If you are producing video content for your blog, you will need to become better at cutting your videos. To be more specific you will want your cuts to look smooth as you transition between clips, and avoid jarring viewers.
Unfortunately that isn’t as easy as it sounds. In order to cut videos smoothly you need to carefully go over the content of the video, get the timing just right, use the right types of cuts, and much more.
That being said there are a few ways that you can start to cut blog video content more smoothly that will prove useful:
Make sure the footage is color corrected
One of the reasons many blog videos look quite jarring when they cut between clips is because the colors aren’t consistent. That can be fixed quite easily by color correcting the video footage before you start to cut it together, or color grading it in a uniform manner.
If the colors in a particular clip are drastically off and you can’t seem to fix them, you may want to trim out that part – or not use the clip.
Use action cuts and match cuts
Both action cuts and match cuts can help you to transition between clips much more smoothly. In action cuts you will match the same movement taking place across two clips, whereas in match cuts you will want to find visually similar elements, movement, or sound to cut on.
For both these types of cuts the goal is to link the clips so that viewers remain focused and don’t take as much notice of the cut itself. Although match cuts will provide you with more options than action cuts, they are more difficult to use.
Do not use jump cuts
Jump cuts are definitely not smooth, and in fact they are very jarring. However they are commonly found in videos, especially where you trim out part of the middle of a clip for the sake of brevity or to remove unwanted footage.
As a rule however you should avoid using jump cuts as far as possible, and should instead cut to B-roll footage and then cut back to the original video if need be. If that isn’t an option, you could reframe one part of the video or zoom in so that it is visually different.
Keep in mind that to use these methods you will need to also keep them in mind when you trim your video with a video cutter. For example if you use the cut video web app you should plan ahead and decide on the best point to trim it so that you can join it with other clips later.
The more you experiment and try cutting videos in different ways, the better you’ll get at it. With practice you should be able to use the methods above to make sure your blog video content is much smoother and able to retain more viewers as a result.
