Do you want to take all that footage you recorded from the last birthday party, sports day, family vacation or some other occasion and compile it into a video? Although that may sound easy enough, as you start to cut together your video you may soon realize it doesn’t quite look as impressive as you hoped.
To put it simply cutting videos requires skill and experience, and odds are you’re short on both. The good news is there are a few tips you can use to hide that fact, and start to cut together far more impressive family videos almost immediately.
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Curate the Footage and Plan the Video
Before you start to try to cut your video you should go over the footage you have, curate it and come up with a plan. Start by discarding any unusable footage, or trimming out parts you definitely don’t want to include.
Next figure out which clips you do want to include, and the order in which you want to arrange them.
By the time you’re done you should have a structure laid out that can be your starting point as you cut the video. It would be best if you plan your video before you record it, but if you’re cutting it together from family videos you recorded in the past that won’t be an option.
- Avoid Direct Jump Cuts
Jump cuts are when you cut from a point in a video clip to a point later on in the same clip, and the subject seems to “jump” to a different position all of a sudden. That is jarring and doesn’t look good – so you should avoid it and try other types of cuts if you can.
Seeing as family video footage is normally recorded from a single camera, that may not be easy – but you can add in B-roll footage as a cutaway. Alternatively you could re-frame one of the clips in the jump cut using a video crop editor, for example Movavi Video Editor.
- Make sure the Audio Flows Properly
It’s important not to overlook the audio when you’re cutting together your video, or it could sound disjointed or you may cut it mid-sentence or even mid-word. To make sure that doesn’t happen you can use L cuts or J cuts to preserve the flow of the audio and effectively cut it independently of the video.
Of course, if you don’t want to keep the audio then this isn’t going to be an issue. Instead, you can replace the audio with background music – but that may require some cuts too.
Overall, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to make use of the tips listed above, and each one will help you to cut together a family video that looks smoother and flows better. The more you actually create videos and try different types of cuts, the better you’ll become at gauging the timing and which types of cuts you should use.
