TED blog: 10 tips for editing video

TED by Kari Mulholland

The techniques that video editors use to shape their content reveal a lot about how people create meaning in the world. Editors have a deep understanding of how people think, feel, remember and learn, and we use this knowledge to build powerful, moving stories and experiences. The best editing decisions come from empathy — both for the people who exist virtually on the screen and for the audience watching them.

The TED Talk editing toolkit is small when compared to ones used to cut a narrative feature or documentary. And that’s why it’s a good place to start as an introduction to the art of editing. We use continuity editing to maintain a consistent feeling of space and time over the duration of the talk. But overall, we strive to keep our edits invisible. What does that mean, exactly? I’ll make the invisible visible by editing a short excerpt from a TED Talk badly.

Now, compare that to the same excerpt edited competently.

What made the first excerpt so uncomfortable to watch was that the edits were unmotivated; every edit was random. Here are ten tips for making meaningful edits:

Choose the best camera angles for each moment. As you look at your footage, your goal is to balance speaker intent with the expectations of the web audience. Think about where the audience would want to be looking at different points during the talk if they were in the room — that will help you select the best camera angle to reconstruct each moment. By thinking about that, you are also choosing angles that help the speaker better express his or her story. read more...