How to Edit Video in Canva (Updated Step-by-Step Beginner Guide)

I'm going to take you through step-by-step how to use the brand new Canva video editor from the latest V2 update. So whether you've used this before and you want to understand how the new interface works or whether you're brand new to this, I'm going to take you through step-by-step. Now the process I'm taking you through to edit here is the same process you would use in any tool or app. We've generated an AI prompt and a PDF guide for you that will step you through the most efficient way to edit in your given tool or app, Canva included. So scan the QR code on screen and there is a link to that in the description box below and let's jump into it. So you want to head over to the Canva website now and log in or create a free account if you don't have an account yet. Then we'll take you to this main dashboard area here. So at the top we can see the different types of things that we can create in here, everything from emails now to social media posts to presentations and obviously video, that's what we're looking at here. Down here you can see all your recent projects. You can also jump into some of the tools directly from here as well, but because we're making a video, let's jump to the video section. So then again, we get direct access to some of these tools like Magic Animate, Premium Animations. We can see which of the tools here or the features are pro or the ones you need the paid account for with the little crown on there and then anything without that is free use. If we scroll down here, you can see we've got a lot of different video templates that you can use as a great starting place. So you could, let's say for instance, pick one of these, it's going to open that up in a new project for you. We get direct access to the timeline, this is all part of that new timeline here. You can see that we're in the new video editor, but we can see everything already added to the timeline here for us and all of it, you can see as I mouse over the different elements here, everything is customizable. So if we hit play on this now, we can preview this. Maybe we want to make some changes already, instead of a short film, let's just double click on that text and we could type in my name. And then that is done. Like I love that we can update this stuff on the fly. We hit play and it's done in real time. It's fast, it's smooth, especially given that we're running this from the cloud. So you can either pick a template from there to customize up, but I would imagine what most people want to do would start from a blank slate or a blank canvas. So we're going to jump back to the main dashboard area here and we're going to choose video. And this time we're going to choose a landscape or widescreen video here, like a regular YouTube video. So again, we're taken to that same new video editing layout where we've got our playback and our creation space here, where we can preview everything and really build everything out. We've got our timeline down the bottom here, all of our controls and menu options and stuff are down the side here. And this is where we're going to spend a lot of time bringing in all of our footage and everything. So to do that, we want to come down here to uploads and this is where we can upload or record directly into Canva here. So we've got the option to upload our files and there's also a record yourself area here. So we can record a talking head video like I am now. We can even do screen recording directly in here too, or we could use this to record a voiceover. Now, if you do use the screen recorder, it does require you to download the Canva app onto your computer, but that's probably not a bad thing to do anyway. But for this one, I'm going to go back. I've already got some video files that I have uploaded, but if you do want to upload them, we just hit upload here. We go and find the files that we want to upload and that will happen for you. I'm going to jump across to videos. So these are all my uploaded videos and I'm going to pick this one here, a five minute clip of me presenting pretty poorly to camera. So by selecting that, that's automatically added it into our timeline down here and we can hit play to preview this. All right. We are recording. Okay. So this is me just making sure everything is set up. I do like that we can click and drag this now. You can see if we go too fast, depending on your internet connection, you could go a lower quality preview, then it quickly snaps back to being nice and crispy. I just love how fast and fluid this is now. So we want to find where we want this video to start. So I start talking here. So just before that, we want to remove all of this stuff here. There's a couple of different ways that we can do this. I can come back here to the start of this clip and you can see how the mouse cursor changes to this arrow. I can click and drag and adjust that start point to where we now want our video to start. So just before I start talking here. So when I let go of the mouse at that point, that now is our new start point. You can have the world's best video. Okay. Solid start point. And it's exactly the same if we scroll across to the end of our video here that we can trim off the end of the video too. Okay. Down here. And again, I can grab that end and drag it back to where we want our video to finish. Now we can also easily add splits or cuts into our footage here. So if there's sections that we want to remove out or reposition in here, we can easily do that too. So if I'm clicking back here, it looks like there's a mistake or something I made. Here we go. I look pretty frustrated. We want to cut this bit out. So I start talking again here. Let's say we want to add a cut here at this point. Again, I've got this clip selected down the bottom here, and we can just come up here to this little split icon. And we've now got two clips here in the timeline, which means then if I click on this first one, I could then drag this back to remove that bad take or the piece where I wasn't talking. So we're able to use a combination of these splits and adjusting the start and the end point of our clips to edit our footage down. But we could also just delete sections as well. Let's say that we didn't want this section here. I could add a split at that point. I could select this clip and we can either just press delete on the keyboard. We've got a delete button up here. Or if we right click on any of these clips, then we get a menu bar that pops up with a lot of this common used stuff as well. So you can see here we've got delete. It's even telling us the keyboard shortcut is the delete key. Likewise for split, we can just press S on the keyboard and it's going to split our clips as well. So I can delete this here and it has removed that from our timeline. So the first thing you want to do is get your primary footage in. We have go through, remove all the bad takes and all the mistakes so that you're just left with the key footage that you want to have in your video. And this would also mean bringing in any extra clips or anything like that as well. Just dragging them down to that timeline to build out your main story. So we've got that cut down. You can see all our chunks of footage down here. Now if we want to pick them up and move them around, we can just click, tap and hold and move them to where we want to have them in our project. So I've just switched the order of those two now. So that would be the next step. And then we're going to bring in any B-roll or overlay footage into our project. So we want to jump back over here to uploads, upload any files that you need. You can see I've already got a few in here. If we want to preview them to make sure that they are the right clip, we can just put our mouse over them and you can see they automatically start to play. So if we just click on a clip here, it's going to drop it down into our main timeline like this so that if we were looking at this now, it's me talking and then at this point it will cut straight across to this clip. So it's added it to our main story edit here. And it's just moved the remaining clips along. We scroll across, you'll see what it's done here. Instead of just dropping it in like this, though, what we want to do here is add this as an overlay piece of content. So I can either delete that and bring it back in again, or I could click and drag this up a layer and it will now sit on top of those clips. So we did just want to bring in the clip from here. We can click and drag it directly onto that top layer as well. I'm just going to come up here and undo on that one because I already have it in our timeline here. But now this is treated as another clip. So I can click on this, I can drag it around, I can move it to where we want it in our project. I can adjust the start and end times of this clip. So maybe we want to start a little bit later. I can just drag that across here to where we want it to start. And likewise, with the end, we can drag that back to where we want that to finish. You can still add splits and cuts and all of that stuff into that as well. But the idea with this is if we're playing this through now, I'm talking here and then it shows this on screen instead of me talking. So I am still talking here underneath. But this is now the visual on top of that. And with these clips here, if we select them, we can scale them up and down. You can see that I am still behind here talking and you can see that that's happening here. Both clips are happening at the same time. We can pick them up, we can move them around, we can rotate them, do all of that fun stuff. It doesn't just need to be full screen, but let's do this. Let's take it back to full screen. And then we want to bring in any other clips that we want to use in our project. Maybe we'll grab this one here. Again, let's drag it onto that layer above and we can actually stack these. So if we wanted this on top of our beach footage here, you can see now we've got three layers, essentially. So I could really have three different clips or more on screen at the one time. Let's again scale these back up and maybe we'll move this clip along here a bit further. Now, Canva also has a solid media library that we can use if we come up here to elements, then there's different types of things that we can access here that are already built into the app. So we can come across here and see the different types of things that are in here, different graphics and things we can either go through and browse as well, or we can search from up here, too. So if we go person walking on beach, let's run this and see what it finds for us. We can see it's got videos, photos, graphics, frames, there's audios. So let's come back up here to videos. Let's go see all on video and we can see all the different types of stock footage that we have access to in here. Again, some of them are free and you're able to use on the free plan. Others, you need to jump on one of the pro plans with that little crown there. Let's say we wanted this clip. We can drag that into our timeline as well and we can go ahead and trim that down and maybe we'll scale that one up. But if you had a keen eye, you'll see there was also another option when we ran this search here as well. So we go walking on the beach. We do have the option in here now to generate video, too. So if I click that now, it says it's thinking this is a fairly new addition to Canva. But I love that it does have both image and video generation built in directly in here, too. If we were going to use AI to generate this clip for us, we'd probably want to give it far better instructions of specifically what we actually want. So that's done. We can see our clip here now. It actually looks pretty good. We can hit play. Yeah, solid. And again, we want to use it now clip. We can just drag it down here into our timeline and maybe we will move it over here. Check out the quality on this. And you also want to make sure that your thumbnail images look good, small. So we're able to access that here from elements. We're also now able to access this under magic media where we can just tell it we want to create images, graphics, videos, 3D objects as well. And then we just give it our prompt or our instructions in here. OK, the next step is to go ahead and add in any titles or text into your videos. So for this, let's jump back to the start of our edit and we're going to come over here to text. We can just add in a text box. So this is a basic text box here. We could type something in Justin Brown and we could customize this up. We've got all our regular controls and stuff across the top here to make this look good. But instead, if I delete this and we come back over here, you can see we've got access to our brand kit. So our titles that were pre-made with our branding, our fonts, our size, all of that stuff, we can have all of that pre-set up, good to go. If we come down here even further, you can see that there are different templates and things that we could use. So if you like the look of some of these, you just keep scrolling. There's so many in here to choose from. Maybe we'll grab this one here, future ready. Again, we can just select that. It shows up in our timeline. We can move it around where we want it and it's customizable. There we go. Justin Brown ready. Okay, no one's Justin Brown ready. But again, that shows up in our timeline down here as its own clip. So we can stretch this out for however long we want on screen. We can add splits if we wanted to put some of it at one section of the video and some at the other. It's all just really fluid and easy to do now. Now, some of these templates and presets and stuff will be animated already, but we can also add some simple animations to things up here under animate. You can see we've still got our text box selected and we can choose the type of animation that we want to have in here. So you want to go through now, add in any text or titles into your videos, and then we would add in any transitions or effects. Now for this, we can see our timeline is starting to get pretty busy in here. So I like to rescale things as I need to, to get more creative space down the bottom here. But for any transitions between two shots, you can see that in this main timeline here, if we put our mouse cursor over the joining piece between two clips, we get some extra menu options here. So there's one to add a transition. There's one to add in some media or a blank clip, a placeholder at that point. So we're going to click here, transition. And again, we get these little animations that are going to transition between those two clips. So let's say we wanted this one here, chop. We just click on it. It's applied with that selected. We can choose how long this chop effect is going to happen for. So I've just made it longer. So it stands out here on our timeline for you. We can see that previewing here. Now we can choose the direction of the chop and we can either manually apply them to where we want them in those cuts between those clips, or we can hit apply between all pages. Now a page is really a cut in that primary timeline here, but normally on a video like this where the first shot is pretty much the same as the next shot and all I'm cutting out is a bad take or a retake or something. I wouldn't normally add a transition between them because both the shots look pretty much the same. So I'm going to select on that. I'm going to come back up the top here. I'm going to choose none. So we're removing that. What I would do instead of what we do for a lot of our YouTube videos is just zoom in on one of them so that it kind of looks like it's a different camera angle, just breaks it up a little bit more zoomed in shot for the viewers. So I just pick either one of these clips here. Let's go this one here. We can't just come up here on our primary clips and adjust the scale on them. You see, there's no option to adjust the scale, but on one of our B-roll clips, we click on it and we can adjust the scale. That's because we've set this main one here at the bottom as the background. So this piece here is a little clunky to be able to make changes to our primary footage, but there's really two ways that we can do this. We can select the clip and instead of rescaling it here, we can come up here to the crop section and we can scale it up in here. So we're cropping in on it. Now, in order to really sell this effect, you kind of want to try to line up the eyes in both the first shot and the second shot. Let's see how close we got here. Okay, that's not bad. So the second shot then is slightly zoomed in, just again, breaks it up a bit. That's probably the easiest way to use the crop. Or if I undo that now, let's come back up here, undo. The other way would be to switch this clip here up a layer. So I can right click on it here and I can choose detach video from the background. And you can see it's moved it up, but it's also moved all of our other clips along. So this is where this bit becomes pretty clunky. But I want to show you because sometimes you might prefer to do it this way. It might make more sense to do it this way. So what I need to do now is come back here and we want to add in some blank media here. Let's just choose blank. And you can see we now have this white piece here in the timeline. Let's stretch that out so that it is the exact same length as the clip that we just moved out of there. And let's then scale this clip up to where we want it. So our goal here wasn't just to have it at the regular size. Our goal here was to zoom in on it. So we can make that a bit bigger now. Again, try to line up the eyes. It's going by guess here. Okay, pretty close. So this would still play back the same. I've essentially done the same thing. If I was playing this now, we'd have this first shot. And then at this point here, it would jump to the more zoomed in shot. So you want to go through now, add in any transitions or zoom ins on your primary footage. You can also make adjustments to any of your B-roll or overlay clips as well. And this is also where we can start to look at some of the effects and things that are built in too. So now that we have the core piece of your edit down, we're starting to make it look good. So let's just take that same clip here, for example. If we select on this, we have the option to come up here and we can remove the background from it. So let's choose here, BG Remover. Again, this is a paid feature. It's going to analyze that clip and it's going to remove the background for us. So if you then wanted to add some text or even some of this B-roll footage here as the background for that clip, we can now do that. So I'll select me here and maybe scale me down. Let's put me over in the corner. And if we play this now. You need to make, so to help you with this, you need to make sure that you're. Pretty simple. If we pick another clip in the timeline here now, and we come to edit, you can see over on the side here, there's a bunch of other things that we can do in here as well. Like you've got your video speed. We can slow down and speed up a clip. There are some extra apps and add-ons for Canva you can access here under apps. Things like a video upscaler, a video reverser. If we want something to play backwards, we can easily add that app into our Canva tool set and have that functionality as well. But then from there, we're going to bring in any music or sound effects into our project. Again, if we have our own, we can access them here under uploads, then audio, and those will show in here. You can see I've got a couple of tracks in here, or Canva does have built-in audio, depending on your plan, that you can use as well. I'm going to come back to our clip, and I'm going to pick this track here from Epidemic Sound, and I'm going to click and drag it down here into our timeline, but I'm dragging it to the bottom. And again, that shows as its own layer. I can pick it up. I can move it around if I wanted it to start later, but let's make this start at the start of our project. If we scroll across to the end, you'll see Canva's automatically trimmed it off at the end of our video for us. I love that. So bring in any music or sound effects or anything into your project now, and then we're going to start to adjust our volume level so that everything sounds good. So straight out of the box, I found that Canva actually does a really good job at automatically adjusting your video clips so that they're at a decent volume level. But if you do find that you need to boost a clip up or down, you can select on a clip, and you come up here to the volume area here, and we can drag this up or down depending on what that clip needs. And I suggest you're doing this piece with headphones on so you're really getting a true representation on what it sounds like. And so we can either do this on a clip-by-clip basis by selecting the clips and adjusting the volume here, or there is now a feature called Balance All. So if we press on this, it's going to go through all of your clips in your project, sound effects, and music as well. And there we go. It's done already. Volume of all media is balanced. So it's automatically going to make an adjustment for you using its fancy AI technology. So we can see just looking at this, it's already lowered the volume of the music for us. So these tools are going to make this whole getting your volume levels right so much easier. But again, if we want to overwrite that or make minor tweaks and adjustments from there, maybe we want the music up a little bit more after that has taken place, we can select on it, we can come back here to volume, and we can make those adjustments. You can see it's dropped this here to volume level 20. Now there's also the ability in here to clean up your audio. So if maybe your microphone wasn't the best or you've got a heap of background noise, we select our clips here that we want to touch up. We can come up here to audio tools, and then there is the option here to enhance voice. Again, this is a premium or paid feature, but it does a really good job of cleaning up your audio. Now that that's done, we can put our final layer of polish onto our video, and we can adjust any of the colors or looks for any of our clips. So let's just come over to this clip here. There's a couple of different ways that we can do this. We can choose the edit button here. And in here, there's different filters that we can apply. So we go see all, see there's lots of different looks that we can apply here. And we can adjust the intensity of them to get the look that we are after. Or if I come back up the top here, let's choose none. Let's come back here. We also have the ability to choose adjust, which gives us all of the individual sliders for all the different things we'd like to control here. But there's also now a fairly decent auto adjust tool in here as well. It's gonna use AI to automatically adjust your clip for you. So if we press on this now, and it says here, our colors have been adjusted, but it doesn't just do it and that's it. We can actually see the adjustments it made. So if we wanted to tweak or refine them further, then we can easily do that. Now, one feature I think that is missing here at the moment is then the ability to apply these changes to all. So let's just say that we took our first clip here in the timeline, and we made some adjustments here for this, the auto adjust feature. I mean, it's done a decent job. I'd probably lower the contrast a little bit here, but there's no easy way for us now at this point to apply that to the rest. You see that even if I select multiple clips in the timeline here, I don't have that edit button anymore. Now, this is a feature I swear that they had before. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but as far as I'm aware, there's even no ability to just copy those adjustments that we made. We can copy a style, but if I come across here to paste it onto this clip, it doesn't work. So hopefully this is something that they fix really soon, but the workaround would be to either apply those adjustments to each clip or to do them back at the start when they're all in one clip joined together, which normally isn't what I'd be recommending because it puts more load on the playback and everything because it's applying all of those filters and things every time you want to play it back. But fingers crossed, this is something that they will add soon. Or let me know in the comments if I've completely missed it. So now that that's done, you'll obviously want to play back your video, make sure it's how you would like it. If you want to do a full screen preview, we can hit preview up here. You can have the world's best video. And that's going to play that back for us. And we can close back to our timeline. But when you're ready to save this out, we just want to hit share. There is the option here to directly share to places like YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. We can even create a shareable review link in here as well. So we can just copy a link to this. We can give it to someone to review it, give us comments and things on it. But normally at this point, I would just hit download to save that to our computer. I'd suggest leaving this here as MP4 video, but you can see the different types of things that we could export from this. And then we choose our quality settings. So this footage here was 1080p recording. The default here is 1080p. That's likely where I'd leave it. But if you did want to do a 4K video, we can bump that up, but it is again on the paid version. And then we hit download and that's going to save onto our computer. Now to jump to speed editing in Canva, don't forget to grab our free PDF and AI prompt, helping you edit faster step-by-step. The same process that I took you through in this video. If you want to geek out more with AI video editing tools, check out the video linked on screen. And as always, there's a bunch of other links and resources in the description box below to help you even further. I'll see you in the next video.