How to Record and Edit Videos in TikTok

TikTok is one of the most popular social media applications of 2021 and for good reason! Of course, creators can upload great videos with music, skits, challenges, and more. But what makes TikTok so successful is that it’s a paradise of creativity.

If you’re new to TikTok, or you’re here to brush up on some new skills, we’ve got you covered! In this article we’ll show you how to record and edit the perfect TikTok videos!

The Built-In Editor

TikTok has its own built-in editor which can perform many basic tasks, including adding filters, blurring, adding soundtracks, and more. Let’s take a look at the basic interface.

When you launch TikTok, the app starts by showing you a video that it thinks you’ll like. You can interrupt that at any time by tapping the “+” icon and starting your own video.

There are a few pages we’ll go through in this article, but this is where we start. Here’s how you record your TikTok video:

1. Select any effects you may want to use for your video.
   
   
2. To change the time frame of your video, use the time selector at the bottom part of the screen
   
3. Tap on the ‘Add sound’ option if you want to add music.
   
4. Tap on the red record icon in the center of the screen. Tap it again when you are finished recording.
   
5. Use the blue line at the top as an indicator for how much you have recorded and how much time that you have left.
   
6. You can also tap on the ‘Upload’ icon in the lower right corner to upload an existing video from your phone’s camera roll (this is the option for you if you want to use an external video editor as we’ll explain further below).

After you’ve recorded your video, you can proceed to the editing process.

Getting to Know TikTok’s Editing Tools

There are so many ways to edit your TikTok video. We’ll break them down for you in this section.

Let’s start at the upper-left-hand corner and go around the screen. We’ll be using the Android version of the app for this walkthrough, but the iOS version is very similar.

The “X” icon cancels your recording and editing session.

The “Add a sound” command brings up the TikTok sound library, which is vast and extensive. You can select a song, search for keywords, look at playlists, etc. You cannot upload your own sounds – although there are some workarounds that we’ve covered in this article. Tap this button before you start recording so that your video can be synchronized with the song or sounds that you select.

The “Flip” button changes from your front to your rear camera, useful for taking selfie videos.

The “Speed” button lets you change the recording/playback speed of your video. Settings range from 0.1x to 3x, meaning you can make your video play anywhere from 10:1 slow motion to 3:1 fast motion.

The “Filters” button opens TikTok’s library of filters, categorized into “Portrait,” “Life,” and “Vibe” sections. These are relatively clean filters that do things like modify the color palette and the image contrast, and they are organized numerically rather than with clever names. You can return to the unfiltered view of the world by selecting the first filter under the “Portrait” section, labeled “Normal.”

The “Beauty” button toggles Beauty mode on or off; all this mode does is some subtle removal of shadows.

The “Timer” button opens a timer interface that shows a video timeline of up to 60 seconds. You can tap the point at which you want to stop (from 1 to 60 seconds) and then tap “Start recording” to start auto-recording without having to hold down the recording button.

Next is the flash button. This newer option lets you turn on or off the flash depending on the lighting you need.

To the right of the recording button is the “Upload” button, which opens the video gallery on your phone and lets you pick a video to upload. This is how you can get videos created or edited in other tools into your TikTok feed.

The recording button (the big red circle) is the button you push when you want to start a recording without using the timer.

The “Effects” button opens TikTok’s vast library of special effects, ranging from digital enhancements to split screens to augmented reality (AR) filters. This is where you go to add giant googly eyes, rainbow swirl effects, and all the other video enhancements. There are sections for “Trending”, “Face,” and “Animal” effects.

Editing Your Video

To the right of the recording button, there are now two new buttons. The X button cancels the recording of this segment, and the check button saves it and takes you to the post-processing interface.

In this interface, your video segment will play on autoloop.

You can hit the back button to return to the recording interface to extend the segment.

You can use the “Trim” button to shorten your video.

The “Mixer” button takes you to the mixer interface, which lets you set the relative sound levels between the sound you recorded and the soundtrack you selected earlier.

“Select Sound” opens the sound interface and lets you bring in music or sounds from the TikTok library, just like in the previous screen.

How to Edit Segments on TikTok

The “Effects” button does something very different than it did on the previous screen. It opens a library of different effects, along with a timeline of your video, allowing you to apply effects only to sections of the video. This is a very powerful feature and is where a lot of the innovative effects you see in TikTok videos are created.

The “Set Cover” button selects a frame from your video as the cover for the video which other users see when they are browsing videos. This lets you pick a representative frame rather than just the first frame of the video, which might be empty or boring.

The “Filters” button applies a filter to the whole segment, just like it did in the pre-recording interface.

The “Stickers” button opens the stickers library, which allows you to add animated stickers to the video. Once you select a sticker, you can drag it around on the screen to change where it appears while the video plays.

Finally, the “Next” button takes you to the posting interface.

Post Your Video

The posting interface is where you send your video out into the TikTok ecosystem for the enjoyment (hopefully) of others.

You can type in a description of your video, along with #hashtags and callouts to your @friends. You can set the video to be either Public, visible to your friends only, or visible only to you. (This lets you save videos to work on them later without having your half-completed work released into the wild.) You can set comments to be on or off, and you can either allow or disallow duet and react videos. You can also automatically share the video to your other social media accounts like Twitter.

At the bottom of the screen, there is a “Drafts” button (which saves the video to draft) and a “Post” button, which sends your video out to the world.

As you can see, the built-in video editor is pretty powerful and is probably sufficient for most users. However, if you want to get really serious about your production values, then you might want to check out the next section.

Using an External Editor

If you use an external editor to look at your TikTok videos, you will be able to do a lot more. The TikTok editor is quite feature-rich, but it isn’t a full-fledged video editor. However, before you can use another video editor, you must first download your video from TikTok.

To download the video, you must first post it. It can’t just be in your draft folder; it has to get posted to the site. So set the “who can view this” toggle on the video to “private”, and then post the video. Once it is posted, you can tap on your profile in TikTok, select the video, then select the three dots icon and select “Download” to copy the video to your local device.

App-Based Video Editors

There are a number of video editing apps that are available for your smartphone or tablet. They have the advantage of being convenient and handy. They have the disadvantage of not really being all that much more powerful or feature-rich than the built-in TikTok editor. However, it might be worth trying them out if they have specific features that you want. On Android, popular video editing apps include PowerDirector, Timbre, Vizmato, YouCut, and InShot. iPhone users might want to check out iMovie, Splice or Filmmaker Pro Video Editor for iOS.

Desktop Video Editors

A desktop video editor offers far more potential for doing serious video editing work. Your PC or Mac is significantly more powerful than your smartphone and has a full-sized screen and more precise interface tools as well. If you are going to go this route, I would recommend an editor that costs money. There are free editors out there, and some of them are very good, but again, you aren’t going to get something better than the built-in TikTok editor without paying. Here are some of the better editors out there.

Adobe Premiere Elements

Adobe Premiere Elements is a lighter version of the movie-grade Adobe Premiere CC video editing software. Elements keep the main features of its larger parent but cut out a lot of the stuff that only videographers really need, to keep the price down and the learning curve manageable. If you’ve used Adobe products before, you’ll be right at home with Elements. Elements have features like a huge array of tools, video effects, and media library management options that make it ideal for a TikTok user planning to do a lot of different videos.

Premiere Elements costs $99, but there is a free trial available so you can see if it suits your needs without paying for it.

Coral Video Studio

There was a time when Corel was a first-rank computer graphics software company, and the company still has a solid reputation in the video editing world. Corel VideoStudio is a very powerful consumer-level video editor. While not at the same level as Avid Media Composer, it isn’t as expensive or as difficult to master either. It has a lot of professional features and a user interface that isn’t hard to engage with.

Corel Video Studio comes in a Pro version for $69 and an Ultimate version for $99. Both are highly powerful and can handle your TikTok videos with ease. There is also a free trial.

Tips and Tricks for Video Creation

When you start getting serious about creating videos for Tik Tok, there are a lot of advanced tips that you’ll want to know about. Here are some of the best we’ve found.

Use a Desktop Video Editor

If you’re creating and editing a lot of videos, you’re quickly going to find that the built-in editor, and even the available app-based editors, while suitable for the casual creator, just don’t have the full feature set and performance of a full-fledged video editing suite on a desktop computer. Not only is the display on a desktop computer far better for viewing your video files, but the performance level of a desktop or laptop CPU and memory are also going to be much superior to even a high-end smartphone.

Invest in a Video Camera + Tripod

Smartphones have great cameras these days for their size and cost, and – as with the video editing side of things – your smartphone camera is perfectly adequate for getting started. But once you get past the starting stage, you’ll want to invest in a nice full-sized video camera. Fortunately, you can get a very nice digital video camera for anywhere from $40 to $100. Features to look for include inputs for external microphones, optical zoom, a large LCD screen for framing your shots, the ability to output lower resolution video files, and manual white balance, focus, and exposure controls. Even if you don’t go with a full-sized camera, you should definitely invest in a tripod – they stabilize your camera and make videos rock-solid stable, as well as giving you an easy way to adjust the camera angle and position.

Light it Up

Lighting is crucial. Depending on the type of videos you are making, you may actually want to rely on natural lighting (if you have the right environment and don’t mind shooting only during daylight hours) but for most creators, you’ll need artificial lighting. The best lights are high-energy LEDs – they produce a white, crisp light that is very well suited for video and photography work. If you’re doing large-area videos with dancing or movement, you’ll want a three-light setup – a key (or spot) light, a fill light, and a backlight. Creators doing more in-your-face selfie-style videos should instead invest in a ring light, like the one we recommend at the end of this article.

Backgrounds are Important

What’s behind the scene is often just as important as what’s in the scene. A messy apartment or kitchen countertop doesn’t make a great backdrop for your heartfelt torch song video. Make sure there are no reflective or shiny surfaces in the background, as that can throw off your lighting or inadvertently include the camera in the shot. A single-color bedsheet can make a solid backdrop, but be sure that your performance takes place a few feet in front of it, so that you don’t cast distracting shadows.

It’s About the Sound

Sound quality is at least as important as video quality; people are often willing to forgive poor video quality, but as soon as they can’t hear or decipher what they’re hearing, they hit the back button and move on to something else. Nobody has time to listen to something they can’t hear. Some smartphones and digital video cameras have decent internal microphones, but you will always get a better sound quality from an external mic. Even an inexpensive external microphone will greatly augment your sound quality. The microphone should be as close to the subject of the video as possible. Be aware of background noises in your environment that you may have long since learned to tune out, but that a video watcher is going to hear immediately.

The Rule of Thirds

One of the most basic concepts in photograph or videography, the rule of thirds envisions an imaginary 3×3 grid being laid out over the field of your camera.

For an attractive and compelling video or photo, you want your subject(s) to be placed along one of the grid lines, rather than in the center of the shot. If possible, you want the subject to be placed at the intersection of gridlines – those four “sweet spots”. There’s no particular theoretical reasoning behind this rule – it’s just that people tend to find images that follow the rule more attractive than images that don’t.

Have a Presence

Screen presence – that quality that some people have that makes the camera seem to love them – is sometimes a gift. Many fine actors are actually just OK actors who have great screen presence. If you don’t have the luck to be born with Cary Grant’s natural camera appeal, you’ll need to consciously develop the traits and behaviors that translate into a charismatic on-screen appearance. Keep your body language calm and open – face the camera, don’t put your arms in front of your body. Have good posture – stand up straight! Your shoulders should be back, and you should be relaxed. Breathe, consciously and unconsciously.

Give the audience some smiles, particularly at the start of the video, so that they perceive you as friendly. Enunciate your words when you speak, and deliberately slow yourself down – nearly everyone tries to talk too fast on camera. If you don’t know what to do with your hands, give yourself props to occupy them – a magic wand for a magician, a microphone (even a dummy one) for a singer.  And practice – the second or third (or tenth or twentieth) run-through of a video is likely to be a much superior effort than the first, particularly if you are reviewing your own takes and learning from each glitched run-through.