Before you upload videos to social media you’re going to want to cut and trim them. As much as that might seem simple, the manner in which you cut your videos can have a big impact on how they turn out.
While learning the ins and outs of cutting videos for social media will take time, as a start there are a few mistakes that you should try to avoid:
1. Disjointing the audio
As much as you are focused on cutting your video, you must not forget that the audio is part of that video as well. All too often beginners tend to try to find the perfect moment to transition the video alone, and end up cutting the audio mid-sentence, mid-word, or in the middle of any sound.
The good news is that this is an easy mistake to avoid: Just edit your video with the audio turned on. If you can’t find a suitable moment to cut both the audio and the video together, you can always use an L cut or J cut to preserve its flow.
2. Joining videos that aren’t uniform
When you join video clips that aren’t uniform the difference between them can make the video quite jarring. Some of the more noticeable mistakes made in this regard are joining clips in different aspect ratios, orientations, frame rates, or resolutions.
However it also applies to other areas, such as the position of the horizon in a scene, color balance, and so on. In short you should try to make your social media videos look as uniform as you can if you want it to be smoother and more engaging – period.
3. Using jump cuts
Jump cuts are fairly common in social media videos, and using them is almost always a mistake. The fact of the matter is that they are jarring, and tend to drive down engagement levels.
It is generally best to not use jump cuts and to instead insert cutaways to B-roll footage in between clips to avoid the jump. However that may not always be an option and if you don’t have any B-roll footage to cut to your best bet may be to crop and reframe one clip so that it looks visually different from the other.
4. Leaving flash frames in the video
A flash frame is a few frames of video that are accidentally left in when the video is cut. Because they remain in the video they ‘flash’ onto the screen momentarily – which as you can imagine is extremely jarring and confusing.
The best way to make sure that there are no flash frames in your social media video is to carefully review it periodically. If you want to be really careful you could scroll through the area near the cut frame by frame to make sure there’s nothing left in – though in most cases this isn’t necessary and you should be able to notice even a single stray flash frame.
It is up to you whether you want to edit and cut your social media videos right away, or would prefer to first use a video trimmer to remove the parts that you definitely don’t want. The latter can be more convenient at times, and for example you could use the online cut video web app.
If you are able to avoid the mistakes described above the impact on your social media videos should be fairly noticeable. After that you can start to experiment with other techniques and types of cuts to improve them further and hone your skills.
