Did you know that you can improve a video a lot with design elements?
If you work with video editing, there are some techniques you can use to enhance your audiovisual productions with design features. Design for audiovisual productions can influence both the audio and the image editing. That’s because the design settings work as a guide for the decisions you make about the content of a video.
In this post you will discover how to improve videos with design through editing techniques such creating color palettes, customizing typography and adding layouts to videos to make your productions more engaging and original, no matter what Video Editing Software you’re using.
Let’s get started!
Color Palettes in Video Editing
The first thing you need to know about design in video editing is what are Color Palettes are (sometimes called Color Schemes). Yep! All those names mean the same thing!
If you are going to produce a video intro, a lower third or anything else that requires choosing colors, using Color Palettes instead of random colors is the best way to result in videos with more harmony in terms of design. Color Palettes are groups of colors that are chosen based on some criteria that can be psychological or logical.
These are some the most popular color combinations that you can use as a guide to create the Color Palettes of your videos:
- Complementary Colors
- Split-Complementary Colors
- Analogous Colors
- Triad Colors
- Rectangle Colors a.k.a. Tetradic Colors
- Square Colors
Why use Color Palettes in video editing? Because they can maintain the connection between one scene and another in a video, creating a visual unit. Generally speaking, a Color Palette is set to a video during the editing process with a color grading tool of the Video Editing Software.
However, it’s also possible to create Color Palettes before editing, during pre-production and the production (the recording phase). This process is known as Art Direction in audiovisual works, everything is thought before the video is recorded: the Color Palettes of a video are set up during the creation of the scenery, during the lighting and during other phases of the pre-production to generate the target final result.
Now let’s see how to use Color Palettes in video editing.
Using Color Palettes to Enhance a Video
There are a few things that can help you choose which color combination is the most suitable to set up the Color Palette for your video. Not always using complex Color Palettes with many colors is the best choice. Many videos work with only one single focus color, giving emphasis to one element or another.
Any audiovisual production can work with predefined Color Palettes, with a single central color or other color combinations. It all depends on what you want to communicate to your audience through your video. For example, movie scenes usually have specific colors to portray different emotions or states of mind.
A Color Palette can be useful when you’re applying color correction to your video because it works as a guide. You can also use a Color Palette to guide the color grading of photos and other media that you may use in your video.
The color aspects of your video determines how your audience sees its. If you’re editing videos for a company or for a personal brand, the company/brand logo colors can be used to create a Color Palette. Another important issue is not to use the colors of a brand’s competitor.
You can use online services (websites) that let you build Color Palettes that will make your video look become much more balanced. All elements of the video, such as intros and typography (text), can follow a color pattern to improve the video storytelling.
Just remember to be careful not to negatively surprise your audience with a sudden change in the Color Palette of your videos, especially if you’ve been using the same Color Palette for a long time.
Now let’s see how you can use another design feature to enhance a video, which is typography.
Using Typography and Layout to Enhance a Video
In addition to colors, it is also important to work on the typography of your video by choosing a font type that better fits your video before you add any text to it, then adjusting the text in a way that is legible and organized. After that, you need to work on the alignment of all text in your video to balance it’s spacing with the other design elements and media, such as photos and visual effects.
Let’s see the details:
Working With Typography to Outline the Content of a Video
Each font style or font family (a group of fonts) suits one type or a few types of video. For example, layout video is about a modern topic such as technology, it doesn’t make sense to choose a retro font style for it. Also, it doesn’t make sense to use a modern font style in a retro video.
In addition to choosing the best font type for your video, you need to work on the font settings by correctly adjusting the spacing between letters and the spacing between lines to avoid readability issues in your video.
Always match the text settings with where your video will be watched. For example, if your video will be watched on a large screen (such as a 43-inch screen TV), you shouldn’t set up its text with too large font size. On the other hand, if the video is for mobile devices, don’t add text with a small font size.
Adjusting the Layout of Design Elements in a Video
When you’ve already chosen the colors and the typography of your video, it’s important to define the layout of the design elements and how those will be organized on the screen. You have to decide if you will put the text at the top of the screen or at the bottom of the screen, and other similar adjustments.
Also, if there is text on the left/right side of your video, think about how to organize the empty spaces without text so that they aren’t “too empty”. However, it’s also important to put space between the elements of your video so that they don’t stay too close to each other on the screen, such as text and images that are too close because that can create readability issues.
To achieve that, you need to study how to set up your video layout in the best way possible. This will make a big difference in how your audience sees your videos and how you produce those parts of your video design.
Using Motion Design Elements to Enhance a Video
You can create Motion Design elements to add to your video with a Post-Production Editing Software to bring life to your creations That will make a lot of difference in your videos. Your customers and your audience will also benefit a lot from your video editing style with motion design because that’s an advanced type of video editing that enhances the professionalism of any audiovisual production. Motion Design is created with a series cinematic techniques, such as 3D animations and visual effects.
Conclusion
Awesome! Now you know what are Color Palettes in video editing, how to use Color Palettes to enhance a video, how to use typography and design layout to outline video content, how to use Motion Design elements to make a video more cinematic and professional! So don’t hesitate to put what you’ve learned into practice and check out the reviews of the programs we recommend!
You can also share your thoughts in the comments below!