How to Cut & Edit Action Cam Videos
Easily & Fast

For fast and simple action camera editing, use a Movie Studio editing template. All cuts in the template are already set to match the music's beat. All you have to do is fill the placeholders with the right clips from your videos.

Here's how to do it:

• In the Media Pool above right, open the Templates tab and click on the "Editing templates Basic" tile.

All editing templates in the folder are listed on the right. You can purchase additional editing templates in the Media Pool tab "Store".

• Move your mouse over a tile and click the preview arrow in the center of the pop-up window. Pay particular attention to the music.
• If you like a song and want to use the editing template as the basis for your action cam video, click the import icon on the left in the pop-up window.

The editing template is now loaded and opened in the editing template wizard. Below left, you will now see a row of gray placeholders. From the top of the Media Pool, you can access all drives on your computer.

• Drag your action cam video files from the Media Pool onto the placeholders.
• If you need to, you can define the section of video to be used in the placeholder in the range display below right.

The range display also gives you information about the effects used in this scene (e.g. slow motion).

You can use the same video for several or all placeholders. Simply drag the action video files one after the other onto the placeholders.

• The fastest way to start and stop playback is to use the space bar. This is a good way to check the finished product too.

If you're happy with it, no more post-production is required. Once you're happy with the way it looks, you can export your edited action cam video or upload it online (see below).

You can also edit a video manually. To do this, close the editing template wizard by checking the mark on the range display.

This opens the normal program view of Movie Studio, where you have access to all program functions. We'll talk about these now.

If you want to use your own music instead of applying an editing template with music, proceed as follows:

• In the start dialog in Movie Studio Platinum, create a new project, or switch from the Editing Wizard to the normal program view in Movie Studio.
• To edit high-resolution 4K footage, go to the "Film settings" (under "File> Settings > Movie") and enable the option "Create proxy files automatically". This will allow you to play back and edit 4K and 8K without any issue.
• Drag & drop to load your video files from the import tab of the Media Pool and arrange them one after the other in a track.
• To add music to the images, drag any music file to a track below the video track.

To adjust music to action video length, simply drag out the audio object with the music to the correct length:

• Move the mouse pointer to the lower object edge until it becomes the Cut symbol.
• Click and drag the object borders inwards while holding down the mouse button until the music starts and ends at the right positions.
• To set a fade in or fade out, use the upper object handles.

Let's begin with the most common scenario, where you want to cut some unusable footage from your action cam video.

• Place the playback marker at the beginning and end of the section that you want to keep and press the "T" key at both positions.
• Then click on the sections that you'd like to remove and press the "Del" key.
• If doing this creates a gap that needs to be closed, go to the toolbar and select "Mouse mode for all tracks".
• Move the section on the right of the gap to the left until it docks with the preceding section. When you use this mouse mode, all other objects further right are moved back too, so following sections of the action video won't get mixed up.

If you drag out a cut or shortened object to its borders again, the deleted sections will be restored. You can play around with these cuts and effects as much as you like without changing the original files in any way.

To help you make an edit with music, place snap markers at the locations of the beats. As they are moved, the video scenes now automatically snap to positions that suit the rhythm.

• Click on an audio object with music to select it.
• In the Media Pool, open the "Effects" tab and under "Audio effects", click on the "Snap markers" tile.
• Click on the "Align snap marker to transients" button.
• Move your video objects so that they snap to the locations of the snap markers.

Above right in the Media Pool, open the Effects tab and under "Video effects", click on "Brightness & Contrast". This effect dialog offers these options:

• The "auto exposure" button sets parameters following an automatic analysis of the image.
• The "brightness" and "contrast" sliders can be used to change the basic values manually.
• "Gamma" is subjective brightness, i.e. brightness as perceived by people. This is different from objective brightness, which deals with the ratio of bright to dark image areas. When you adjust the brightness, all of the pixels in the picture are made brighter or darker; when you adjust the gamma, the ratio is changed.
• "HDR", or "High Dynamic Range", refers to a particularly high range between the brightness and contrast values. "HDR blur" affects the transitions between bright and dark areas.

It's often a good idea to color correct your video. The three parameters of color, brightness and contrast work together to define how the video picture looks. Click on the "Color" icon to open the color dialog. You now have the following options:

• To balance out a specific tint, select the complementary color of the tint in the dialog. For blue tint, select yellow. For green, select violet. This is only necessary in special cases.
• To universally tone down colors or intensify them, use the "Saturation" fader. Experiment a little.

The color correction tile enables you to colorize the foreground and background to make specific objects in the picture stand out from each other. Click on "Add" in the effect dialog and select the color range that should be used for editing the foreground with the mouse cursor which is now a pipette. Then, adjust the colors for the foreground and background separately.

Use speed effects to enhance the action in your video. Slow motion places emphasis on the climax of your video and shows decisive moments in detail in slow motion, while time lapse accelerates the images in fast motion and provides drama.

Speed ramps are a particularly popular effect which can be used to dynamically change the playback speed of a video. These work especially well in action cam video scenes, where they can be used to turn fast-paced visuals into a brief slow motion sequence to focus on a crucial moment before allowing the action to continue at normal speed. This technique is great for highlighting key moments such as those in sports videos (e.g. when the ball hits the net or a skateboarder begins to make a jump).

Here's how to do it:

• In the Media Pool, open the Effects tab and click on the Speed tile.
• Click on the video in the track and move the speed factor slider In the effect dialog to the left to create a slow-motion effect. You can also type in the factor number yourself. If you set the factor to a value less than 0.75, we recommend enabling the option "Interpolate intermediate images" to ensure that the video plays smoothly.
• To create a time lapse effect, move the speed factor slider the other way, to the right. The time lapse effect makes the video play faster. As a result, the video object will be shortened. Objects further to the right in the timeline will be shifted to the left automatically.

For speed ramps, use the keyframe animation tool below in the dialog.

• Position the playback marker where you want the speed ramp to begin.
• Open the keyframe animation in the Media Pool and add an initial keyframe here.
• In the keyframe animation, move the playback marker further to the right to the end of the first speed ramp.
• Move the speed factor slider to the left to create a slow motion sequence. The program will automatically add a second keyframe where the playback marker is positioned. When you now play back the sequence, you'll see that the speed is continuously reduced between the two keyframes.
• Move the playback marker further to the right to where you want the slow motion sequence to end. Here, place a third keyframe manually. Do not change the speed factor. The playback speed remains constant in slow motion between the second and third keyframe.
• Then, move the playback marker even further to the right to where you want the action camera movie to return to normal speed. Double-click the speed factor slider. The speed will jump back to the default position (1.00), and the program will automatically add a fourth keyframe.

Play the action cam editing sequence to check how it turned out. The speed transitions between the keyframes are calculated automatically by the program. In the resulting sequence, the video is slowed down until playback reaches the end of the first speed ramp. Then, the slow motion sequence begins. Between the second-to-last and last keyframe, the speed is gradually increased.

Once you've understood how this principle works, you can use speed ramps to create any kind of speed transition you want.