5 easy iPhone video editing tips to make your footage stand out
Let’s talk video. Whether filming something for school, work or a cute little clip to send to friends and family, you have plenty of tools to get the footage you want. Best of all, they are built right into your iPhone.
We have some essential video editing tips to make your videos stand out.
1. The right time to cut corners
Let’s say you’re taking a video of yourself for a presentation or birthday greeting. The lighting is good, and you composed a touching message. Aside from the awkward beginning when you were trying to position the phone for a good angle, it’s perfect. And then you knocked the entire thing down when you went to stop the recording.
This is where video trimming comes in handy. You can cut out the first and last few seconds of any video. It’s also helpful when your video is too long for posting on social media and you just need the good part. Perhaps you want to cut it down to reduce the file size before sharing it through text or email.
Here’s how to trim a video:
- Open the Photos app and tap the video that you want to edit.
- Tap Edit.
- Move the sliders on both sides of the video timeline to change the start and stop times. To preview your trimmed video, tap the play button.
- Tap Done, then tap Save Video or Save Video as New Clip.
NOTE: Save Video saves only the trimmed version of the video. Save as New Clip keeps the original version and saves an additional trimmed version in your library.
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2. Adjust light and color
Let’s get back to the basics. You can change the look of a video to bring out details or change the mood. Your iPhone provides all the basic settings you’ll find in any photo or video editing software:
- Open the video you want to edit and tap Edit in the upper-right corner.
- On the bottom of the screen, you’ll see icons for Video, Adjust, Filters and Crop.
- Tap the second icon, which looks like a dial, and you can fiddle with the Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Contrast, Brightness and more. There’s also an Auto setting with its own slider to adjust the strength of the automatic edit.
- Tap Done when you’re finished.
3. Change the mood with filters
You can change the mood and style of a picture or video by simply adding a filter. You can change the color temperature or go monochrome.
- Open the video you want to edit and tap Edit in the upper-right corner.
- The third icon, which looks like three circles, contains the Filters. You can change the photo’s warmth or slide all the way to the end for black-and-white options. There’s even a Dramatic option. Each filter has a slider to adjust its strength.
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4. Crop, straighten and rotate your video
The fourth icon on the editing screen looks similar to most cropping tools. You have lots of options here.
- Open the video you want to edit and tap Edit in the upper-right corner.
- On the bottom of the screen, tap the Crop icon (the last one on the right).
- On the top-left, you’ll see buttons to mirror the video or rotate it.
- On the top-right is an icon that looks like a series of boxes within each other. Tap it and you’ll get options to change the aspect ratio to a square, 16:9, 4:3, freeform and more.
- Is your video off-kilter? Tap the straighten button underneath the video, which looks like a circle with a line through it. Adjust the slider until you have the angle you want.
- Tap Done when you’re finished.
5. A new perspective
Let’s say you shoot a tall building from the ground. Because you’re shooting upwards, you end up with a video where the lines converge towards the top. You can change the perspective to make the lines more symmetrical and natural.
- Open the video you want to edit and tap Edit in the upper-right corner.
- On the bottom of the screen, tap the Crop icon (the last one on the right).
- Tap the middle icon, which looks like a trapezoid with a vertical line, to adjust the vertical perspective.
- Tap the third icon, which looks like a trapezoid with a horizontal line, to adjust the horizontal perspective.
- Tap Done when you’re finished.
Bonus tip
We all make mistakes. That’s what undo buttons are for. In the case of your iPhone, it’s called something else, but it has the same function:
- Open the video you edited and tap Edit in the upper-right corner.
- Tap Revert in the bottom-right corner to remove all your changes.
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Tags: Apple iPhone, cropping, editing, Facebook, filters, footage, lighting, presentation, school, settings, social media, tips and tricks, video, video editing, work, YouTube
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