Canva Video Editing

 There are many instances where videos make for better visual marketing material.

After all, videos receive a lot more attention than still images.

Also, you are visually able to put in so much more information in a video than in a single still graphic.

And with the new video editing timeline interface recently introduced in Canva…

…we can create quality video compositions using all of the features we’ve found convenient in creating other forms of visual graphics on their site.

And in this post, we will be showing you how to edit your marketing videos using the Canva video editing tool.

The video editing timeline is available for both regular and pro Canva accounts so you will not be needing a pro account for this guide.

With all of that said, let’s go ahead and get started!

Takeaways

• Canva’s video editing tool is available for both free and pro accounts.
• If you have a social media branding guide for your business, it would be good to have that open in a window.
• You can now make use of the timeline to edit video ads like Facebook video ads, social media video, and even YouTube.

Steps In Using The Canva Video Editing Tool

Step 1: To start, go to Canva’s home page, and on the format options, we’re going to click on the Video button.

And then, you’ll have this row of all the dimension options for videos in Canva.

It’s also important to note that as of now, if you do start a design outside of what’s here in the video options and start a document on the other tabs here…

…you will not have access to the timeline editing interface.

But, you will still be able to assemble videos in the traditional Canva pages interface.

That will, although, not have the same amount of options for editing as you would have with the new timeline UI.

Step 2: For this Canva video editing guide, we are again using our mock brand Koffee Kat.

We will be making a special promo video for the hypothetical launch of our brand and products.

We want to make a video specifically to post on social media.

And for that, we want to have a 1:1 dimension ratio, which is in this size for Facebook video @ 1080×1080.

Step 3: Once your canvas is open, you will immediately have the timeline view under the Preview area.

Just like when you make other Canva designs, all the options to add:

• elements,
• photos,
• audio,
• text,

…and others are on the left side when you’re in the Canva video editing tool.

And if you want to add an item from there to your canvas, click on it or drag it to where you want it to be placed.

Step 4: There’s the play button that lets you preview your video so you can see what you’ve done so far.

And then the downward-facing arrow lets you determine at which second of your video the preview will start when you hit the play button.

This rectangle marks your first and currently only scene in your video.

And on the bottom left of your scene is the length of your video. As you can see, it’s currently 5 seconds long.

Step 5: You can edit the duration of the scene by dragging its end left or right…

…depending on whether you want to shorten your scene or lengthen it.

And as you drag the scene’s duration, you will see exactly how many seconds your new adjusted scene length is.

If you want to duplicate a scene, simply hit Cmd +C and Cmd +V or Ctrl C and Ctrl V if you’re using a PC.

When you want to add new blank scenes, you can click on the plus (+) button.

And to change the order of your scenes, simply drag your scene left or right to where you want it to go.

Step 6: Right out of the bat, Canva will be showing pre-set templates for video compositions of this size dimension.

So when you use the Canva video editing tool, you can either start with one of these or start with a blank canvas.

When you select a template, it will apply it to the scene you have selected.

In this case, we just have this one rectangle, so it’s going to apply the template to that.

So for this guide, we want to start with a plain video for our first scene.

If you have videos of your product or service, you can go ahead and upload them in the Uploads tab.

For this tutorial though, we will be using stock videos available right here in Canva.

Step 7: Click on the Videos tab on the left side of your screen.

And since our mock brand is a coffee beans brand, we’ll start with searching for a video of coffee beans and drag the video we like into the scene.

Step 8: So now, let’s say you want to add text to your video.

Just click on the Text tab on the left and you can either click on the plain text options at the top…

…or you can select one of the pre-set texts that already have effects integrated into them.

We’ll try this one out since it has something like a neon effect on it. We’ll then edit the text to say “Premium Coffee Beans”.

But we also want to edit the font to make it similar to what we have on our existing brand guide.

If you have a social media branding guide for your business, it would be good to have that open in a window.

This is so you have something to look at if you want to check what fonts or colors you should be using for your video.

Step 9: Now, we want our text to be easier to read so we need to darken our background.

We can do that by clicking on our background video and then clicking the Opacity button at the top.

We’re going to lower the opacity of our video and then edit the background color behind the video by clicking on this box.

Now, we want to set the undertone color of the background video to be dark brown, so let’s find the right shade that works to make our text more readable.

Speaking of backgrounds, check out this post next if you want to learn how to remove image background using Canva too.

Step 10: So now let’s move on to adjusting when in our timeline the text should show up.

Let’s say we want to have our text show a little after letting the plain video in the background run alone for a few seconds…

…we’re going to click and drag this marker to the second we want the text to first appear on the screen.

In this case, we want our message to pop out after 5 seconds.

Once we’ve dragged our marker to 5 seconds, right-click on your scene and select “Split”.

What that will do is split our scene exactly at the point we’ve marked it earlier.

Then we can delete the text on our first half of the separated scene so that our text shows up at the 5-second mark on the second half.

Step 11: We can also add animations to each individual text, or you can also group them to share the same animation.

Our frame currently has animation from the text preset we picked earlier, but we want to change it.

So, we’re going to click on the Effect button that currently says Rise, and after that, select None so we can start with no effects on any of our text.

And in this case, we want the word “Premium” to slide in from the side.

So while it’s selected, we’re going to click on Animate and pick the right transition from the presets.

And then, we want both words “Coffee” and “Beans” to fade into our scene, so we’re selecting both and setting it up with the preset animation we like.

Step 12: Now that our texts have set transitions, let’s again split the video to when we want the text to stop showing.

The thing with transitions is they will not just bring your selected elements into your scene…

…but they will also transition your elements out at the end of the scene.

So when you again split the clip, it will transition your set elements out the same way they came in.

Then we will delete the text in the next scene and have the video continue without the text.

We’re keeping this empty background scene for later since we’re planning to use it in the last part of our video.

Step 13: Let’s now preview what we have so far by dragging our marker back to the start of our video and clicking on the Play button.

Now just in case, you notice an odd jump while it runs from one scene to another when you preview your video…

…you’re fine and it’s not going to show in the final output.

Your browser is probably just loading your video.

After previewing it a few times, you’ll notice that the jump is no longer there and it’s now running from one scene to the next smoothly.

Step 14: Now, let’s move on to the audio.

Back in the options tab on the left of our screen, click on the Audio tab, click Play to listen to any of the available soundtracks.

Click on the audio you like and drag it down to our timeline.

You can also edit wherein the video you want to queue in your music by simply dragging it into the position you want it to start.

Back in the day, you could only load one soundtrack for your videos in Canva. But now, you can add more than one audio for the same video.

And this is especially useful if you want some time-specific sound effects for certain scenes.

For this project though, we think we’ll stick with just one soundtrack.

Step 15: Moving on to the next step in our Canva video editing tutorial, let’s add our next scenes.

We want to feature each of our products in 1.5-second frames.

We have four variants of our coffee beans and we want to feature them in similar templates personalized for each variant.

So let’s start with one so we can duplicate it later for our other variants.

Now that we like how this looks, we’re now going to make 3 duplicates of this frame and edit them to fit each of our different variants better.

Then, we want maybe 5 seconds of a person leisurely drinking coffee at home or maybe an espresso machine dripping coffee into a cup.

Let’s add a new scene frame, then find a good video on the Videos tab that we like.

We won’t need to edit the scene duration since each newly added blank scene is automatically generated to 5 seconds in length.

Step 16: Now, for our final scene.

For the last frame, we’re going to use what’s left of our split video earlier…

…and use it as a background for our logo and text under it that says “Coming soon”.

After that, we can make final adjustments by hitting the Play button to preview our video.

Again, if at times the frames seem to be skipping and it looks laggy when you preview, that’s fine.

It’s most likely your browser is rendering your video and the output video when downloaded will be fine.

As you can see, instead of dragging the ends left or right, we’re editing our product template scenes to 2 seconds instead of 1.5.

We do that by clicking on the duration indicator itself.

Or, you can manually type in the number of seconds you want your scene to be changed to.

And there you have it, we’ve edited our social media video here in the new Canva video editing user interface.

Wrapping Up

The Canva video editing tool has only just been recently released.

But even now, it’s already proven to be efficient and effective in creating quality videos that make use of all the features in Canva that we already know and love.

You can now make use of the timeline to edit video ads like Facebook video ads, social media video, and even YouTube.