Summary

This chapter has hopefully helped you to see editing in a new light – as a necessary process that is integral to the whole world of video production, from amateur to professional. Fundamentally, editing creates meaning.

To narrow down what is most important to focus on when editing your video, we covered the three key purposes of editing. These are to make a video coherent, so the story it tells makes sense; to make the video concise, so it tells its story efficiently; and to add meaning so that your story becomes richer and has more context. It’s important to ignore anything that doesn’t help you fulfill these principles. That way, you shouldn’t get waylaid or distracted when editing, which is especially important if you’re working toward a deadline.

We also learned about how clips are arranged in the timeline and how the timecode and playhead tell you what part of the video you are looking at. We edited a simple video using QuickTime Player, using trimming and splitting to remove unwanted sections, added new video and audio to the original file, and saved a new file with the edits completed. I hope you’ll now agree that every video tells a story. Thinking about how your narrative is communicated can help make your videos clearer and more impactful. In the next chapter, we will delve further into the idea of storytelling and video structure by looking at Magic Movie and Storyboards mode on iMovie for iOS and iPadOS.