How To Edit a Video The Easy Way
Editing Video For Magicians and Entertainers
Whether it’s promotional videos or the traffic generating FAQ mini interviews that you were introduced to back in the ‘Essential Video and Youtube for Magicians‘ post or my over 150 Julian’s Magician School videos or my over 250 Build Your Magic Show video tutorials, my editing program of choice is Camtasia.
The strangest thing about this is that Camtasia is not really a video editing program as you would expect. It’s primary design purpose is to create screen capture videos of the type that you would see if you were watching a tutorial on how to use a new piece of software.
Why then do I use it? Watch this video …
Watch this video and see how easy it is to create a video that will answer the objections from a potential client. You need nothing more than a smart phone to do this.
Go back to the essential video guide for magicians and other entertainers here to find out your next step in creating videos that will drive you traffic.
Did you listen to Ep 11 of the Magician Business podcast and here the great info on building promo reels?
And here are 23 great tips to consider when you are creating your promo reel. This will save you a lot of headaches.
If you wanted to purchase Camtasia use our Camtasia affiliate link to support Ken and Julian.
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In the next post we look at adding music to your video.
Transcript of video1:
Why I Use Camtasia in Preference To Other Video Editing Software
Question #1 Is Camtasia the most powerful video editing software out there?
Answer: Not by a country mile
Question #2 Is Camtasia the best video editing software for magicians and entertainers to drive traffic and increase income?
Answer: I think so and I’ll show you why.
Here’s a great reason to start:
1. You get a 30 day free trial … so you can just hop into this and even if you don’t commit you will learn a whole heap …fully operational … not watermarks
I’ll give you a quick tour. If you have never used a video editing program then this will be consistent with most out there so even if you don’t use Camtasia, completely your choice, you’ll be a step ahead when you use the program of your choice.
1. Once you have downloaded it open the program .. you have 2 buttons on your task bar … the red dot is screen capture and the other is the editing program, that’s the one we are interested in now … so it’s like you get 2 programs in one
2. This window here is the clip bin … where you see all your clips and tool options and previews. Record the screen, import anything you need, Produce and share. This is where you finish it all up. It’s like clicking the PRINT button on your printer. These tabs up here are just like on any program you have ever used.
3. Over here is where you see the finished product. It’s called the canvas. Right Click anywhere on the grey area and choose 1280×720 and white background. Don’t ask, just believe me.
4. This is the Time line. Think of it this way. Where we edit a word document top to bottom, we edit video left to right, all the cut and paste and delete functions work the same, except your using with pictures. You can add tracks by clicking the plus buttons. The cool thing is these tracks are not designated like other editing programs. You can put what you want(video, audio, graphics, effects) in any place at any time. This speeds up things so much.
This is the play head. Click and drag it to wherever you want to view or edit. If you want to select part of the footage to alter it, just like you would select a line of text or a paragraph in a word document, use these green and red tabs. To cancel just double click on the grey head and you’re back to normal.
5. This section here:
Slider to expand and contract the timeline
Copy and paste just like in a word document … or a right click of the mouse does the same
Split the track. Click on any item on a track so it highlights in blue. Move the play head to where you want to split the track. Click. and voila, you have split the trick. You can move these bits to wherever you need them or simply click and highlight the one you want to get rid of and hit your delete key on your keyboard. Told you this was easy.
The best button of all is the back button. Just click this and all is forgiven. I love the back button.
6. All these sections are adjustable to suit your editing needs. Click, hold and drag.
7. One more great tip. Just hit the space bar on your keyboard to play and stop the video instead of using the play control buttons over here. This speeds things up so much.
Big tip. Always think of these tracks as layers of paper. If you stack them on top of each other you will not see what is underneath unless the piece of paper on top is transparent, or at least partly see through. So things like our video track are solid and we can’t see through those so if we put them under things like our lower third graphic we’ll be able to see it.
There are great tutorials available.
3. It’s a tool for communicating messages online as opposed to just a video editor.
Sure you can edit the FAQ videos we’ve been talking about
Sure you can edit tight punchy show reels
Sure you can do all of this fast
But that you can quickly an easily send clients personal videos explaining how you can tailor what you do to their event a success, that you can improve conversions markedly by doing this. That this is such a great tool to focus attention on specific messages in your video. That you can do all this so easily is why I love Camtasia.
I use video a lot so the value for investment for me is off the scale. But here’s the thing, we will all be using video more and more and more. One booking you get from a video you create and put online will pay for this. If I had a choice between this and a handful of tricks I’d take this any day.
Anyway there are free video editing software out there. None of them are going to be as easy as this but they will get the job done for you. You will be able to replicate the process you see here on other programs, it’s just that buttons and panels with be in different places.
