton of time. It sounds great, right? The thing with audio is if your audio isn't mixed correctly, it's distracting for the viewer, right? So you want to make it seamless. And so by using the essential sound panel and remembering those general levels that I introduced it can help you improve your soundtrack.
Ian Client Feedback Tips
So that way you just are not kind of guessing the sound levels you have a base to go from and here's Ian from the learn how to edit stuff YouTube channel when working with client notes always do the last notes first and the first notes last why well typically clients will provide timecode notes either in an email or on something like frame. I oh and if one of the first notes is something like remove this section now all your other notes are immediately out of sync from the timecode notes and it will be an absolute headache to deal with but if you work from the back to the front you will not encounter this issue. So if I could go back to baby Premiere Gal and tell her one huge tip that would help her out with editing it would be to collaborate as much as possible because editing is a very solo process, especially when you're working for yourself.
Collaboration Tips
It can feel a little bit like self-doubt is creeping in and you start to question your decisions. It doesn't hurt to make friends in the editing community to send them your sequence and be like, hey, what do you think of this? Even if you do believe that it is good. It's just good to get that reassurance reassurance reassurance.
That's why I'm super happy that I work with an editing team right now because we can collaborate together. They can bring new creativity to the edit that I maybe didn't have time to implement myself. It gives a different perspective and I'm also glad that I reached out to all the other youtuber friends here because they also have more insight and experience and that's what I love about the editing community is that we all are like problem solvers and we all want to help each other out, right? That's why Google is so strong for editors because you can type in a question and you're probably going to find an answer and that's part of the reason why I created this YouTube channel is I really wanted to share easy to access tips from whatever level that you're coming from and there's no intimidation here. So if you have any questions about anything in this video, just leave a comment below and if you want to watch some more tips on this channel, you can click right over here and don't forget to subscribe as well.
Thanks so much to all of my YouTube friends that came on here and gave some tips and as always keep creating better video with Gal. See you next time. Bye. All right. I think that was pretty good.