In part one of this two-part article series, we considered five skills you need to edit training videos. Here, we’ll continue with five more skills that can help you create more engaging and effective training videos.
Skill 6: Adjusting Volume
It is completely possible that you may need to alter the volume of your training videos because someone was too close or too far from their microphone.
When editing training videos, there’s have multiple layers of audio you can deal with. These are called audio channels and they are typically numbered. There are audio sliders that allow you to adjust the volume for each channel. There is also a main slider that affects the volume of the overall video. So, if you have two channels of audio, you will have three sliders — one for each channel and a master.
On the channel meter, you will see the green, yellow and red levels that occur when audio plays through that channel. Your target is for the audio to mostly land just inside the yellow. If you can adjust the channel to hit this mark and it is still too loud, look to your main volume. Lower that so it hits just inside the yellow area, and you should be good. Also, check your computer volume and your headphone volume (if your using headphones). It’s possible that you’re not hearing the audio properly because of these settings.
If you have two people speaking in a video and one is louder and the other is softer, you can use the different channels to address this. Simply cut your audio, like you do the video, and move the audio of the different speakers to different channels. Then, you can lower one and raise the other without impacting the other.
One more thing to know about audio is that typically audio and video channels are linked. When you move one on the timeline, the other will move with it. If you want to separate audio and video from each other, so they are independent of one another, you must unlink them. You make this selection at the bottom of the right-click menu.
Skill 7: Adding Music to Your Video
Most likely, given the style of videos that your subject matter expert (SME) provided in the scenario at the beginning of this article, you will not need to add background music to your video. That doesn’t mean you won’t ever want to do so.
After you have imported your music to your project file, simply drag it to an empty audio channel on your timeline. Then, reduce the volume of that channel to a level that meets the requirements of your video. Be very careful with this if you have spoken audio tracks already in place. You need the music volume to be much lower than your spoken audio. You need to hear people’s voices and not be distracted by the music.
Don’t be surprised if, from a creative standpoint, you need to try out several different pieces of music during the creation process. Many times, music that sounds good on its own doesn’t actually work within the video you are creating. Don’t get frustrated and keep trying different pieces and styles. You may be surprised by what works for your video and what doesn’t.
Skills 8 and 9: Zooming in on Your Video and Adjusting the X and Y-axis
This skill is a little more advanced and becomes important when you consider the video your SME provided of a “cameras-on” discussion. When you look at a video like that, you see lots of people’s faces and one of them is talking. The others are typically staring at their cameras and listening. Then another person speaks, and this format repeats throughout the video. It can get boring to a viewer, and it may be difficult to identify who is talking. Therefore, it would be valuable for you, the editor, to focus the video on the person speaking.
In the Properties of the segment of video, you have three Transform settings:
- Zoom – This does just that. It zooms in or out on the video. In a 3D space, this is called the Z-axis.
- Position X – This shifts the video to the left or right, along the X-axis.
- Position Y – This shifts the video up and down, along the Y-axis.
This allows you to find the person speaking, zoom in on them, so they fill the screen, and then shift the video left, right, up, or down, to allow it to fill the screen.
Here’s the important thing to know about this feature. It does this for the whole clip you have selected. So, when you are ready to jump to the next speaker, you need to make a cut in the video to make a new clip and then adjust that one. Repeat this for each clip where a person is speaking. To simplify this process, if you know there is a primary speaker, it would be valuable for you to set up the X, Y and Z-axis positions for the main speaker first. This way, it affects the whole video. Then, you can make your cuts where needed and adjust for the secondary speakers when necessary. It also may be valuable to you to capture these positions on a post-it note so you can repeat them if you are working back and forth between two speakers.
When zooming into your video, it works like zooming into photos. If the image is a low-quality image to start with, zooming in makes it look a lot worse. This is a function of the quality of the video, not a function of the tool. If you start with low-quality video, you won’t be able to improve it during this process. I say this because not all web cameras are high-quality and it is possible that you will get video recordings from online meetings that are lower quality. The best way to address this problem is by getting speakers better cameras before the meeting even happens. You might be forced to work with what you are given, so you should be aware of this limitation. If you aren’t satisfied with the result, don’t force this capability onto your videos.
If you go back and think about Skill 4 – Adding Titles, this is the exact same way you would move titles around on the screen. Therefore, if you have this skill, you can apply it to both situations.
Skill 10: Publishing Your Video to .MOV or .MP4
How do you tell Resolve what parts of your project you want to publish? If you are cutting a larger video into smaller chunks, you don’t want to publish the whole thing. You just want segments. You do this with in and out points. Basically, you put your playhead at the start of your segment and press I on your keyboard for the in-point. Then, move your playhead to the end of your segment and press O on your keyboard to create an outpoint.
Then, from the File menu, select Quick Export. By default, Resolve publishes to a .MOV format for its Quick Export feature. It asks you for a location to save the published video and you click Export. It gives you a countdown till it’s done, and that’s it. You can expect a 10-minute video to take about 10-15 minutes depending on your computer’s processing speed. Once you complete one Quick Export, you simply create the next set of in and out points for the next segment and repeat the process.
If you specifically need an MP4, there is a little more to it and that is outside the scope of this article. But, along the bottom of the screen are several icons that represent workspaces within Resolve. You can publish different formats in the workspace identified with the rocket ship. You choose your settings, validate your in and out points, and put it into your render queue. Then, you render your video.
Conclusion
With the 10 skills outlined in this article series, you should be well-equipped to get started editing training videos. Knowing that you can ignore most of the complex interface and menu items in a video editor can be a liberating experience. (I have seen enough people open a video editor excited to create a video and get so intimidated that they just close the application and never go back.)
Of the things mentioned in this article, you can install Resolve and learn how to perform about three of them and be a functional editor for what you need to accomplish. Those three are:
- Import media for your project.
- Make basic cuts between clips.
- Publish your video.
Any of the other skills simply make your videos just a little bit cleaner and more polished.
Register for the next in-person Training Industry Conference & Expo (TICE) to hear Barry Nadler’s session, “Top 10 Video Editing Skills an L&D Professional Needs To Know.”
