Today, we are talking about how you can edit videos faster and be more effective with your time!

Let’s jump right into it!

As with every good video project, you’ll shoot all of your A-Roll to tell your story and tons of B-Roll to complement that A-Roll. Now, a huge time waster when putting videos together is when you don’t have a clear vision of your videos direction. To solve this and bring clarity to your editing — we created the CSS process. C.S.S. stands for Clips, Sound, and Story. This will make things easier and faster

First, let’s look at Clips!

Once you’ve imported all your footage, you may want to start creating trendy visuals and drop clips into the timeline as time goes on, but this can be a huge time-wasting process!

We recommend first going through all your footage right after you import it. And, when we say “all” the footage, we really mean all of it. This will be from the first to the last clip. Now, I can see how you would think that this is a huge waste of time, but what you are doing is laying the foundation and creating clarity for your project. While you are going through this footage, create an in and out point on each clip, and lay them in a separate timeline that you can later pull from when you are placing together the main story. This is going to help you visualize your edits and allow you to make better compositing decisions.

Next, let’s look at Sound.

This part is super easy! Choose a song that will best suit your video, and the mood you or your client is going for. We are subscribed to Artlist.io, and that’s where we find all our music for our videos. So bring in your audio, and get ready to start laying down tracks and clips.

Now for the last step, Story.

This is the fun part. Now that you have all your clips ready, it’s time for you to start piecing your story together. You’ll find that this goes from a huge guessing game, to a simple and creative tango! Because you’ve seen each clip firsthand, you’ll know exactly what you are working with, allowing you to compost faster and edit more effectively. Once you start using this simple process, you’ll find your editing time going down, and your video quality going up!

So thats about it! Simple right? Even though it seems super simple alot of creators struggle with this when they first start to create so remember C.S.S. for your next video project and let us know if it works for you!

Don’t forget to check out our next post on how we deal with choosing the right clips for your videos. You can stay updated with all our new posts and videos here on our blog, on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Soundcloud. You can also get notified when we release new content and get acess to our free tools for creators by signing up for our newsletter below.