Do you want to become a video editing professional? This can seem demanding at first, but practice always makes perfect! What are the first steps to becoming a professional video maker?
That’s what you will discover in this post!
Just to make it clear, sometimes the term “video editor” is a synonym of “video editing software”, but here we’re talking about people who edit videos as video editors, not the video software! Remember that because you may find this term with the other meaning every now and then on the Internet!
In this post you will discover what are the 5 steps to become a video editing professional. You can begin your video editor career today!
Let’s get started.
1. Understand the phases videos production
It’s important to know about the video creation phases so that you understand where the professional video editing work fits in to get a video ready. There are three phases in the creation of any video, film or series:
1) Pre-production, in which everything is prepared for video recording
2) Production, in which everything is recorded (video and audio)
3) Post-production, in which the video is edited at all levels (putting scenes together, adding music, sound effects and special effects).
You don’t need to be an expert on concepts and terms from all areas, even as video editing work only goes into post-production, but knowing about them will be useful to better understand how video making works.
To understand in detail the three phases of video production and video editing (pre-production, production and post-production) see our post:
2. Study video editing techniques
Understanding basic techniques and advanced video editing techniques is very important to becoming a professional. And when it comes to video editing, studying means practising! See our posts below to help you get started:
See our Advantages Guides for many professional video editing programs:
See our posts below to download copyright-free media for your productions:
Don’t forget to always keep training and learning new editing techniques as this creative area of work and knowledge never gets old!
3. Create your own videos to build a portfolio
A portfolio is essential for presenting your work to people both as an independent video editor or when you work for clients. You can build a portfolio with some jobs you made for clients and also with your own video productions.
Including original videos that were not made for clients is good to enrich your portfolio with unique and original material! You can produce videos at home, shot even with your smartphone’s phone camera. See our posts below to help you come up with ideas for creating videos and then building your portfolio:
4. Work on the video soundtrack
The music and sound effects a.k.a. the soundtrack is essential in a video, it brings life to videos and makes them more attention-grabbing for the audience. A technique that will make you a professional in video editing is to choose all the background songs and sound effects before you start editing, you may need to watch all the raw material first (raw videos that are not-edited).
To better understand how to choose music for your videos, you can see our post:
If you’re editing your own videos for personal projects, it’s important to search for the soundtrack first before you start editing. This will help you plan the entire video and it can make writing the editing script easier (if you plan on making one).
If you are working with a client, it is important that you propose to the client that you choose the video soundtrack before editing. You’ll be able to guide the entire project dynamics according to the music (or songs) chosen for as soundtracks.
See our posts below to find out where to download copyright free audio for videos:
If you prefer to buy songs in a content marketplace due to greater exclusivity or possible demand from some clients, you can include the amount of money needed to buy the soundtrack in the value you will charge the customer because sometimes clients don’t know that you have to buy songs.
When working for clients, remember to don’t ask clients to choose the free soundtrack or buy the soundtrack by themselves, it’s best for them to give feedback on what you choose. You can show the soundtrack sample (if paid or free) to the client before starting the project, but work this way: suggesting the soundtrack and asking for customer feedback.
This will save time because customers often don’t realize that choosing the soundtrack is part of editing, and they can get a little lost if they have to do it themselves.
See our Advantages Guides for many professional Digital Audio Workstations to improve even more the audio quality of your videos:
5. Choose specific areas of the video creation to work with as an editor
Once you have started your video editing studies and already have some original productions, you can choose one (or a few) of the many audiovisual knowledge areas to work with, this can help you develop your professional identity as a video editor.
You can choose to edit videos for Internet content, for independent cinema (a.k.a. indie movies), for online or offline marketing, for television, for series and movies, for independent productions for clients (wedding videos, graduation videos and others) and so on. These are just a few examples.
Within each area of the audiovisual universe, there are sub-areas that you can choose to study and specialize in. Example: the production and editing of videos for business marketing can be divided into videos about products and videos about services, and the dynamics for editing those two types of videos will be quite different. The advantage of specializing in one or in a few areas is that it’s easier to develop your own editing identity!
Conclusion
Awesome! Now you know the steps you need to follow for becoming editing videos professionally! So don’t hesitate to put what you’ve learned into practice!
You can also share your thoughts in the comments below!
