A lot of the editing you might want to do with the video of a speech is possible with free tools like Windows Photos / Windows Video Editor, Google Photos, or Apple’s iMovie.
I’m telling the story of how to do it in two videos, one of my speech about video editing at Club Awesome, and a second video that my friend Chris Guld of GeeksOnTour.com is allowing me to share for Toastmasters educational purposes. If you’re interested in digital photo editing and other topics of particular interest to travelers, I recommend that you subscribe to her complete library of video tutorials.
I frankly wasn’t aware that there was a video editor in Windows 10 until I saw Chris’s tutorial, but now that I know about it I plan to use it for a lot of simple speech editing tasks. Because I wanted to do some fancier editing of the recording of my own speech, splicing in images of the slides I used, I created the video below using a commercial tool, Camtasia. I probably also could have done it in Apple’s iMovie. Both of those allow you to edit multiple tracks of audio and video.
As you will see in the tutorial, the Windows video editor uses a simpler “storyboard” metaphor — but does a good job of allowing you to accomplish basic video trimming, cutting and splicing tasks. You can also add titles and even 3D effects.
More than promoting any one tool, I hope to communicate the basic principles and get you thinking about the possibilities.
First, here’s my speech video to set up the topic.
I shared the video below in the middle of that speech, so you’re getting the replay slightly out of order. This will make the “how to” of video editing a lot clearer.
Chris Guld’s tutorial isn’t specifically about editing a speech video — her example is a video of a dance party — but she does a great job of showing how to edit the timeline of a video to remove any unwanted bits at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle. That includes removing errors, like in her case the moment where someone walked in front of the camera while she was recording.
Chris discusses the video editor as a feature of Windows Photos, and I subsequently found another tutorial on the “hidden” video editor in Windows 10. If you have the current update to Windows 10, Microsoft added a “Video Editor” app — which appears to be just a shortcut for accessing the same tools in Windows Photos.
Another way you could use this tool is to combine clips from several videos — either the best moments or the bloopers — into a single video. Or you might use a clip from a video of a live speech as the introduction to a subject, followed by an explanation of the details produced using PowerPoint’s recording feature.
Now go forth, create, trim, and share!