Lesson 3: Editing Tools and Techniques
Lesson 3
So, by now you know a little bit about the program and about editing. You also hopefully have some footage to use to practice editing with now. If not, I highly suggest you get something soon! If you really need it, I can supply you some footage, though it's better to get your own since doing so forces you to acquire it and therefore know the content of the footage better, as well as your overall goal you want it to achieve.
This lesson is going to focus primarily on all the various editing techniques you can apply in WLMM. This will start with the basics of learning each tool and option and what it does, but will eventually lead into using techniques together to make something you couldn't do with one thing alone. The next lesson will go over some out of program techniques and FYI type information, and any other misc. topics to cover before the final project.
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Let's jump right into this. By now you have a good understanding of where important things are. We'll fill in the gaps now.
Start in the Home tab. Let's go over everything else here.
You have your basic Paste/Cut/Copy on the left. The normal shortcuts for these work on items in the filmstrip area.
Next are two buttons to Add videos and photos and Add music. You'll mainly just need to use Add music, since this is the only place to choose that (you can right click the project area of the filmstrip and add videos from there too, but not audio/music). Audio is a separate item in the project area from the video. The only other thing that is separate from both of those is Text overlay, which we will get to in a moment. Photos imported are considered video clips, and are aligned with them.
Next are the options to make a Webcam video, Record Narration, or take a Snapshot. I have never used the former two, but the Snapshot tool is actually very helpful. We will get into the specific editing technique soon, but when you want a stillframe shot for any reason, you can get that from any video clip in the project by just pausing it on the frame you want. MM will save the snapshot as a new picture and automatically import it into your project once saved.
After these you will see Title, Caption, Credits. Clicking Title or Credits automatically inserts a 7 second long black background video clip at the very beginning or very end of your video. Caption adds just a text object. Try each of them so you can see what I mean, especially how Text is considered its own layer. Misc Note: I sometimes like to insert a title and remove its text object, and just use the blank black frame to separate chunks of my video. It's purely a visual reference for early stages of editing and I of course remove it before the final product.
The next panel to the right is AutoMovie Themes. You should really never use this as doing manual themes is always better.
The last important tools here are the Rotation and Remove/Select All. Each should be pretty self explanatory. Rotation will rotate the view of selected clips 90 degrees one way or the other. Remove is the same as right clicking the filmstrip and removing it from there, or hitting delete.
The rest to the right are unimportant, you can use Save Movie here if you would like, but the Sharing options are essentially useless and I don't care to use them. I prefer to manually save the video file when done, and upload to youtube from the raw file and not through WLMM, since video editing isn't completely done even after rendering half the time.
Let's go back to the Add Audio/Music and do just that. For now, it doesn't have to be any audio you will definitely use in your final video, but let's add it so we can see it juxtaposed in the filmstrip.
http://i.imgur.com/kshRpTd.png
Notice the new item in the project area under the filmstrip. The green section is your audio. It also has the waveforms for a small visualization of volume at any given point.
Now look at the top and notice the new Music Tools tab, next to the Video Tools tab. Select it and look at the options.
On the left is a slider for adjusting the volume of the selected audio clip. Anything imported for the first time starts right in the middle of the slider, giving you freedom to completely mute it or make it louder as needed.
Next is the Fade In/Fade out feature. Self explanatory as well, here it allows you to choose between a slow, medium, or fast fade for the audio. One for the beginning of the audio clip, and one for the end. You will have to experiment with which fade option is best for your audio on a case by case basis. Generally though, slow fade in is good for intros, fast fade in is good for stuff in the middle of the video, and medium is a good in between for anywhere.
You will also notice the Split tool here as well. Remember this one is for the SELECTED AUDIO, so moving that gray slider bar on the filmstrip over an area and hitting Split here will only split the AUDIO at that point. If you want to split video and audio at the same point, you just pause in the same place and go to each Video and Audio tab to split. You will notice when splitting audio that it behaves much the same as splitting a video clip.
http://i.imgur.com/9WTMIfh.png
http://i.imgur.com/F9DdexN.png
Next are some tools to set the start time/start point/end point of your audio. Sometimes, especially with music/songs, the part of the song you want to use is in the middle somewhere. Or you just don't want to use the whole song, or only a specific part, etc. Using this allows you to split the audio based on a timestamp. This is pretty useful for quick audio editing if you know exactly what time you want to split at, but I generally find it faster and more specific when I manually split the audio using the split tool and dragging through the audio as I listen to it on the filmstrip.
Next, go back to the Home tab and add a Title to our movie.
http://i.imgur.com/nD9nLnk.png
http://i.imgur.com/ZEUVN26.png
You will notice the black title clip and associated text appear before your selected video clip in the filmstrip, as well as another new tab at the top next to the Music Tools called Text Tools. Let's check it out.
If you first go to the video preview panel on the left, you can click somewhere right in the middle to make the text box show up for editing. When you first insert a caption, it is invisible until you do this and add your own text.
http://i.imgur.com/pkv7hci.png
http://i.imgur.com/8m107mV.png
You won't always be using the built in text tool for your actual text, as usually doing it outside the program will yield more awesome stuff than the limited text creator in here. If you just want simple text aesthetics though, this tool will do just fine, and will use any installed extra fonts you may have.
In the top panel you will now notice some familiar text editing basic tools. A font dropdown menu, Bold, Italics, font color, font size, etc. You can play around with these depending on how you want your text to look. Generally if you just want some simple text, you need change no more than color, size and maybe font style.
The most important tool for text is the Text Duration option. By default all created text is 7 seconds long. You can click the dropdown menu to select different times, or click in the box itself and enter your own time, which allows you more specific times (down to decimals/milliseconds). Text Duration is simply how long the text remains visible before disappearing, another thing you can see visually on the filmstrip that is directly related to how long the pink text item is there.
http://i.imgur.com/2QCJWgA.png
Last important thing in line here is a panel with animation choices for text. You can try each yourself if interested, the picture for each one gives a general idea of what each animation does. Most are pretty simple, fades or scrolling text animations.
The last things we will be looking at are the Animations and Visual Effects. Start with Animations tab near the left. The first panel on the left contains all the different animations you can select for a video clip. You can scroll through and try whichever ones you want. Some of the best ones though are usually the most simple, I use simple fades more often than anything else, and sometimes no animations at all. These are effectively transitions between clips, and sometimes putting too much into a small transition just overcomplicates it.
http://i.imgur.com/XWtUzYl.png
The panel on the right adds a little extra to the animations, with options to pan & zoom the camera through the video clip. Generally these ones don't add much to the video clip, and are pretty situational. They're better used with titles or text of some sort and usually not raw gameplay footage. In any case, it's very situational, so don't get in the habit of trying to utilize it, if it doesn't feel like it works the first time, it probably won't ever.
http://i.imgur.com/RNwvAaY.png
The last tab we will look at is the Visual Effects tab, just to the right. These are all also pretty self explanatory once you mouse over each and read it's description, and they can add some useful effects to the selected video clip. Some are generally useless, as they can take a lot more away visually from a clip than they add, but even then they are pretty situational. You will still most likely use the simple ones most often, ones for black and white filter, blur, or fades (again). I have never used the ones that add the silver-ish cinematic overlays, as those are very basic and a telltale sign of using WLMM. We want you to be able to make a video someone can't tell was made with such a simple program, and those cinematic effects are really not that good and just scream WLMM.
http://i.imgur.com/jEkK7JV.png
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That's everything in program you will be able to use for editing. It really isn't much when you look at it all together, but it's still pretty potent once you get the hang of how to use it all. We'll soon be looking at putting it all together to make a lot from a little and get a great video out of it.
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Originally Posted by Flinn
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