Editing is a crucial stage of the production process; an edit can affect the pacing, emotion and even the plot of a film or video. To help anyone starting out as an editor, we’ve compiled a few simple tips to make things a little bit easier:

• Where is that clip?!: There’s nothing worse than losing that all-important clip, to avoid this, go through all your footage before you even start editing and name them all based on what happens in the clip. This is called ‘logging’, and it will make editing a whole lot easier.

• Keep it simple: Often simplicity is the answer, unless you’re using an industry standard piece of software (Adobe Premiere, Final Cut etc.) stay away from the jazzy effects, comedy fonts and cheesy transitions, unless you’re aiming for a 1980s music video feel, these will more than likely cheapen your video.

• Keep it short: The shorter the better rule applies in most cases, people have short attention spans and if you can do a better job at conveying your story and message in five minutes as opposed to ten, then do it in five. It may be painful cutting the shot that took you all day to set up, but if it doesn’t add anything, it’s got to go!

• Edit, and edit, and edit…: Similar to how the first draft of a script is rarely the one that makes it to the screen, your first edit will seldom be the finished product; show it to people (mainly the people involved in making it) get feedback and do a couple of rough edits before finishing it and making the final video file.