Getting Started With Editing Your Videos For YouTube

If you’d prefer to watch the original live talk, you can check it out here: Getting Started With Editing Your Videos For YouTube – Live Talk Replay

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Where Do You Actually Get Started With Video Editing?

Making videos can be quite complicated. There are a whole bunch of different things you have to take into account — you need to make videos engaging for people, you need to add text, and just a whole bunch of stuff. It can be really confusing to figure out where you need to get started to make an awesome video. The honest thing is that if you want to start making a video, you do need software to edit. By all means you don’t have to use software at all and you can just upload raw video that you’ve recorded, but you do need to add a little bit of a sparkle — just something that changes the video and makes it a bit more interesting for people.

First of all, you need to pick an awesome program to get started. A lot of programs are paid, and I do use paid programs myself, but I also use an awesome free program which I’ll be talking about today. We’ll be going over iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and also a mystery one which I’ll talk about shortly — and I think all of you will 100% benefit from it because it is just such an awesome program. It’s even included with your Microsoft Office bundle as well, if you pay for Word and that sort of stuff.

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iMovie

iMovie is an awesome app that is free on your Apple device. If you’re an Apple user, it works on iPad and on your Mac. It has a whole bunch of transitions and effects, it is simple for importing videos, and you can export high quality videos — which is actually quite rare for video editing programs. A lot of programs that are free don’t let you output or render a high quality video, but iMovie actually allows you to render high quality videos. So that is iMovie, but let’s move on because I want to get to the proper one!

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Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro is the pro version of iMovie. It is a paid program but I love it so much and I use it all the time. It is Apple exclusive, which is a little bit of a shame, but it is honestly one of my favourite programs to edit with. There are a whole bunch of features you get with it — you get caption support, and they’ve recently added AI generated captions, so you know how lots of videos do those really cool animated captions at the bottom of the screen? You can do that now. You can also do a whole bunch of advanced editing, and there are loads of transitions as well. The big downsides are that it’s not free and it is also not available on Windows.

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Clipchamp — The Free Video Editor You Need to Know About

Now this is actually such a cool program. When I discovered it I was just amazed with how cool it is. It’s a program that works on the web and works on Mac, Windows, iPad — you name it. Anything that can access the internet, this program will work on. It is called Clipchamp. It’s actually probably already installed on your computer if you’re a Windows user. Clipchamp is an awesome tool, it’s similar to iMovie in a way, but it is the Windows version of a free video editor which has a whole bunch of tools you can use to make awesome videos.

One of the really cool features they’ve recently added is Auto Editing. Let’s say you record an hour of content — you can actually get Clipchamp to automatically cut quiet sections of your video and delete them. So if you have a video where you’re talking and there are sections of silence, the program will detect that with AI, automatically cut it out, and make your video a little bit more sharp. There are also loads of free transitions to keep people’s attention, whether you want a nice crossfade or a more colourful transition. I’m actually looking forward to doing a future event where I do a full walkthrough and show the live screen of how to use Clipchamp, with me actually editing a video in front of everyone.

Clipchamp is an awesome app and it’s getting even better. If you do pay for your Microsoft subscription you get the premium features, but the really good thing I like about this app is that they don’t really restrict things from you. The paid subscription just allows you to render slightly higher quality videos, but apart from that you get a whole bunch of great tools. It’s a program I love so much.

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What Does Clipchamp Look Like?

When you open the app for the first time after logging in, you’ll see a whole bunch of templates you can use — YouTube templates, Instagram, intro and outro, gaming, and all these little predefined things. These basically just change the setup of your video. For example, TikTok uses a vertical layout, whereas YouTube uses a horizontal layout. If you do record a vertical video it will automatically and dynamically change the editing style, which is super cool. There are so many templates that can help you get started with video editing.

The layout inside the editor is very familiar to other apps such as Premiere Pro, Final Cut, or even CapCut. On one side of the screen you have all of your importing media where you can add recorded videos, and they’ve got a seriously massive library of animated texts as well as a massive library of free to use media. So if you want sound effects for your videos or just some free media to use, they do have that. A little disclaimer — some of the stuff is paid for, but if you do pay for Microsoft you get all of that included for free. On the other side of the screen is where you can actually manipulate your video, so if you want to add a filter, slow down your video, or add effects. I personally use the blur effect — for example if you’re doing a video where you need to blur the background. You can also add a slow zoom in, which I’ve seen lots of videos online use to great effect.

They also have a great selection of transitions and I do use quite a lot of the awesome animated transitions in my own videos on my YouTube channel, UnderMyCap. The ones I especially like are called wipes — they do a nice little swipe across the screen from left to right or from bottom to top. There are a lot of great options available.

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Is There a Quality Limit on Clipchamp?

There is a limit unfortunately. If you don’t pay for Office 365, which is Microsoft’s subscription service, you can only export videos at 1080p 30 frames per second. But if you do have Word and all of that included — and I know some universities and schools do get that sort of stuff included in their subscription — you can export all the way up to 4K. What I’ve found is that 1080p 30 is perfectly fine, especially if you’re doing vertical videos, because the resolution is quite small on people’s phones anyway. If you’re doing really high definition videos you’d probably want to pay for that tier, but from my experience I’ve never had to pay for the app, so it’s a really good program.

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Can You Use Clipchamp on Mobile?

Clipchamp is available on Windows computers with a physical app you can download, and for any other device you can access Clipchamp through the web editor. So if you’re on a Mac, you can go to the Clipchamp website and all of the videos you’ve worked on in the Clipchamp program on your Windows computer will all sync across. They use OneDrive for storage. You can access Clipchamp basically everywhere you can access the internet — if you have Safari or Chrome, that sort of thing — which is really handy.

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What’s Coming Next?

Thank you so much to everyone who came along to this event. It was a short one and I do apologise that it was very quickly put together, but more events will be scheduled as I get back on track with everything. The next Cap Create event will be on how to use YouTube Studio — I’m going to be giving you a full insight into my actual YouTube Studio, showing you all of the ins and outs of how to use the analytics tab, and really breaking down everything I know about YouTube. I can’t wait to see you at the next event!