Canva is not just great for design work. The Canva Video Editor is also a solid option when it comes to video editing software. So in this video, we're gonna run through a complete Canva video editing Article for beginners step by step, including a ton of tips and tricks along the way to help you boost your results much faster.
Now, like the rest of Canva's design tools, the Canva Video Editor is super simple to pick up and use, but there's also plenty more advanced features and cool animations, and custom effects under the hood as well. So we're gonna cover some of my favorites as we go through. And even better, Canva video editing tools aren't just limited to desktop, PC, or Mac in your web browser. If you're an iPhone or an Android user, you can also use the Canva app to edit your videos mobile on the go. The process is pretty much exactly the same.
So you can just follow along using this Article no matter what device you're using. Okay, so here we are at Canva, I've gone ahead and created a free account and logged in, and this is what you'll see. So to start our video. We wanna come over here, make sure up here we are on video. And there are lots of different templates and things that you can choose from here in terms of the size and the format of the video you're gonna be creating. So we've got templates here for a Facebook video, sort of square video. We've also got here a portrait video.
And if we scroll across, there are some other ones in here as well. But the one we want and the one I'd suggest you start with is over on a blank video. So interface wise over on the left here is where you've got all of your templates, all of your controls, and everything, all over here. This main area here is your canvas area. This is where you'll be creating your video. Down the bottom here is the equivalent of your video timeline, but we can see all the different clips, how long they play for and this is where we'll be editing down our video.
We've also got the menu bar across the top here that changes depending on where you're at in your edit, but this is where you'll access a lot of the tools and functionality. Okay, so first up let's bring in our footage. So I want to come over here to upload, and this is where we can upload our videos from either our computer, Facebook, Google Drive, Instagram, or Dropbox. So you just want to hit upload, select your video files. I've already got some uploaded here that we're gonna use. And then I'm gonna go ahead and start uploading to Canva. Now, the cool part about this is that you don't need to wait for that video to finish uploading before you can start editing it down. So even if you're gonna be editing a really high-quality, large video file, you can start editing it right away.
So I'm going to go ahead and select our primary footage here, and I'm gonna click on it and drag it down into our timeline here. So you can see by default, it's stretched it out to be full screen, which is what we want. Down the bottom here we've got our video clip. We can zoom in and out on the timeline here just by using this slider. And if we click on this little button here, this will change between zooming out thumbnails or zooming in and out on the timeline and zooming in and out on this canvas area. So if we click it now and we zoom in and out, we can see that we're able to really customize up our playback area. So I'm gonna go ahead and leave this pretty big. So now that we have our primary footage in, let's go ahead and remove any of the bad takes,
the mistakes or the stuff that we don't want to have in our video. So we're going to hit play and watch through and listen to our footage and work out the bits we want to remove. We can grab this little triangle here and we can click and drag with this and we can scrub throughout footage fast to see the bits we might want to edit out. So at the start of the video here, I did a practice run of the first sentence. So I'm just reading this through here now. So final checks, make sure everything's all good and this is where I start the video. So let me go back a little bit here.
Great face there, Justin. I'm gonna right-click down the bottom here and I'm going to choose a split. So now we've got two clips in the timeline here. The left one is all the stuff at the start that we don't wanna have on there. So I can just select on this and press the delete key on the keyboard. Or if I undo this now using CTRL + Z, or CMD + Z on the keyboard or coming up the top to the undo button. I can also press the three little dots on the clip here and I can choose delete. So our video now is going to start at that point. So if we hit play on this now. This is the complete guide to editing with... So it was a little bit of a pause at the start. So what we can also do to refine this edit even further is can move our mouse over the start of the clip here, and we can click and hold and drag to the right. And this is again going to give us more granular control. Let's start it right here before I start talking. So we're just starting a little bit quicker. Let's go ahead and tidy up the end.
Now for this one, I'm gonna click on our timeline here. I'm now gonna zoom in just so we can get a little bit closer to it. And I'm gonna scroll across to the end of our timeline. And again, we want to either find the place where I finished the video by scrubbing across here and adding a split in our timeline by right-clicking and hitting split. Or I can click off this and I can grab the end of the video here and drag it back to where I want the video to finish. Now,
in terms of removing any bad takes inside your footage, we just follow the same process. We can either play through our video and find these sections, or we can grab this arrow. We can drag it back to where it looks like I'm not talking. Not a great face there. We can right-click, we can split, this now is our ending piece. So then we go across to the next one to see where we want this to come back to. Okay so we want to remove from here, all of this footage, we can just grab this handle here, drag it back to that point and move down remove that section. So you want to go through now add any cuts and remove any bad takes or mistakes? So what you're left with, is just your primary content or the story piece of your video. So now that you've gone through and you've edited down your primary footage, the next step is to bring in any B-roll or overlay footage.
Now, this is one thing with Canva that is a little bit more complicated because they don't let you lay layer video clips on top of each other. I'm hoping that's a feature that comes soon. But there is a workaround, I can show you how to do it. So let's say after this intro piece here when we start getting into the content, I want to show some of these clips that I have up here, but I still want to have me talking behind them. I can come over here and I can grab some of our footage of the switch part here. And instead of dropping it down to the timeline,
I'm gonna drop it into our actual project on screen here. So with this clip, now we can pick it up, we can move it around, we can scale it up, scale it down. But right now as it is, this is the entire 41.7-second clip. So let's say we only want a small section of this clip and then to cut back to me talking full screen, I want to make sure that we have this video clip here selected. I'm gonna come over here to the pair of scissors. And this is where we can trim down or select the area that we want to use. So again, we can grab this handle here at the start but can choose where you want this clip to start. Let's say about here.
And we come across to the end and let's drag this back here to where we want the clip to finish. Let's say around here. So we've got a 6.5-second chunk out of our longer clip. Now I want to hit done here. Now let's scale this up so that it fits our entire video here. So now when we play this section, we've now got me talking underneath with this footage being shown over the top. But the problem we have now is that we've now got that shorter clip that is just looping here on top of me talking beneath it. So the workaround and what you need to do here is to play through until you want this piece to stop.
So let's say here, and then we want to split this clip at that point. So let's right-click and choose split. Now with this second clip, we don't need that B-roll or overlay footage. We want it to go back to me talking so I can select that, press delete on the keyboard. And now we're back to me talking. So if we grabbed this handle here and scrubbed through this again, we've got me on camera. We then cut to our B-roll footage where I'm still talking underneath and then back to me talking here. Now you don't need to necessarily make your footage full screen. If you did like that picture in picture effect where you've got one big video and one small video playing on-screen as well, then, by all means,
you can do that easily here, just like that. But in order to keep the audio from your background video, while you're showing footage, then you have to do it the way that I just showed you. Now we're going to get to volume adjustments really soon. But one thing you do want to be mindful of here is let's go back to this clip. Let's select our top video layer here. If your B-roll or overlay clip does have audio on it that you don't want, and you wanna mute it,
then you want to make sure that you're selecting that clip. Come up to the top here to the little speaker and you can hit the mute button. And that's gonna remove the sound from our B-roll clip. We're still having our voiceover happening underneath it. So you wanna go through your video now, add in any B-roll or any overlay footage into your project. So once you've got your B-roll in, the next step is to add any titles or texts into your videos. Now, this is something that Canva is really powerful because a lot of presets and everything built-in here,
To help you create some amazing-looking titles. So we're gonna come over here to text, and we can just add in basic text here or the basic text box, or if we scroll down, there are lots of different preset, templates and animations and things that you can add in here. And it really is as simple as just dragging and dropping them onto your project, double-clicking on them, and you can customize them up. But one other thing to note with these templates while we're here is that some of these have this little pro symbol on them. These ones are only available on the pro plan for Canva. They're not available on the free one,
but there are lots of free options in here as well. So we're gonna go ahead and add in a basic heading here and customize this up. Now, one thing you will need to note is if I just create a heading now, it's going to add it across this entire first clip, 18.3 seconds. If you only want your title to show up for a small amount of time, we've got to follow a pretty similar process to what we did with the B-roll footage. And we need to mark out an area or cut a clip where that title is gonna be shown. So I'm gonna press play on our video here now.
This is the complete guide... Okay, so I'll probably add a cut in our timeline here, 'cause this is where I want that title to start so we split our timeline there, keep playing. (speaking faintly) And let's say we want our title to finish here. Let's add another cut here. So we'll go split. And now any title that we add in this clip here is only gonna be onscreen for that 5.3 seconds. So now we're going to come up here with that clip selected, grab our heading,
drag it onto our project. Here we can customize it up. We can change the fonts. Let's go Oswald to that Primal video font. Let's change it to bold. Maybe we'll make the text color white. Maybe we'll make this a little bit smaller. So we just pick it up and we can move it around and let's move it down to the bottom corner here. Now what we usually do for our titles is we've normally got a rectangle behind them so that they stand out. So I can come over here to elements. Let's choose a rectangle, again lots of different presets and templates and things that you can drag and drop and use in your project. I'm gonna pick just a simple shape here,
drag that on. We're now going to resize this down and position it so that it fits behind our text. And we can come to the top here to change the color. Let's go with this one, it's pretty close to our primal video of colors. Now we now have a basic title here. So when we play through our video, there's no text on the screen. Then for this section here, the text is on-screen and then disappears again. Now we can get fancy than that, we can animate our text as well.
So if we select our text, and then come up to the top here to animate. And again, lots of presets that we can choose from to have our text animated on screen. So I'll go with something simple like this one, shift and we can also add an animation to our background color there behind it. So if I select on the background and again come up the top to animate, then we can pick how that comes on screen too. So I might just go a simple fade. So now if we come back here and we hit play,
we've got a simple little transition there for when the name card comes on screen. Once that's done, we're gonna add in any effects or transitions onto our clips. Now you can see between all our clips down here, there is a little plus between them. If we select on that and then choose to add transitions, this is how we can add an effect between these different clips. So we can choose a dissolve, which is like a fade. We can slide from one clip to the other.
There's a circle wipe or a linear wipe. Now this is something, for the most part, we either wouldn't use a transition or if it did need one, I was gonna add to the overall polish of the video, but I'd normally stick to something simple, like a dissolve. But in terms of a video like this, where it is just a talking head, me presenting to camera, instead of a transition between the clips, what I would normally do is zoom in, on one of the clips so that when you're playing through, it looks like it's almost a different camera angle. It just breaks it up a little bit for the viewers.
So to do that here, I'm gonna pick this second clip. I'm gonna come up at the top, make sure our clip here is selected. And then if we come up to crop, then we zoom in on this, make it a little bigger, scale it up. In order to really sell this effect. We want to try and make sure that the eyes are in a very similar position. So it's not so jarring for our viewers. So let's try about here, come back and play this. Okay, so it just breaks it up a little bit for the viewers where it's the same shot,
same camera, but just looks a little bit different. So you want to go through this step, add in any transitions or any zooms or any effects onto your clips at this point. From there, we're gonna add in any music you want to have. So if you come over here on the audio, there's a lot of different music that is inside of Canva. Some of it's free, some of it's only available on their pro plan. But for me personally, where I go for my music so that I have no licensing issues is to Artlist and to Epidemic Sound. So I'm gonna go ahead and use one of the audio tracks that I've already uploaded. So if you want to use your own music track,
again come over to uploads, choose audio. You can upload your files here and you can see I've got two in here. I'm just gonna click and drag this one onto our project here. Now you can see this has dropped in where we had our playback head, which was towards the end of the video. We can pick up this music file and move it around. So let's say we want it to start at the start of our video,
which I would imagine most people would. We can just pick it up and drag it all the way back. So now that you've got your music in there, it's a good idea to play through your video. And you might find that you're adjusting any of the cuts to line it up to the beat, or if you need to move any chunks or sections of your videos around, you can just click on them, pick them up and reposition them.
This whole thing is kind of an iterative process whereas we're moving through these steps, you're just constantly refining and tweaking this and moving towards your end goal of completed video. The next step then is to adjust your volume levels. So this is something that Canva does do a pretty good job of, of getting your primary footage to the right volume level. But if you do find it needs adjusting, you can click on the individual clip, come up to the top here and make sure that it is actually selected here too.
And then up the top here, you're gonna have your little volume slider where you can mute or adjust the volume here. And it's exactly the same for the music. So once you're happy with the volume levels on your primary footage, which as I said in most cases it's gonna be fine, you can then select your music track, which here is showing for me now as a skinny little purple line, we can click on that, select our music track, come up the top here to volume, and we can lower this down. Now for us with our videos, when we do have music playing behind them, we're normally starting at around between 20 and 30% as kind of a starting point, playing it back and seeing what it sounds like. Now,
this is something you might want to do with headphones on. So you're really hearing what this video is gonna sound like when you're finished. But there really is no right or wrong here. This is a personal preference. You just want to make sure that it's not too overpowering or that is loud enough that you can hear the music too. So that's the core editing functionality here in Canva. But one of the other power areas of Canva is some of the templates and graphics and things that it lets you create that you can use in your videos as well.
So let's say you want to add in a video intro between where I start the video talking and between where I actually get into the content of the video. So we can hit the little plus here to add in a page or blank footage between the two clips. Then if we come to the top of templates. And let's search for the intro. We've got here in YouTube intros, and we have a full, dedicated video on how to create an intro animation here in Canva and another tool that we recommend Placeit. I'll link that one up in the cards. I'm not going to run through all of that here, but you can literally grab one of these templates, drag it onto your timeline here. And again,
all of this is fully customizable. Now I'm not gonna build out a full intro here for this video, go and check out our full tutorial, on how to make an animated video intro using Canva. So for this video, I'm gonna take that back out. But note that is not just video intros. If we come up here and just type in "YouTube," then in here we've also got end screens as well. Something like this one here,
which we could drag down to the end of our video. And again, it's animated pointing to the next best Article that we want our viewers to watch, and we can customize it up. Now for this tutorial, I'm just gonna remove that and click on it, press the trash can at the top here. But now our video is done. Let's go ahead and save it out. We want to come up here to download. You want to have MP4 video selected and then just hit the download button and your video is going to save out and let you download it to your computer.
So now you know how to edit your videos down using Canva. Now if you're looking to speed up your video editing in any software, any app, then don't forget to grab your free copy of the Primal Video Method