🎬 Final Cut Pro: Complete Crash Course for Beginners

welcome to this Final Cut Pro tutorial for beginners this is going to be a complete crash course in video editing so you can learn everything that you need to start making amazing videos whether it's YouTube videos travel vlogs or anything you can think of we got you covered this is a dork stinger from video plasti and let's get started all right welcome to Final Cut Pro if this is the first time you're opening Final Cut Pro it might look at fine a bit confusing at first but don't worry it's actually super easy and intuitive to use so just to show you the interface real quick here on the top left we have what is called the browser which is where we will import our media browse our projects and some titles and generators here on the bottom is basically the heart of any video editing software it's gonna be the timeline you're gonna see that in a minute here in the middle we have the preview area for the video that we edited or imported and the here on the top right is what is called an inspector right now it looks kind of empty so let's go ahead and import some media but before we do that you have to understand the hierarchy of how Final Cut Pro imports footage and organizes everything so first of all you have what is called a library and now you can create a new library by going here or use the one that already exists and inside each library you can create what is called an event so let's go ahead and create a new event called Final Cut Pro tutorial and now inside this event this is where we can actually import some media and create a project inside it so first of all let's go ahead and create the project so I'll just call it Final Cut Pro project it's gonna be saved inside this event and for the settings just go ahead with a 1080p that's more than enough frame rate this is up to you depending on your project for this I'm gonna use 24 frames that's usually good and everything else just leave it as it is so now we have the Final Cut Pro project inside this event right here and the way you use events is pretty flexible it's up to you for me I use the event for the entire video and all the footage that I have for that video but maybe you're working on a longer video like a film for example and then you can use events to organize the different scenes and assets that you have for each one so now let's go ahead and import some of the media you can do that either by going here and import or right clicking here and importing medium and if you go here it's gonna show you the media import window with a lot of settings when you import footage and one day you want to make sure you have is leave files in place because if you have it selected on copy to library it's basically gonna make a duplicate of the same footage that you're importing and that's gonna just use a lot more space and you don't want that and if you're gonna work with 4k footage it's a very good idea to select this thing called create proxy media which is basically going to downscale and use a lower resolution version so you have better performance while editing but personally I never use this and nobody that I know actually does what we always use is we have a folder here open in finder and I already have my footage selected and organized like this so it's just a matter of selecting all of it and then drag and drop it here in the Final Cut Pro event and now we have our footage and music here imported and there's two ways that we can view this it's either a list form or a filmstrip like this but personally I prefer to use the list so if I click on either one of those as you can see it opens a video preview right here and if you want to preview the video you can hit the spacebar to play or pause the video right there you can also preview it by clicking here to see different points inside the video and this is the area where you can trim the video before you add it to the timeline and to do that you can either grab it here at the beginning or at the end or what I actually use all the time is if you play back and you decide you wanted to start here you can insert what is called an end point you can hit the keyboard shortcut I to mark an end point and then if you continue playing it and decide this is where you want it to end you can mark out by hitting the keyboard shortcut oh and now we have this selection right here and it's time to add it to our timeline and there are a few ways to do that by using those patterns right here or using keyboard shortcuts the one that I actually use most of the times is this one which is a keyboard shortcut e which basically stands for adding the clip at the end of the timeline now I've added a couple of other clips on the timeline so I can show you the other ways to add your footage the other options are to just add it wherever the playhead is by using the Q key on the keyboard and it's just gonna add it as b-roll right here on top on a secondary Channel or maybe just want to split this and add this selection here in the middle you can use this shortcut which is W on your keyboard and it's gonna add it here in between that and split it in half or maybe just want to add it here and just override whatever is at the playhead you can do that as well by heating letter D on the keyboard all right now it's time to add the music as well which we have here and I'll just add it here on the bottom and another way to trim audio or video on the timeline is to just grab it directly here at the end because for example we can notice that the audio doesn't really start until this point so this is just silence and now you can grab it here and if you move it like this it's gonna remove that silence and now we can move it all the way to the beginning and for example you can do the exact same thing with the videos if you grab it here at the end you can see it selects the one on the left or if you do this it's gonna select the clip on the right but we want to trim this one on the left and just match it for example here with a bit of the music and then for the boat I want to actually extend it a little bit until here because it's gonna match the beat of the music here so that's another way to trim your content but keep in mind if you make it shorter like this it's pretty much removing everything that comes after it alright now it's time to show you some of the tools that we have here and the most basic ones that we are gonna use our select position and blade so the one that we have right now is called select with a keyboard shortcut of a and in this case if you just grabbed any sort of footage like this and move it here everything else is gonna snap into place and you'll never have any empty spots on your timeline but say for example you actually want to add another clip in here and have this as an empty space temporarily in order to do that then you move to the position which is keyboard shortcut of P so now if I move this here or anywhere it's not gonna snap everything back into place and now we actually have this empty space from second to till like six second or something like that where we can come in later and add whatever we want and the last tool that I want to show you is the blade which is a keyboard shortcut of P and you can use the blade as you can see it has a blade icon that's gonna cut whatever clip or music you want so let's just say we want to cut the music here and then with a key board shortcut hey I'm gonna select this and you can move it around like this or what I'm actually gonna do is I'm just gonna hit the Delete key and it's gonna remove it so now we can go here and actually play back our current edit to see how it feels [Music] all right I think we managed to match up with the music pretty well but the problem that I notice now is that the music just ends abruptly and in order to fix that you can grab it here at the end you can see the cursor just turns into those left and right arrows you can just grab that to create a curve like this and it's gonna add a very nice fade out at the end and now let's say for example maybe we want to make the music louder you can also grab it here on this white line and increase the volume a tiny bit like that by a few decibels or you can do the exact same thing to lower the volume on the entire track so I want to show you a couple more useful shortcuts in Final Cut Pro say for example you want to remove this part on the tunneling because you don't like it if you hit a backspace key the next clip is just gonna snap in and fill in the gap but maybe you don't want that maybe you want to remove this clip and have that part empty and in order to do that you need to use the keyboard shortcut function + delete and it's gonna remove it but now we have all this space here for us to use later another useful keyboard shortcut is if you want to duplicate this clip or title or any sort of thing that we have on the timeline you can do so by holding down the Alt key and moving the clip wherever you want and now it just created another duplicate for example when you have a lot of things on the timeline it's very useful to be able to zoom in and zoom out on the timeline if you have a trackpad then you can definitely do that but I don't currently have one so the keyboard shortcut for that is command + or command - like this - zoom out or to zoom in so you can actually see a bit better what is going on and of course you have a very long project you're gonna have a lot of footage right now we only have around 10 15 seconds so we're gonna zoom in so we can better see what we're doing so if you want to adjust the speed of a clip you need to have it selected like this with the yellow border on top and you can either go here and click show re time editor or you can use the keyboard shortcut command R and we have this thing on top now that shows us the speed which is at normal 100 percent and if you grab it here at the end you can either make it faster like this at 200% which is basically gonna be half the time or if you want to make it in slow motion for example you can do this at 50% speed which is basically going to make it twice as long [Music] in Final Cut Pro you can also record a voiceover if you want to do a narration of your video whether it's a documentary or a travel video like this or anything in general and to do that you go here to window and click record voiceover and you have a few settings here but the most important one is that you want your inputs to be on the microphone that you're using and if you record a voiceover make sure you use an external microphone and another microphone that comes with your MacBook or iMac and the start recording all you have to do is click this red bottom right here and it's gonna start recording exactly at the playhead where it was initially and as you can see it's adding the voice over here on the bottom adding transitions in Final Cut Pro is incredibly easy the way to do that is you go here and click this button to show the transition browser and Final Cut Pro comes with a lot of existing transitions that are super easy to add if you want to preview and see how it looks all you have to do is move your mouse on top of it like this to see a preview of it in our case I'll just use a classic transition which is a cross dissolve like this you can use it anywhere and it's impossible to go wrong with it so to add a transition all you have to do is drag and drop it like this and you can add it in between Clips like this or for example maybe you want to add a dissolve at the end in which case you can just add it at the end of the clip if you grab the transition like this you can control the lengths of it to make it shorter or longer next I want to show you how you can add effects in Final Cut Pro and to do that you click on this icon right here which is going to open the effects tab and as you can imagine there are a ton of effects that you can use so I'll start by showing you the audio effects so for example the audio effect that I'm gonna show you is here in the spaces category which basically simulates the audio coming from a different space and that the easiest one to check is actually the Cathedral and to add an effect is as a transition you drag and drop it on the audio file and now if I click on the audio file and go here on the inspector and scroll down a little I can actually see the cathedral effect here and to make it even more obvious I'm gonna increase the amount to something higher and now let's preview and see how it sounds now it doesn't really work very well for this travel video but he can actually hear the music coming from a different space in this case something that resembles a Cathedral and has those exact same acoustics next I want to show you some video effect and as before there are a lot of different effects but the one that I want to show you so you can get an idea of how to use those is under stylize and if you go here on the bottom is actually called vignette it's a super classic one like this it just makes the whole image a lot nicer as with everything else in Final Cut Pro you drag and drop it on the clip like this and now if you go here on the inspector tab you can actually control some of the settings but first you gotta click on this button show to expand the controls and here we can control the vignette properties to make it less dark or darker adjust the size and depending on the effect you're gonna have a lot of different controls here alright so now I want to show you the rest of the inspector panel if I minimize this vignette tab right here I can go on to the next one that I want to show you which is the transform tab here you can change some very basic properties like the position to move it right or left horizontally or vertically as well you can also rotate the footage like this and more importantly you can also zoom in and then change everything else as well to reach the desired transformation of your footage if you want to reset any of those properties you can just click on this button right here and it's gonna reset everything all right next I want to show you how you can use keyframes in Final Cut Pro this is just a base introduction as keyframes are a bit of an advanced topic and what keyframes are they're basically a way to control any of those properties and how they change over time so the one that you might find yourself using pretty often is changing the volume over time and for example if I just change the volume here by using the volume meter in the inspector it's gonna change the volume for the entire thing but that's not what we want let's say for example maybe we want to change the volume and lower it only on the duration of this clip right here and to do that we need to add what is called a keyframe and you can add a keyframe by using this icon right here and as you can see it added a keyframe here on the timeline on the music now if I use the arrow keys to move further down a bit like this I can add another keyframe there so for this keyframe I'm actually gonna change the value of the volume property to say -10 and as you can see here on the timeline as well the waveform is a bit lower but now when the whole thing ends it's time to bring it back up so we need to add another keyframe here with the value of minus ten then if we move further to the right by using the arrow key like this I can add a another keyframe here with the value of zero so this is really useful for example maybe have a bit of a voice over here and you want the music to be a bit softer in the background so you can clearly hear the voice and what it's saying so you can use keyframes for pretty much any sort of property that you find here in an inspector panel you can change the position rotation basically pretty much anything that has this icon you can add keyframes to it and change the value of that property over time adding titles and Final Cut Pro is incredibly easy and the way to do that is you go here on this icon that says T on it and it's gonna show you the titles and other generators and you can explore all of those things because Final Cut Pro comes with a lot of pre-made elements that you can use but for now I'll just show you some very basic titles and let's say we want to use this one right here with the blurb as you can see if I move my mouse on top of either one of those it's gonna show me a preview of how that title looks like so I'll just use this one called a blur and I can add it here on top of this video or maybe I want to add it in the beginning and this is gonna make it on a black background but I don't want it to be on a black background I just want to add it on top of this video right here in the beginning and same with anything else in Final Cut Pro you can grab it at the end to make it shorter like this exactly the same length as this video and if I click on it and go back to the inspector I have a couple of settings here that I can change maybe I want to remove the start animation or the in animation which is basically the blur change the font or also play around with the duration of the in and the out animation next if I go to this I can right here I can actually change the text and let's say Greece holiday 2020 let me change the font to something a bit nicer and I can also move it around in a better position by using those controls here so let's have a look and see how that feels [Music] all right that works pretty good and I think the positioning was pretty good here as well of course if you go here you can also change the color maybe you want to make it red or yellow or whatever works for you but in our case I think White's worked pretty well and when it's all said and done it's time to export the video and as with anything output related the way to do that is by clicking this button that looks like a share button forum any of your other devices and the one that I use all the time is I export as a master file on your computer here we can add a bit of metadata like description creator and tags next move to the Settings tab and for format you definitely want to have video and audio for codec Apple ProRes 422 is pretty much gonna do the job most of the times or you can also use h.264 that's pretty popular here on the bottom right you can see an estimate of how big your file is gonna be after it finishes exporting and when you're ready to export just click the next button and it's gonna ask you where you want to save this on your computer and now it's pretty much exports in the background which you can see the progress of right here on this icon it's gonna load all the way to 100% but you can minimize that and if you want you can keep editing or move on to another project alright that's all for this final cut pro tutorial I hope you learned a lot about video editing if you did make sure to leave a comment below this video and hit the like button because it really helps with a youtube algorithm and this way I can keep making more videos like this if you want to see more video tutorials and more content about video marketing make sure to subscribe to my channel as well this was ed what a stinger from video pasty and make sure to add me on Instagram as well to keep in touch and I'll see you in the next video you [Music]

Channel: 🎬 Eduard Stinga (VideoPlasty.com)

Views: 47,690

Keywords: final cut pro, final cut pro x, fcp, fcp x, final cut pro tutorial, final cut pro x tutorial, final cut pro crash course, video editing in final cut pro, learn final cut pro, final cut pro beginners, final cut pro 2020, tutorial, crash course, beginners, learn

Id: qv2SkV0S27U

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020