Video editing for beginners: timeline basics in plain words

Video editing for beginners is mostly learning one screen: the timeline. Your clips sit on it from left to right in the order they play, stacked on tracks like layers, with a vertical line called the playhead marking the moment you're looking at. Editing means trimming the ends of clips, splitting them to remove the bits you don't want, putting them in order, levelling the sound and adding captions. Every editor uses the same ideas, so once they click, any app will feel familiar.

The parts of a video timeline

Here is the whole vocabulary you need. Different apps use slightly different names, but the parts are always there.

time  0s        5s        10s       15s       20s
      |         |         |    ▼    |         |
TEXT                [ Title ]                       
CAPS  [ Hi, I'm Sam ][ Today: sourdough ][ Step one ]
VIDEO [ intro clip  ][ kitchen wide    |  close up  ]
AUDIO [ voice .......................................]
MUSIC [ music, quiet, fading in ............ fading ]
                               ▲ playhead

How to edit a video, in order

Beginners often polish the first five seconds for an hour and never finish. Work in passes instead, from rough to fine. Each pass only does one thing.

1. 1

   Gather and watch everything

   Import all your clips and watch them once. Note the good takes. Don't edit yet.

2. 2

   Rough cut

   Drag the good takes onto the timeline in order. Too long and messy is fine at this stage.

3. 3

   Tighten

   Trim the start and end of every clip. Split out pauses, false starts and repeated sentences. Most videos get much shorter here.

4. 4

   Sound

   Level the voice so it's steady, add music under it, and fade music in and out.

5. 5

   Captions and titles

   Add captions, a title at the start and any on screen labels. Check spelling of names and numbers.

6. 6

   Watch it through, then export

   Watch once without stopping, on a phone if that's where it will be seen. Fix what jars, then export.

How to trim and split a video

Trimming and splitting are most of editing. To trim, select a clip and drag its left edge right to start it later, or its right edge left to end it sooner. Nothing is deleted from your original file; the editor simply plays less of it, so you can drag the edge back if you cut too much.

To remove something in the middle of a clip, split it. Move the playhead to the start of the bad bit and split, move to the end and split again, then delete the small piece between. Close the gap so the two good halves meet. A cut that jumps on the same shot is called a jump cut; on social video it is normal, and it keeps pace up.

Audio basics for beginners

Viewers put up with a soft picture far longer than with bad sound. Three adjustments solve most problems.

• Voice first. Set the speech so it's comfortably loud and even across clips; raise quiet takes and lower loud ones.
• Music well under. Background music should sit clearly below the voice. If you have to strain to hear words, lower it further.
• Fade, never chop. Fade music in over a second at the start and out over two or three at the end. A sudden stop sounds like a mistake.
• Mute what you don't need. Turn off the sound of cutaway clips that only add noise.

Only use music you have the rights to: tracks you have licensed, or the libraries the platform or your editor provides for that purpose.

Add captions to a video

Captions make a video work with the sound off and for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. You can type them on the timeline, one short line per caption, or import a caption file. The two common formats are SRT and WebVTT (.vtt): plain text files with a start time, an end time and the words for each line. YouTube accepts both, so keeping a caption file saves retyping.

Video captions goes deeper on styling, and talking head videos shows where captions sit in a vertical frame.

Export settings that just work

Keep the frame rate you filmed at; frame rate explained covers why. For formats, see MP4 vs WebM, and for every platform frame, social media video sizes.

Editing on Gradiently's timeline

Gradiently's timeline, part of Pro, is built for exactly this kind of short video. Import MP4, WebM, MP3, M4A, WAV or Ogg files, or record your camera, screen or voice, and they land on video, audio and caption tracks. Drag edges to trim, with nearby edges snapping together, split at the playhead, change speed and volume, fade in and out, and loop a clip. Import or type captions, then download them as SRT or VTT. Your clips sit inside a design, so titles, your Mark and every other element stay editable while you cut.