How to Edit in iMovie Featuring Meredith Marsh

Creating videos that look polished and seamless is not always easy as it appears to be on the outside. So it's a good thing you're here. Since away on maternity leave right now, I wanted to bring on one of my go-to GoPro pro, say that fast three times, biz buddy, Meredith Marsh of VidProMom. She's amazing at breaking down the techy things when it comes to video, and specifically, editing with iMovie. Which is what she's going to be sharing with us today, so get excited. Let's go take a listen.

3 Simple Ways to Make Your Videos Look Polished - Using iMovie

1. Avoid Distracting Titles - So you may have noticed that both Meredith and myself had a little lower thirds come in here on our videos that have our names and websites. You might have also notice that they are actually kind of small.
   
   That little lower third title with your name and your website or whatever you put in there, you know, maybe your Instagram handle or Twitter handle or something. That's really just, like, supplemental to what you're actually saying on camera. Right? It's just there to make everything kind of look put together and polished. And it's what the pros do, right? So that's what we do. We put a lower third title on there.
   
   But if you make it really big, then it's just distracting from what you're actually saying. And if you're on camera talking, you want the person to be focused on what you're saying and not on something flying in from the bottom, right?
2. Add Background Music - And I know that's kind of a little bit of a no-brainer, but here's the thing that I see happening a lot. Is people have their background music with the volume turned up a little too much. So when you add background music to your timeline, you're always gonna wanna lower the volume. You don't want it to compete with what you're trying to say. And I would recommend that you err on the side of too little background music rather than too much. Because it might sound good to you, but here's the thing, you already know what you're saying in your video. The people that are watching your video, they click on it, they wanna watch it, they wanna hear what you have to say. They wanna hear what you have to say, right?
   
   The music is really just there to help with the mood, help deliver the message, maybe enhance the message a little bit, but you don't want your viewers to strain to listen to what you have to say. So just like using titles, background music isn't 100% necessary, but if you decide to use it, which I think is a great idea, turn that volume down.
   
   
3. Avoid Elaborate Transitions - All you really need to do is make a simple jump cut. I know Holly has #1min1take I'm more of a 20 minutes, 20 takes type of a person so I do a lot of jump cuts. You're gonna see them a lot in this video. So I actually wanna show you how I do my jump cuts. They're a little bit different, and they kind of make things a little bit more "slooth". It's, like, a combination of slick and smooth. "Slooth."

So those are the three ways that you can make your videos look nice and polished if you're editing in iMovie. Before you upload to YouTube or Facebook. The name of the game here is simplicity so when you start playing around with a bunch of graphics and animations and stuff, all you're really doing is adding time to your editing, which I doubt you wanna do. 

Q: Let us know in the comments, what was your biggest takeaway? Did you have any aha moments? What was the biggest thing that you learned?