So, you shot some bad travel video footage and you’d like to make to make it look BETTER.

In this week’s video, I share three powerful video editing tricks that will help your footage look less shaky, less boring, and more professional.

I demonstrate these video editing tricks in Final Cut Pro X, but you can use many different types of editing software to implement them.

WATCH THE VIDEO ► Make BAD TRAVEL VIDEOS look BETTER w/ VIDEO EDITING TRICKS

I’m going to come CLEAN about something. I am NOT the best videographer.

And especially when I first started shooting travel videos, I would bring home some pretty awful footage.

Fortunately, I figured out a TON of cool tricks in the editing suite.

Using these tricks I was able to create a final video that was good enough to tell my story, and get my travel vlogging channel STARTED.

I will demo these edits in Final Cut Pro, but I don’t want you to take this as a software tutorial so much as an overall instruction of video editing concept and technique.

Even if you don’t use Final Cut, you can still apply the same editing tricks to Adobe Premiere or many other video editing systems.

Video Editing Trick #1- Shred It Up

It’s pretty obvious in video editing that you’re going to CUT the footage- remove the bad parts and leave only the good parts.

Try to go extreme with this and really SHRED that bad footage up.

In the video, we dive DEEP into the AMaeTV travel footage archives to grab some footage from Ireland in 2015.

Visiting Ireland was a great opportunity to shoot beautiful footage, but I mostly blew it by ONLY using my GoPro Hero4- which was new and exciting at the time- and never actually stopping to TRY to get good shots.

Needless to say, I was not a serious YouTuber then!

However, I got home, and I got the video clips cleaned up with some fancy editing.

It’s not amazing, but it’s a major improvement over what the original footage looks like.

Watch the video to see the finished intro I made to Top 10 Things To Do In Dublin, and a peek at each of the clip’s longer version. You’ll be amazed by how the clips were 99% terrible yet I was still able to find acceptable slivers to use in the video intro.

And this is a video that has gained almost 300k views on YouTube 😯

Video Editing Trick #2- Speed It Up

This next video editing trick has to do with speed ramping your clips as a method of zipping through boring parts AND masking camera shake.

In the video, I demonstrate this on a clip of the Dublin city bus.

In FCPX, I sped up just the center of the clip to allow the viewer to experience more of the city in less time.

I also use this same speed ramp trick to mask some camera shake that comes between filming the city street, and flipping the camera around to start my intro. The speed ramp helps the viewers become a part of the motion, rather than having time to simply observe it.

Video Editing Trick #3- Correct & Color

If you don’t know, the video footage that comes out of cameras is DESIGNED to be color graded before it can really look good. Or if it wasn’t shot with a proper white balance in the first place, it needs to be color corrected.

In the video, I demonstrate in Final Cut Pro X, basic color correction and color grading on my Ireland footage- shot on the GoPro Hero 4.

I also offer a demo of a few of the video presets in my LUTS PACKS to see how my new creations affect the old footage. LEARN MORE ABOUT THEM!

Any color grading on the poorly shot footage from this GoPro was quite a challenge. It didn’t help that Ireland was quite drab and sunless most of the time. Pretty in person, not so much on camera.

Fortunately, color grading saved the day on many of these clips!

BEFORE the LUT was applied..

Of course, the best way to make a great travel video is to shoot great video footage to begin with. Fortunately, there are tons of resources here on AMaeTV to help you do just that.