It’s not just your video content concepts that reflect your brand voice.
To a massive degree, it’s the editing.
Video editing can make or break a video marketing strategy. It can make a clip resonate with your audience – or fall completely flat.
Here are five ways unprofessional video editing can tank your brand’s reputation. And how to avoid it.
Key Takeaways
- Awkward cuts and transitions result in jarring experiences for the viewer.
- Bad audio quality, sudden shifts in audio levels, and badly-harmonized background music draw attention away from your content.
- Structural faults make your videos hard to follow and confusing.
- Visuals and effects that don’t match your audio or aren’t necessary create a cognitive disconnect for your audience.
- Untrimmed pauses and filler words make videos feel far longer than necessary.
Off-Key Pacing and Transitions
To start with, one of the principal red flags of a badly edited video are awkward jump cuts, abrupt transitions, and off-key pacing.
A professionally-edited video should provide swift forward flow, with segments neatly slotting into each other. It needs to hit its pace early and keep it up – slow enough for the audience to follow, but fast enough to hold their attention.
Getting this rhythm wrong – or mismatching it to the intended audience – will tank engagement and brand reputation faster than almost any other mistake.
Badly Harmonized Audio
Have you ever watched a brand’s video and were wondering what on earth was going on in the background or what kind of mic they were using?
Buzzing. Irritating ambient noise. Hollow echoes from low-quality equipment. Off-putting sound effects. Or baseline music that is WAY too loud.
Not even marketing experts are immune from video editing fails.
Bad audio is extremely jarring to a viewer. Often, jarring enough to make them stop watching. In any case, audio issues reflect badly on your brand and distract from your content.
Poor Structure
Just as much as the pacing, the overall structure of a video is critical in holding your audience’s attention and reflecting your brand voice.
This includes the strategic use of attention resets, logical cohesion, clean content blocks, and strong endings.
For example, one of the most common structural issues in badly-edited videos is that some sections drag on far longer than necessary while others feel too short and incoherent.
A particular flaw to watch out for: Points are restated that were never emphasized in the first place. This makes viewers wonder where they missed a step – then realize that you did.
Disconnected Visuals and Effects
One of the most visually glaring signs of bad editing is the overabundance of effects.
Rather than using visuals and effects strategically to underline principal points, matching what the viewer sees to what they hear, rookie editors often go wild.
Random zooms. Effects without purpose. Adding panache just because they figured out how to do it in Premiere.
It makes your brand’s video feel neurotic and out of tune.
Excessive Durations
Finally, one of the hallmarks of bad edits are excessive video durations.
Even in videos that are meant to be long-form, it’s essential to have tight cuts and solid pacing to hold viewers’ focus.
You can absolutely have four-hour video essays that just seem to fly by. But all too often what you get are ten-minute videos that should’ve been Shorts.
Bad edits are full of pauses between sentences that should have been trimmed, slow transitions between topics, filler words that were never cleaned up, and boring repetitions.
Keep every video you post as long as necessary but as short as possible.
The Bottom Line
Cuts, audio, pacing, structure, fillers, flow issues, unnecessary repeats…
Sounds like a lot of pitfalls? There are. Especially if you’re not an experienced editor yourself.
The easiest way to avoid them? Delegate to a professional.
Ready to get started? Tasty Edits offers all-round video editing services and YouTube channel management for professional creators. Check out our portfolio or start your first edit today!
FAQs
How to make a video look professional?
Tight cuts, on-point pacing, well-harmonized audio and solid structure are hallmarks of a professional video edit. Strategically leverage attention resets and VFX to hone your audience’s focus and underline your key points.
How to spot a low-quality video edit?
Badly edited videos drag on. Pauses and fillers that should have been trimmed. Jarring audio level variations and sound effects. Disconnected visuals, random zooms, and arbitrary VFX all make bad edits hard to follow and erratic.
What makes a video edit good?
High-quality video edits stand out through tight cuts, on-point pacing, well-harmonized audio and solid structure. They strategically leverage attention resets and VFX to hone their audience’s focus and underline their key points.
