Skip to Main Content

The Basics of Video Editing: The Complete Guide


Last week we learned the basics of video editing, covering everything from the general workflow to special effects and color correction to a primer on encoding and delivery. Here's the complete guide with all the videos and notes in one convenient location.

These lessons concentrate primarily on editing video in Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro, but that doesn't mean they won't be helpful for other editing software. The idea behind having the lessons with both applications is to demonstrate that when you learn one editing application it's pretty easy to learn another. Most of the stuff is the same, and these lessons mainly concentrate on the sorts of things all video editing software can do. We'll get a little application-specific at times, but you'll get an idea of how different applications tackle the same problems. If you want to learn Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro, that's great, but if you'd prefer to learn other editing software you shouldn't feel like these lessons don't apply to you, too.

Part I: Getting to Know Your Editing Environment

Before you get started editing any video in a professional, you need to understand your environment. In our first lesson, we'll take a look at all the windows and tools in Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro so you know what you're dealing with. More...

Part II: Creating a Project, from Start to Finish

Now that you know your editing environment, you can start editing. In this lesson, we'll create a project from scratch, perform some minor edits, and take a quick peek into exporting out projects. More...

Part III: Effects and Color Correction

Special effects and color correction are some of the more fun parts of video editing because you get to manipulate the picture and create some pretty neat, visually-appealing effects. While we're not going to learn to be special effects masters in this lesson, we'll take a look at basic color correction and effects that you can pick up pretty quickly to create some awesome results. More...

Part IV: Preparing and Encoding Your Video for Delivery

In our last lesson, we'll get your footage ready for delivery by learning about the built-in video export methods in both Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. We'll also spend half the lesson discussing encoding, how it works, and how you can create your own encoding specifications to achieve better results with your exported video.More...

Part V: Additional Resources

If you want to keep learning more about video editing, here are some additional resources and additional video editing options to help you out. More...

Lastly, if you want all the notes for this lesson in a PDF file, you can download it here.