Editing your video can provide you with the means to fix many issues that stem from when it was recorded. However at the same time it could also cause many issues in turn too.

All too often mistakes are made during editing that have a big impact on how the video turns out – and can affect its quality, pace, and flow.

While there are many things that could go wrong during editing, some of the more important mistakes that you should try to avoid are:

• Poorly mixed audio

The audio of most videos consists of two main components: Voice and music. Both are important, and yet they need to be mixed together well so that the music doesn’t overpower the dialogue of your video.

One effective way to gauge the audio mix is to close your eyes and just listen to it. If you can clearly make out all of the dialogue then you should be good. If you can’t – you should reduce the volume of the music slightly.

• Lots of jarring transitions

The way in which you join clips together is important as it can affect both the pace and flow of the video. More importantly however if you cut videos together improperly you could end up with jarring transitions that distract viewers.

One of the main causes of jarring transitions are jump cuts where you cut out a portion of the middle of a video – making the subject suddenly seem to ‘jump’ to a different position. That can be fixed by inserting a cutaway, so that the ‘jump’ isn’t as jarring.

Another common cause is when you don’t take the audio into account, and accidentally cut it mid-word or mid-sentence. To get around that you should use L cuts or J cuts, and transition the audio separately.

• Overusing visual effects

The most common mistake that beginners make is going a bit wild with the visual effects that they add to their videos. Instead of making it look more impressive however, in most cases all that really does it make videos look tacky.

As a rule you should only ever use visual effects when there is a reason for them – such as to provide additional visual meaning or add context to your video.

If you want you can try to edit a video using Movavi Video Editor and make it a point to avoid these mistakes. It is a video editing software for beginners and not only is it user-friendly but it has tons of powerful features. With it you can cut and join videos, apply effects, enhance the video quality, fix common issues, add customizable text, include audio tracks, and more.

All said and done now that you know what mistakes you should be on the watch for, it shouldn’t be too hard to avoid them. The more that you do edit videos the easier it will get to avoid any of the more common mistakes and learn from the ones that you do make.