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How to Edit a Travel Video: 5 Essential Tips

Shooting a travel video is always a lot of fun, because you also enjoy a new country at the same time, besides the fact that you are working. You can see the most beautiful corners of the world, get a lot of cool emotions, and at the same time share your own experience with your audience.

But most people involved in travel video shooting face huge difficulties, not at the shooting stage but, on the contrary, during editing. This is because editing things like this can be very difficult. Not only that, most travel videos are edited by a huge team, which makes it almost impossible to be original. Moreover, the process is very tedious and time-consuming.

But not everything is as sad as you might think. People who have been in video editing for years will have no difficulty in creating a cool product quickly. This is because they know a lot of tricks that make the processing much easier. In this article, we will provide some tips to help you do video editing in an effortless way.

Best Video Editing Software for Travel Videos

Before moving on to the tips for video editing, you need to start with which video editing program to choose. Choosing the right video software is vital to creating great travel videos. If you are determined to create high-quality content, you should choose those programs that are popular in the market and offer a wide range of different processing functions. Good examples of such programs are FXhome, Lightworks, and Shotcut.

The difference between professional video software and other programs is enormous. Not only do they perform much better, but they are also more reliable and efficient. No longer break down in fits of rage when video software stalls or crashes. It also doesn’t make sense to carefully compose various parts of the video because the video software is very slow. Invest in quality video editing software and start making some cool travel videos.

Tips for Editing Travel Videos

#1 – Use Sound Effects to Enhance Your Visuals

One of the well-known facts is that audio and video have always been interconnected parts. That is why you can use the standard sound effects, your audio recording in the camera, or some foley you created in your garage to strengthen, inform, and stylize your video. But how can this be done? Below, there are several ways you can implement this principle.

  • Add trickling rain sound effects to the frame of some ominous gray clouds and then abruptly open the torrential downpour. That’s good foreshadowing.
  • Add an audio recording of two people talking about their love for muscle cars instead of showing a video of them working on muscle cars.
  • If you somehow haven’t managed to get any good sound of your subject walking in snow as they trekked a niveous bluff, you can stomp on cornstarch. This will be a good replacement.

#2 – Establish a Clear Point of Interest

Your audience needs to understand what they are looking at constantly. This is why you should shoot all of your footage in such a way that the audience has a clear point of interest, which will go a long way in a good, energetic video. And what about the editing?

If you have already decided how you are going to edit your travel video, i.e., how to compose your shots, there are a few things to consider. Once you’ve decided how to shape an object that interests you, you should always insert it on the right side of the frame. If your audience sees all the necessary objects in one place, that is, on the right side, it will be much easier for them to find this object in any frame.

Simply put, points of interest are much easier to find than others when they are in the same area in the frame.

#3 – Consider Using Stacked Timelines on Top of Each Other

Do you want to edit faster? Do you want to speed up your workflow? If so, then the principle of stacking timelines on top of each other should be used. It can be compared to pancakes. After all, you need a stack of timelines on top of each other, as well as a pancake on a plate. This method is quite popular with most video editors because it allows you to:

  • easily scrub through and see what kinds of clips you have
  • drag and drop chunks of one timeline onto another one

Some editors also use this method to separate A-roll and B-roll; some do it for selects and rough cuts. Well, you get the idea.

#4 – Ensure Seamless Transitions

There are many techniques from various editors to make transitions more fluid. But this little trick is very important because almost all “newbies” always make this mistake.

If you place two clips side by side, where one clip has camera movement and the other does not, everything will generally look like garbage to you. So, many will disagree with this statement because there are examples when such a situation does not occur. But most of the people who were able to do this did it unconsciously because if it were consciously, everything would look like garbage.

Therefore, if you want to include a snapshot in which there is no camera movement, you can always add a small part of the camera movement to this piece of video. You can try to crop in and add some position keyframes, add some motion blur, or create some handheld camera shake.

#5 – Find Your Video’s Rhythm

Everyone understands that you’re excited to show your audience what you shot, but you can’t do that until your video is ready. You should find the best rhythm and flow. It should start at a slow pace, gently helping the audience to plunge into the experience when hit a little harder and faster, ramp up the energy, increase the pacing until you gently ease it all back down again. Then you can go on the second circle in the same sequence.

Also, never forget about video quality. When uploading a video, make sure you select the maximum values—everything to ensure that your travel video is of the highest quality. There are also many video quality enhancer programs.

Conclusion

In the end, it should be said that travel video is a fairly popular type of content today, with the help of it you can attract a huge number of new audiences, but the creation of such videos is quite difficult, from filming in a foreign country to problems with video editing. That is why you need to look for new tricks to facilitate the video editing process. If you adhere to the tips that were described above in this article, you can speed up the video editing process several times.

Justin Stewart Cotta

Header image taken from: https://unsplash.com