How to Edit Surfing Videos for Social Media

Transforming hours of raw water footage into a slick, sixty-second banger for social media is a modern art form. A great surf edit is more than just clipping your best wave, it's about telling a short story that captures the feeling of the session. This guide will walk you through a simple, effective process for editing your surfing videos, from organizing your clips to adding the final polish that stops the scroll.

Start Before You Even Hit the Water: Shooting for the Edit

The best edits begin with the footage you capture. If you go into a session with a plan, the editing process becomes ten times easier. It's not just about pointing the camera at the wave, it's about collecting all the pieces you'll need to build a compelling narrative.

Get Your Camera Settings Right

Whether you're using a GoPro, a drone, or a DSLR on the beach, a few technical settings can make a huge difference.

• Frame Rate: Always shoot at a minimum of 60 frames per second (fps), but 120fps is even better if your camera supports it. This is your secret weapon for creating buttery smooth slow-motion. You can slow 60fps footage down to 50% on a 30fps timeline, and 120fps footage down to 25%, without any choppy motion.
• Resolution: Shoot in the highest resolution your camera and memory card can handle (4K if possible). This gives you more flexibility to crop your shots in the edit without losing quality, which is handy for reframing vertical videos.
• Shutter Speed: A good rule of thumb is to set your shutter speed to double your frame rate (e.g., if you're shooting at 60fps, use a 1/120 shutter speed). This produces a natural-looking motion blur and avoids that overly crisp, jerky look.

Collect More Than Just Waves: The Power of B-Roll

Nobody wants to watch 60 seconds of non-stop action shots. Variety is what holds a viewer's attention. Think like a filmmaker and collect plenty of B-roll - the contextual shots that build the atmosphere and tell the story of the day.

Here are some B-roll ideas to capture:

• The morning check: The dawn patrol landscape, steam rising off of your coffee.
• The gear: Waxing your board, zipping up your wetsuit, close-ups of your fins.
• The journey: The walk down the dunes, the paddle out.
• The environment: Panoramic shots of the coastline, waves crashing on the rocks, the sunset.
• The aftermath: A post-surf smile, water dripping off your board.

These supporting clips are the glue that holds your edit together, giving it a pace and rhythm that a sequence of only wave clips could never achieve.

Organizing and Culling: Finding Gold in Your Footage

You're back from your session with gigs of footage. This next step is often the most tedious, but it is single-handedly one of the most important parts for creating a tight, punchy edit. You need to be ruthless.

Step 1: Dump and Organize

Transfer all of your footage from your SD card to a specific folder on your computer or an external hard drive. Create a few sub-folders to keep things tidy:

• 'A-Roll (Waves)': This is for your main action shots.
• 'B-Roll (Lifestyle)': For all those atmospheric and contextual clips.
• 'Music': For audio tracks you're considering.
• 'Project Files': Where your editing software project file will live.

Step 2: Cull Everything

Now, watch everything. Don't start editing yet. Your only job is to find the best moments. As you watch through your wave footage, drag the absolute best clips into your 'A-Roll' folder. We're not looking for decent waves, we're looking for clips with a distinct moment - a great turn, a deep barrel, a stylish noseride. If a clip is just you trimming down the line, has an awkward section, or shows an incomplete wave, it's probably not the best choice for a short, punchy edit. Your social media edit needs to contain only your absolute best clips.

The Editing Workflow: Assembling Your Story

With your clips organized, it's time to build your edit. While fancy software like Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve offers the most control, you can apply these same principles in simple mobile apps like CapCut or InShot - they are surprisingly powerful and perfect for social media edits.

1. Set Up Your Project Correctly

Before importing any footage, set up your project - what editors call a "sequence" - for social media. This means setting the aspect ratio to 9:16 (vertical video). For frame rate, 24fps or 30fps are standard. Starting with the correct dimensions saves you a massive headache later on.

2. Let the Music Drive the Edit

For short-form edits, music is everything. It sets the pace, the mood, and the energy. Instead of just slapping a song on at the end, find your track first and lay it down on your timeline. Platforms like Epidemic Sound or Artlist are fantastic for finding royalty-free music, though you can also use popular sounds directly within Instagram or TikTok.

Listen to the song a few times. Where are the beats? Where is the drop, the chorus, the quiet moments? Use the beat of the song as a guide for your cuts. A big turn should hit on a strong beat in the music. A lull in the song is the perfect spot for a moody B-roll shot. In short: edit to the music.

3. Build the Foundation with Your Best Clips

Drag your top 3-5 'master' wave clips (your A-Roll) onto the timeline. Don't arrange them chronologically, arrange them for impact. You want your two best waves right at the start and towards the end. A great clip in the first three seconds will hook viewers instantly, while another strong clip at the end will leave a lasting impression. Any mediocre clips can be used in the middle to bridge your best shots.

4. Weave in Your B-Roll

With your primary wave clips in place, start sprinkling in the B-roll. These clips provide much-needed breathing room and context for what would otherwise become a hectic-looking edit.

• Put a 1-2 second clip of the beach or sunrise at the very beginning to set the scene.
• Use a close-up of waxing a board to transition between two fast-paced wave clips.
• Cut to a slow-motion B-roll clip right before a major wave. This contrast in pacing resets the viewer's expectation and builds suspense for the action that follows.
• End the edit on a mellow, stylized shot of a sunset or a silhouette of you walking by the ocean post-surf. Remember you are storytelling, so make sure your outro wraps the whole story together. Ensure the B-roll shots line up with the ebb and flow of your chosen song.

5. Get Creative with Speed Ramping

Speed ramping is the technique of dynamically speeding up and slowing down a clip to add emphasis, and it works particularly well with slow-motion footage. In a surfing video, speed ramping can turn a great shot into a visually engaging highlight. Keep things punchy.

When applied to your A-roll clips, speed ramping should add a burst of energy and anticipation. Start by ramping up the speed as you pop up or drop into a wave. Return the clip to normal speed through the bottom turn, and then slow it down significantly for the main maneuver. This helps the viewer fully appreciate the key moment, which is perfect for big aerials, cut-backs on the lip, stylish noserides, or barrel rides. After the main maneuver, ramp the speed back up until the wave finishes. Don't be too harsh when you adjust your keyframes, keep tweaking both sides until you get a smooth-looking motion as the speed changes.

6. Don't Skip Color Correction & Grading

Raw footage can often look flat, washed out, and boring - especially from action cameras. Adding color turns a flat clip into a cinematic one.

Correction: The first stage involves adjusting exposure, contrast, white balance, and saturation to make your shot look natural. Brightening a dark shot, balancing the orange glow of morning light, or boosting the vibrance of colors are all part of the correction process.

Grading: Grading is where your artistic talent comes into play. Here, you apply a specific look or style. Will you go with a moody edit that has crushed blacks and cooled-down blue temperatures, or a warm, sun-kissed feel?

Subtlety is key. Don't overdo it with the colors or the vibrance, or you could ruin a perfectly good shot. Unless it's your intent, you should always aim for a natural look for any social media post, otherwise your audience will tune out.

Final Polish and Exporting for Social Media

You're almost there. Your edit is timed to the music, has great color, and tells a story. Just a few more things to do ensure all of your efforts can be successfully viewed and reach a bigger audience after it's scheduled on any of your desired socials.

Text and Subtitles

Use text for quick context: the location, the surfer's social media tag, or anything that adds a layer of connection for the viewer. Subtitles and text overlays also make your content more discoverable, as platforms like TikTok use the words in your video to categorize it for search results.

Pick Your Thumbnail

Scrub through your edit and find the most captivating frame for your thumbnail. Don't let social channels auto-select one for you. A strong thumbnail is what will stop someone from scrolling and convince them to watch your video.

The Right Export Specs

For vertical-video-friendly social platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, you will want to use the H.264 codec. It's universal and keeps files relatively small without sacrificing picture quality. Choose a Variable Bit Rate setting and target somewhere between 10-15 Mbps. These are reliable settings for keeping top-quality video without creating an enormous file size for uploads.

Final Thoughts

Editing great surf videos is a skill you cultivate just like reading a wave. It combines technical adjustments with pure feeling, turning raw moments into memorable stories. The key is to start by shooting with intention, being selective with your clips, and using music to guide the rhythm of your edit, not the other way around.

Once your masterpieces are exported, the last thing you want is for them to languish in a folder because you have too many things going on. Consistency on social media platforms is what builds an audience, and that means posting all of those edits you worked so hard on. Because our content strategies always involved managing Reels, Shorts, and TikToks, we built Postbase to make that last part effortless. With its video-first design and a simple visual calendar, you can schedule your surf edits across all of your accounts at once, freeing you up to get back to surfing or continue editing.