Want to start on your YouTube journey but don’t know how to edit? Look no further. Below is our whirlwind tutorial that will help guide you on making the best YouTube videos.

Above, you can watch the video version of this tutorial. However, if you want a written version, taking you step by step, then carry on reading.

How To Edit: Your First Steps

The first thing you need is something to edit. Ideally, you have some footage you’re keen to work on, but if not, we have some footage available here – for free – that you can have a go at editing.

The next step is picking your editing software. We recommend either Premiere Pro (which requires a subscription) or DaVinci Resolve (which has both a free and paid version). You need to import your footage into your software – most likely by dragging and dropping it into your project window. From there, you can drag the footage onto the timeline, which is where you will start cutting it up.

You can also import PNGs, SFX and other material that you intend on having in your video – just import and drag onto the timeline. The main shortcut you want to glue to your fingers right now is the plus and minus keys, which is how you zoom into your timeline.

Now, it’s time to start cutting! Press C when using Premiere, or B when using DaVinci, and start cutting up your footage. Remove the boring parts and the bad takes, and start piecing together the bones of your video.

With all that footage, you have a blank canvas to paint on your editing characteristics, AKA how you highlight your personality through things like zooms, pacing and voiceover. You might not want to use voiceover, but it’s a really easy way of making your content super engaging. Consider your voice as a major tool in the editing process! It’s not flashy, but god damn is it powerful, especially for explaining points and quickening the pace of a video, which is key for YouTube.

Your Introduction

So, how do you hook a viewer from the beginning of a video? It’s all about the intro. In essence, you’ll want to follow the rule of describing the what, why, and how of the video. You can watch a video about that right here. This is also a good place to show off some flashy editing skills – using After Effects, 3D text, that sort of thing.

That’s going to be tricky for any beginner, so if you’re just starting out, we recommend the Beginner to Pro Editing Course – as well as using our presets, which are beginner-friendly.

It might all be intimidating right now, but you’ll come to learn how to edit like a pro, and we’ll go over some basics here. Our big “two cents” on animating intros is to keep things simple and smooth. Use elements that enhance the points you’re making with your voiceover, and then get creative with how things are animated. That might mean using a PNG to make a transition, or animating a character to point at something important. So let’s go over some basic flashy editing techniques that will impress your viewers out the gate!

Flashy Editing Techniques

First, transitions, which are super easy within both Premiere and Davinci, but in Premiere, the Film Impact transitions are a great place to start. Just drag and drop one of these in between your clips and just like that, you have a fairly cool transition. Unfortunately, this doesn’t account for other layers on the timeline, like text or PNGs. So really, you’ll want to create a transition using adjustment layers that can go on top of everything! These are super easy with our Transitions presets, which you can see how to use on the product page.

PNG characters are also great to use in intros. Making PNGs move is all about keyframes. These are the bread and butter of editing, and can be quite tricky to understand, which is why we made a whole video on them right here. You’ll want to do things like have your character slide into place and bounce around. Again, these things are super easy to achieve with our presets – we have two sets of Animation Presets and a Bounce Pack.

You’ll want to have these bits of editing flair throughout your entire video, and then once you’ve added a layer on those, it’s time to tie this all together in a neat package with your sound design. As tempting as it may be to only spend your dwindling editing energy reserves on this bit once you’ve finished the fancy, you really should spend a long time on audio.

Audio in your videos is THE most overlooked part of editing. You want this to be as detailed as your visuals are, because it’s all going to add up to a much better, professional package when uploading. For instance, always add Whoosh sound effects to any moving PNG or image. Think of it as if everything is moving through incredibly thick air. There’s so much resistance that it can’t help but make sound with every little thing that happens, whether it’s an entrance, a sway, a point, an exit – anything and everything should make a sound!

You just want to be careful about audio levels here, so you’ll be using a lot of volume control. In Premiere, you can just hit G on the keyboard and adjust the volume by 6db at a time.

Timing is everything

Let’s go back to your timeline and thing about the timing of your footage. When you’re dealing with real-life footage that’s following some kind of story, like a comedy sketch, pacing is everything.

Say you want an intense scene that feels overwhelming, you would cut the footage down so that the dialogue overlaps and interrupts one another. Doing this utilises a cutting technique called a J-cut. This is when you lead into a shot with the audio first, then introduce the matching visuals after.

For some serious dramatic tension, we have to look at the space between cuts. By that, we mean leave space after something is said. For instance, is someone accuses someone else of doing something bad, you may leave some silence between the two characters to let the moment hang, and for the viewer to absorb what’s going on. You can then make things super cinematic with letterboxing around the image, which makes it look wide-screen.

Sound effects can have a major impact on the atmosphere. You might want risers, slow builds and some creeping ambient music to make things super tense.

Music

Music is super hard to get right. You really have to let yourself really feel a scene and then pick the music that fits with that for you. It’s like being a good DJ.

Think of music like a foundational layer, it sets the precedent for the visuals, the pacing of cuts and of course the emotional tone. Cutting music to the beat is a really good. This isn’t noticeable like editing can be when you throw a flashy PNG on screen, but it is something that’ll work reliably to add smoothness to your video. This might even mean recutting a scene so that it works with your music choice – don’t be afraid to go back.

What next?

This really is just a quick overview of some of the biggest talking points in YouTube video editing. If you want to deep dive, then check out our courses page – these courses are hours in length and really will make you a master editor.