Basic Porn Editing

“I don’t know how to edit”, people say.

You do.

You just don’t know it yet.

OR, more likely, your editing software is “fuck complicated” looking.

I hate editing. Because I hate editing, I have a simple process and stick to it almost all the time.

Horrible Software

Good news – you don’t have to work out how to use most of it. Just a few tiny little things. And Youtube almost certainly has excellent tutorials for these basics, and more advanced.

Import your video. (Usually some kind of file selection).

Get your video onto the Time Line. Usually drag the imported files from wherever the software is showing them.

Cutting Tool – usually a scissors or knife icon, basically CUTS the video. Watch the video from the start and make cuts to separate out the good bits and the bad. You end up with a bunch of small clips.

SAVE : save the project in this state. Give it name, and next saves are given different names. Because you will probably want to “start from here” a few times. (I am assuming that you have to render clips one at a a time. Worth googling your software and “batch render” or “multiple clips”. If it can do it, huge time saver. See Tip 2).

Starting from the saved base edit :-

Full Scene : Delete the bad clips, move the good one together. Drag each one to overlap by 0.5-1s to create smooth transitions.

Text : Use the simple tools, not the complex ones. Generally include your OF or MV and the twitter tags of you and co-stars.

Render/Publish/Export – something like that. And you have your first scene:-)

Save the project as “fullscene” or something.

Starting from the saved base edit. Do the same, but throwing away even more. Perhaps even some of the good stuff. Create a clip. Repeat until you have all the clips and trailers and 2-10s snippets (for Twitter) you need.

Advanced : Colour, Brightness, Contrast, Contrast Centre… welcome to the rabbit hole 🙂 Seriously, you might want to play with these, but once you start to get fussy, you’re on the way to learning to become a proper editor.

Practice makes Perfect : It can be slow going at first, and to be honest, it never gets fast. If you have 40 mins of footage, the first pass – those initial cuts, will take 1-2 hours…. But you will get to the stage where you know what you’re doing and not wasting your time.

TIP 1 : Sometimes you like a visual but not the sound – you can probably split the video from the audio. So when you have some great fucking but the cameraman is saying “Move Over”. Split out the audio, delete it then paste in some fucking audio 🙂

TIP 2 : If you can batch render you can copy/paste your initial bunch of clips in the base edit into multiple copies along the Time Line. Turn the first one into the Full Scene, the next one into the next proper clips, and then one into the short snippets. Then render them all in one go.