We all know editing can be a rewarding yet frustrating experience. We want to find the best way to convey our message but this usually only happens after numerous failed attempts. Often, we have an idea of what we want our film to look like but until you've actually put it together, it's hard to know what works and what doesn't. That's why we've come up with our top 5 tips to speed up your editing and produce a great video.
1. Avoid going through all your coverage.
Often, we have bundles of coverage to go through. Initially, you simply don't need to go through all of it as you probably won't even use 90% of it. As an alternative, go through the edit instinctively and think about what comes next so you can make choices of what footage to use as it comes to it.
2. Be organised
If you make sure you're organised before you start editing, you'll reduce the work you have to do throughout the editing and can therefore work faster. Make sure you set up your project file properly, create proxy files and log and label all your footage clearly. There is nothing worse than being in the middle of an edit and then having to stop for half an hour to go and find a clip that you forgot to label. It may be a pain at the time, but organizing yourself and your footage before you edit will save you hours when editing.
3. Keyboard Shortcuts
When dealing with a substantial amount of film, you can save a large amount of time by learning keyboard shortcuts - the less time you spend juggling between the mouse and the keyboard, the better. Here's just a few of our favorite keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Premiere Pro.
- Sequence - Ctrl+N
- Open project - Ctrl+O
- Undo - Ctrl+Z
- Duplicate - Ctrl+Shift+V
- Ripple delete - Shift+Delete
- Group - Ctrl+G
- Add Edit - Ctrl+K
- Apply video transition - Ctrl+D
- Extract - '
- Go to in - Shift+I
4. Ignore your audio edits
Your audio won't sound great during the rough cut of your film, some parts will be louder than others and parts will probably be missing. This makes it tempting to start working on your audio so that it sounds cleaner - this is a waste of time. It will get re-done anyway, your sound recordist will make the audio high quality and is likely to be better than you with post audio. Whilst editing, you might just have to put up with rubbish audio until you're closer to the finished cut.
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5. Make use of placeholders
Often, when in the middle of editing, you can have a mind block where the scene just isn't working. This could be a number of things such as finding the right track to use, the transition shot or a number of other issues. Trying to work through this scene and mind block is a waste of time. You can just drop this scene into a placeholder and move on. After working on some other scenes, it will be a lot easier to go back to that placeholder and figure out what to do there. You'll be looking at it with a fresh set of eyes and a fresh mind.
We're sure you'll save hours of time with our top editing tips.