How to edit video clips from your pocket
Posted by Chris Coates on 6th March 2020
Editing on a mobile is especially useful if you are tweeting from an event and you don’t have the time or resources to edit on a laptop. You can film short clips easily and edit them into a short sequence for social media within minutes.
When it comes to editing software, I find that the free iMovie app does everything that you’ll need it to do if you have an iPhone. There are apps available for Android phones, such as Kinemaster or Adobe Premiere Rush, but they are paid so if you are going to be doing a lot of editing, an iPhone will give you the best value for money.
Firstly, I would recommend mounting your phone onto a tripod before you start editing. This will make editing more user-friendly because your phone is fixed at a comfortable angle. Laying it on a table or your lap will make the process much fiddlier.
Once your phone is in a suitable position for editing, import all your video clips into the editing software, and then start thinking about the timeline, or ‘story’ of your video. To keep it simple, I’ll focus on a video which involves an interview with some cover shots overlaying the interview clip.
The first clip you should insert onto your timeline is the interview. The app will allow you to trim the start and the end of the clip, so the video begins when the person starts talking. If the interview involves several questions from the interviewer, you’ll then need to remove them. To do this, you can ‘split’ the clip into segments between the interviewer’s questions and then remove the bits you don’t want.
Next, you can insert your cover shots onto the timeline, known as ‘overlays’. You’ll need these to cover the sections of the interview clip you have removed, otherwise the interview will jump, and it will be obvious that the clip has been edited. The app will allow you to insert these clips on top of the interview so they will play over the top of the interviewee as they are speaking. You need to make sure that the overlay shots cover the gaps in the interview clip you edited earlier. They only need to be a few seconds long, or you can make a sequence of two or three clips together which lasts up to ten seconds. If you haven’t got any cover shots, you can add a transition, such as a fade, into the interview clip to prevent it from jumping.
My final tip is to add name straps, and if necessary, subtitles to your clip. Editing apps will allow you to create a caption which you can use to display the name and title/job role of the person being interviewed. The best place to add this is around three seconds into the video, and you can fade the caption in and out to make it look more professional.
If the video is going to be used on social media, you might want to think about adding subtitles too. Most people viewing social media videos are doing so without sound, so investing a bit of time adding subtitles is likely to mean that more people watch your video. The caption feature will allow you to do this too.
Once you’re happy with how your video looks, you can export it as an mp4 file into your phone’s video library, and you’ll then be able to upload it onto social media or YouTube.
If you need help with video content, contact us to find out what we can offer.
