Quick Pointers for Training Video Editors
Here are some quick pointers to help the novice editor get better results out of a training production.
> As mentioned before, start by grading everything into folders/buckets
> Know the footage. There is no substitute for knowing the video footage inside out. With a voxpop training video this can mean knowing over 100 clips – inside out. We didn’t say great editing was easy!
> Aim for smoothness and flow. Dramatic effects often break the spell on the audience and disturb how they absorb the training message, so be careful with these. Smoothness ensures the audience stay watching and listening, which is the objective of training video.
> Listen with your eyes shut and listen to the spoken story. Judge the sound and the message with eyes closed. Listen to the pace. Is is smooth and easy to absorb? Or is it jerky? Keep editing until it’s smooth. Editing the sound so it flows will often mean re-editing the pictures too, so expect to do this. This especially applies to vox pops, but really applies to all footage in a training video.
> Choreograph to a music track. I knew a senior award-winning television editor who used to play music in his headphones while editing, tapping his feet to give a hidden rhythm to the timeline. Great links between visuals and music is important, and rhythm is part of this.
> Sustain a continuous smooth flow in audience conscious. Don’t let your training video feel jerky, like a newspaper reader on a train flitting aimlessly from story to story.
> Use good taste. It’s easy to want to put something vivid or dramatic into the production of a training video to liven it up. But never at the expense of good taste. Clients won’t allow this sort of clanger.
> When chroma keying, aim for graphics and the post-production colourising to create a thematic unity. For example if a person was wearing a blue suit against a blue graphic background, then colour match so the two blues were related. If the background is red, then find a red in the VIP’s tie, and colour match to that, and so on. Colour matching will make chroma keying look less stuck-on, and more natural. Most edit suites can do this, though many video editors don’t bother or don’t know. Also try using a double shadow, close and distant, to enhance the look of chroma keyed subjects. Your production will look better for this television-like pro approach.
> Use scoop eq when editing music against voice, By first using an a graphic equaliser to identify the main frequencies in a voice, you can use your graphic eq to cut these frequencies quite sharply in the accompanying music track. This allows you to have quite loud music, while still hearing the voice clearly, which is more exciting. Who said training videos can’t have punchy soundtracks!
> Compress all audio at the final output stage. 2:1 to 4:1 are suitable ratios for typical video compression ratios to deliver maximum punch while keeping the sound lively. It’s an in-house joke among audio editors that compression makes things sound 5% better. And always use a limiter set at -0.1dB to avoid accidental overshoots and consequent distortion.
> Use noise reduction software on talking heads and voxpops, if you you see the ambient sound level as noise. Quiet backgrounds can make a training video production feel quite slick.
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