You’ve filmed a YouTube video, movie, or shot a music video, and now it’s time for the other half of the battle: the post-processing stage. As with filming, this step requires a good mix of both creativity and technical knowledge.
Undoubtedly, editing entire webinar recordings is beneficial so parties who couldn’t attend during the live webinar can watch after the fact and get the entire experience.
Editing webinars and courses involves improving their quality, clarity, and engagement. It includes tasks like correcting errors, enhancing visuals, organizing content, and ensuring accessibility, ultimately delivering a better learning experience.
The crucial reasons for editing webinars and courses
- Quality Control: Editing ensures that the content is of high quality. This includes checking for audio and video clarity, removing background noise, and fixing technical glitches. High-quality content is more engaging and retains viewers’ attention.
- Clarity and Organization: Editing helps in structuring the content for better understanding. It involves rearranging, cutting, or adding sections to improve the flow of information. This ensures that learners can follow the material without confusion.
- Error Correction: Editing allows for the identification and correction of errors, whether they are factual inaccuracies, grammatical mistakes, or typographical errors. Accurate content builds trust with the audience.
- Engagement: Editing can enhance engagement by adding visuals, animations, or interactive elements. It also involves trimming unnecessary content, which keeps learners focused on the most relevant information.
- Branding and Professionalism: Editing can incorporate branding elements like logos and graphics, making the content look more professional. Consistency in branding across webinars and courses reinforces a brand’s image.
- Accessibility: Editing can include adding subtitles or transcripts to make content accessible to a wider audience, including those with disabilities or those who prefer text-based learning.
- Length Management: Webinars and courses often benefit from condensing information into a more digestible format. Editing helps in managing the length, ensuring that the content is neither too lengthy nor too brief.
- Feedback Incorporation: If a course or webinar has been delivered before, editing allows for the incorporation of feedback from previous sessions. This iterative process can lead to continuous improvement.
- Compliance: For educational institutions or businesses, editing ensures that the content complies with regulations, such as copyright laws, privacy policies, or industry standards.
- Audience Engagement: Tailoring content to the specific needs and interests of the audience is essential. Editing allows for personalization and adjustment of content to maximize audience engagement.
In summary, editing webinars and courses is relevant and important for delivering high-quality, accurate, engaging, and accessible content. It ensures that the material meets the needs of the audience while reflecting professionalism and compliance with standards.
How to prepare for editing
Choose the Right Software
The first step in improving your video editing process is to choose the right software for you and your work. They normally offer everything you need to perform standard video edits, but you may prefer one to others for their usability, digital interface, and features. The key here is to select what works for you and your editing style instead of just the latest, most advanced video editing program out there.
Well, look no further – the solution we’d like to suggest is a really versatile digital toolkit for producing quality multimedia content for a range of jobs, thanks to the cloud video editing features provided by HTML5 Video Editor.
Smart rendering (without complete re-coding), as well as additional options when overlaying sound, music, audio, adding text, graphics, and transitions, are a few of the editor’s main benefits.
HTML5 Video Editor is a video editor for the web. It is designed to function solely with Chromium-based cloud video editing browsers. Vivaldi, Torch, Microsoft Edge, SlimBrowser, Brave, Comodo Dragon, Epic Privacy Browser, and others are among the browsers that have been authorized.
Use a Fast Computer
No, we’re not about to pit PCs against MACs in this section. You can choose whatever computer brand or model you want, as long as it’s fast enough for you to store huge files and allows you to focus more on your editing work without having to worry about slow rendering.
Watch Video Editing Tutorials
YouTube, blogs, and educational websites are full of useful tutorials for creating great video content. Most of the tutorials you’ll find out there are free, which makes them even more accessible. Websites like Video Copilot, Skillshare, and Red Giant Tutorials offer lots of very specific tutorials to help you improve your video content. As you look for tutorials to achieve certain looks and complete specific tasks, target the software version of the program you’re using. Many companies adjust functionality and menu settings from version to version.
Obey the 321 Rule
Just like woodworkers learn from the start to measure twice and cut once, video editors using any program should practice the 321 rule. Keep three copies of everything you create in at least two different places, with one of those places physically separated from your other locations.
The main stages of editing
Post-production is the final stage of video creation. Once you’ve shot your footage, the finishing touches will need to be added to your film. The process can involve many individuals and teams, from sound mixers and voiceover artists to editors and color graders.
The 5 stages of video post-production
Post-production is a very detailed process involving many individuals, but it can be broken down into five distinct stages:
- Logging footage. You won’t want to lose your footage, so make sure it is saved and clearly labeled ahead of moving into the editing process. Depending on the length of the film and your computer processing power, this could take several days.
- Assembling footage. This is the beginning of the editing process. All the footage is gathered, and any substandard footage – outtakes, misread lines, staff in the back of the shot, for example – is deleted. Gather several takes from each individual scene into folders, labeled by scene name, for ease later. This whole process may take a few days. Footage from each scene is then placed into an ordered timeline as the film begins to take shape.
- Rough cut. A rough version of the film is edited together. This can easily take a couple of weeks, depending on your processing power and the number of editors involved. The timeline is cleaned up, with final takes of each scene chosen, and a rough edit put together. The post-production sound team will also work on the film at this stage, re-recording clearer voice acting, adding sound effects, and composing music.
- Fine cut. The film is tweaked and tightened up, and finalized scenes begin to take shape. Pay attention to each individual frame, making sure the film works together, and there are no obvious mistakes, such as changing costumes or changing camera angles.
- Final cut. The final cut is where all the remaining work takes place, including color grading and correction, motion graphics, and visual effects work ahead of release.
Post-production is the third and final stage of video creation. It’s a detailed process that involves many different services, skill sets, and types of professional software, all working together to create a final version of your video or film. Once your footage has been shot, you’ll enter the post-production phase of creation, editing your reels of film together and finalizing the look, sound, and feel of your film.
Creative editing approach
Effective filmmaking is not only about production – creating high-quality footage with solid lighting, camera, and sound techniques – but also about post-production, bringing your footage and additional elements together in the editing room.
While pre-production gives you your plan, and production gives you your footage, you really make your movie in post-production – editing.
A solid technical background is essential if you want to create a professional product, but these days, editors are supported by excellent digital software applications and newer editing techniques like non-linear editing. In this segment, we take a look at the most effective video editing techniques, new options for software editing, and when and how to use them. Master these edit types and make your videos more exciting with a style of your own.
Regular sizing
The most elementary kind of editing is the direct cut, in which one shot is immediately followed by another that picks up directly where the previous one left off. However, uncomplicated does not automatically mean unimaginative. Adding a lot of drama to the presentation is possible by starting a scene with a location being shown on a map and then suddenly cutting to a scene of a huge countryside or an enormous rock face. A hard cut can be used humorously, such as when a character emphatically states that he will never do something, and then, in the next frame, we see him doing it.
Transitions, Also called Cross-Dissolves or Cross-Fades
Cross-fades and cross-dissolves are common transitional techniques used by film filmmakers when they want to gradually cut from one shot to the next to represent the passage of time or some other kind of change. A nighttime scene could gradually transition into a morning scene.
Lessening the frequency of events
Cutting on action is a tried-and-true approach for making seemingly jarring cuts between shots feel natural. The audience won’t even notice the cut if it’s done smoothly, as in the case of showing a character strolling down a corridor before cutting to them reaching for a door and entering the next room.
Inserts or Cutaways, if You Prefer
To make it seem like one continuous shot when there are actually multiple takes or jump cuts, cutaways are a useful tool. As the name implies, you “cut away” from the main action to an insert or another interesting object, such as an approaching car. This method can be used for a variety of purposes, such as increasing tension by transitioning to a ticking clock while actors race against time or connecting multiple takes or sections of clips where you’ve deleted some frames. This is one possible application of the method.
Final thought
As a general rule, the more people involved in post-production, the greater the effort a director or producer must make to manage and coordinate everyone involved to achieve the intended result. Modern video software makes it possible for everything involved in post-production for many productions to be done by a single party. This helps you save a ton of time during production.