4 Mistakes To Avoid When Editing Videos For Social Media
Optimizing your video before uploading it to social media platforms is important to get the desired result out of your digital marketing strategy.
Editing a video for social media can seem to be a daunting task as you can make a lot of mistakes along the way. However, many of these errors can be easily corrected with some caution in the post-production stage.
As much as trimming and cutting might seem simple, it is a skill that one should acquire for the best results for social media marketing. The manner in which you trim or cut your videos can have a big impact on how they turn out.
There are dozens of simple online tools to quickly cut, trim and revamp your raw footage to make them suitable for social media. An online video trimmer will allow you to quickly upload your files, trim to the desired length, and download your files without any watermarks or loss of quality.
Here are the four common mistakes you should try to avoid when editing videos for social media.
1. Using Jump Cuts
Jump cuts are quite common in social media videos, but they often turn out to be a mistake. Each editing technique has its optimal place and time. While jump cut is a tried and tested way of collapsing time to push the story forward and keep it engaging, newbies often end up overusing them. Too many jump cuts appear to be jarring, driving down the engagement levels.
The reason why jump cuts become a mistake in video editing is their excessive use, as beginners are not aware of other cuts they can use. It is particularly evident when you cut the time out of a frame in a shot, making the character look as if magically moving to another position in the same scene. Such a mistake can project your video as amateurish and poorly edited.
You can avoid such a mistake with jump cuts by exploring your editing options. One of the best ways is to set up another camera angle and cut to a different angle in a scene or use a transition to prevent jarring. For beginners, it is best to minimize the use of jump cuts and rather add cutaways to B-roll footage in between the clips. This may not always work; if you don’t have B-roll footage, the best option is to crop and reframe a clip to give it a different look from the other.
2. Inconsistent Audio
As much as you focus on editing your footage for social media, you must remember that audio is also a part of the video. Newbie editors tend to make a lot of errors with their audio components, which hurts the overall impact of your social media video content. You should find voice, audio, and music on your timeline when you edit the video. The key is to achieve a balance of all the components.
If you don’t require the audio from the original clip, you can turn it off in the first place. Most video editors allow separating audio from video, after which you can easily hide or delete the audio track. Beginners often have their background music overpowering other audio. It is important to ensure that the music blends perfectly with the voice or rests below it.
Listen to your final edit and see if it sounds off; if it does, you should adjust it no matter how great your footage is. Use the audio control to adjust it so that it blends harmoniously with the music, and neither sounds more powerful than the other.
Problems in the quality and consistency of audio are often found only in the post-production stage. Another common mistake you should fix in this stage is the audio of the subject. You can easily cut out embarrassing filler words and pauses by adding B-roll footage.
3. Too Much Reliance On Sound
When creating a video for social media, one of the most common mistakes you should avoid is to make the content too reliant on sound. Most people like watching videos on their phones today with the sound muted. They tend to avoid plugging in earphones when watching videos in public places or the workplace. Your best bet is to come up with a video that allows viewers to watch without sound.
A professional-quality video editor should help you create a video with a muted soundtrack and add subtitles to enable viewers to understand what you are trying to convey. Muting the video also reduces the file size and makes it easier to upload on social media platforms. Moreover, your content gets more views as it can be watched in the feed with sound off.
4. Incorrect Frame Rates & Codecs
Most editing tools today take care of frame rates and codecs to make your job easier. Newbies generally don’t realize that they can’t just drop anything on the timeline and expect a perfect video. This is particularly true when you have a mix of codecs and formats. When you bring together frame rates on a timeline, you may experience problems like strobing or sync issues for your multi-camera shoos.
Dealing with frame rates is a normal part of video editing and is nothing new. However, when you start working on bigger projects, a good understanding of these concepts should help you approach your job better. Moreover, when you have a mixture of file formats, resolutions, and frame rates, your resultant video may not show consistency.
You can use a video editing tool to get everything matched perfectly by adding frame rates, file types, and aspect ratios in the same sequence. It automatically conforms to all the aspects as you adjust your settings.
Final Thoughts
This guide should help you understand how to avoid common editing mistakes and give your final product a more polished look. By avoiding these mistakes, you can expect a noticeable hike in the impact of your social media videos. You can then experiment further and hone your editing skills to get desired results from your content marketing strategy.
