How To Make a Reel On Instagram Like A Pro!

Anyone can make a reel on Instagram. You don’t need to be a professional video editor or have the latest gear and equipment. Here's how we do it!

How To Make a Reel On Instagram

Instagram reels are an incredible way to show your expertise in a field to new audiences. They are perfect to extend your reach, boost engagement and help build an incredible community. We know for some people this can be a daunting task, but we want to break down the barrier and teach you our tips, tips and ultimately how to make a reel on Instagram like a pro.

At Live To Create, we know throughout 2022 there is a big push on social media for video content. Over the past two years, our team have been experimenting, testing and pushing the known limits of the algorithm. This has resulted in over MILLIONS of people engaged on the reels we have created for ourselves and our clients.

So grab a pen and paper, because throughout this guide we will help you harness the potential and power of reels. We will step you through how we effectively create our reels and provide you with best practices, tips and tricks to get you producing reels like no other person. If you're curious, you can also check out our previous article How To Find a Trending Audio.

What are Instagram Reels?

Reels are short entertaining, educational or immersive videos published on Instagram. You can express your yourself or your brand to an audience and get discovered by thousands of people who are within similar communities. People create reels on Instagram to participate in trends, collaborate with community members or create inspiring content.

So how do you create reels?

There are many ways that you can create and edit a reel for Instagram. To narrow it down, we are going to be teaching you two ways:

1. How to edit a reel on your phone.
2. How to edit a reel on your laptop.

But first, the key to creating a reel like pro is to edit and cut your clips to engaging audio. As mentioned earlier, if you haven't read our previous article on How To Find a Trending Audio, go give it a quick (3 min) read and come back here!

How To Edit A Reel On Your Phone

We love being able to whip up a quick edit on our phones. To do this, all you need is multiple phone videos, an editing app and a great audio to edit to. Here's how we do it!

1. Find an Instagram audio you would like to edit your reel to. Screen record it!
2. Open up your editing app of choice. We love using CapCut or Splice.
3. Import your screen recording as audio (see the below video on the left on how to do this).
4. Import your videos and start editing away to the audio! Make sure you cut your clips to when the audio beats are located.
5. Export your edit with the audio.
6. Go into your saved audios on Instagram, and upload your reel to that audio. The magic tip here is to put the reel volume to 1% and your own audio to 100%! This is how you can still use the trending audio but have your edits and cuts perfectly lined up to the music. (Reference the below video on the right!)

How To Edit A Reel On Your Laptop

To effectively edit to a reel on your laptop, the following steps are followed:

1. Find an Instagram audio you would like to edit your reel to. Be sure to save it for later when you upload. Copy the video URL and download it here.
2. Open up your editing suite of choice (we love using Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve - which is a free editing suite!). If you're new to using editing suites, a great tutorial can be found here.
3. Import your audio .mp4 file and the videos you would incorporate into your edit.
4. Edit away! Make sure your video cuts are to the beat to the music you have imported.
5. Export your edit with the audio. Airdrop or transfer the file to your phone.
6. Go into your saved audios on Instagram, and upload your reel to that audio. Like mentioned above, the magic tip here is to put the reel volume to 1% and your own audio to 100%! This is how you can still use the trending audio but have your edits and cuts perfectly lined up to the music. (Refer to the video above on the right to how we do this!).

By following these steps, you'll be pumping out incredible, well timed reels in no time!

Where to next?

Be sure to sign up to our newsletter to stay tuned for future blog articles! We have so much instore and we're so keen to be able to share our content creation tips with you.

As always, be sure to let us know how you go! Tag as @livetocreateau.

If you want to help editing your content, get in contact with us for a free 15 minute introduction chat!

The Live To Create team.