10 Essential Tips for Final Cut Pro

hi tyler stallman whether you're just getting started with final cut pro or you've been using it for years this video will have at least one tip and or trick that you're going to start using every single day and thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this video the best place to host your portfolio online and let's start at the very beginning by creating a new library once again i'm going to be using footage we shot for northwater in the fall and typically i name my library the same thing is a folder that i put it inside and everything else and now this brings us to our first tip which is something that's good to figure out early on when you're using final cut is when do you want to create a new library versus adding to an existing one and i think part of this confusion comes from the language that final cut uses so inside of our library we will create projects and give my project the exact same name the word library implies that it's going to hold on to a lot of different projects like a library but that can get pretty messy in final cut so i would keep the projects inside of your library all related so they're all sharing footage maybe they're all part of the same shoot but more or less i have one library per project next i'll show you how i do my file and folder structure so i did already edit this video so there is a file structure existing right here and i will have a folder for videos images audio and inside of video there can be different either shoot days or cameras depending on exactly what i'm doing i like to try to keep it very loosely organized i know some people use events as the primary way of organizing footage within final cut but i find keywords way more useful so here i'm going to import everything i am going to leave files in place because i don't like final cut managing my files more about that in a minute but what i'm going to do is import the audio images and video and i'm going to select keywords from folders this is going to take the title of each folder and use it as a keyword so now all of our footage is in the library and if we open up our event here you can see that there are a series of keywords so now our event can be anything i often don't rename them but i don't know we can just name the same things the project if we want more importantly we're now able to really find things so we had two days of shooting for this commercial and we used two different cameras so the gimbal shots are shot on the eos r so i'm gonna make the browser a little bit bigger here and select a1 and day two and then just by the file name i can tell these are all of the eos r videos select them all command k to open up keywords and i'm just going to call this canon r then with those days still selected i'm going to go down and i can tell again by the file name these are all the c200 files and you can add as many keywords as you want but i'd strongly recommend only add the amount that are actually useful to you so for example with cameras these have different log profiles on them so i have to color grade them differently so if i select all of my c200 footage this was shot in canon log2 so if i go into info i can select the custom c log 2 profile that i made which you can download below it's based on alexa luts and it looks great it's my favorite lut that i've got and now all the shots are in beautiful rec 709 full contrast so they look good again i've also got one that i use for c log c log 3 and most importantly a film emulation that i put on virtually every single project including this one right now so if you want to download my luts link is in the description below i'm actually going to take a little step back select the library click modify settings and let's take a look at where we're storing things so right now the media is set to be stored inside of the library if you're storing it in the library that's how apple tries to make it easier for you i really prefer to choose the video folder and keep it all in there it makes it easier to move files around and nothing i always do this caused huge problems for me it's actually part of the reason i switched to premiere for a few years until i figured this out final cut can start to take up your whole hard drive if you let it one way to prevent it is to change your cache location from inside of the library to the root folder of the main project and i put it right there so it is visible to me the reason for this is now it is just it's completely visible if i click on it i can see right now it's 27 megabytes that's nothing by the end of editing this it will be hundreds of gigabytes it will be enormous and you can just delete it when you're done you don't actually need to keep the cache file around you can actually just delete it as you're editing so whenever i need to clear up hard drive space i look at completed projects and just delete all those cache files from the finder the other big thing is that when you are importing your files make sure that you have a close look at where your files are being copied to because if you click copy as opposed to leave in place it'll create duplicates of all of your videos same thing goes for create optimized media and i mean kind of create proxies just make sure that you're watching those because you don't want to end up having multiple versions of all the same videos because you can fill a whole hard drive in just a few minutes so to be clear i never create optimized and i do create proxy media if i'm working with files that slow my computer down like the r5 r6 a7s3 all these new cameras really can slow down editing all right in this next tip i learned from a friend that does really high-end commercial work for like mercedes-benz and game of thrones and like all the big stuff thomas grove carter has great tutorials of his own but the first thing i do when i'm sorting b-roll style footage which this isn't narrative none of this stuff connects but i'm gonna go through everything and like well i should go to the start and i want to watch every single clip so you're just kind of checking out what you have and as you see good moments you press i and then when the good part's over you press o and now you set in in and out so if we look over here there is a yellow section that is selected now your first instinct might be to drag this down to the timeline or press the e key and that drops into the timeline don't drop it in the timeline yet the much more useful thing to do is press the f key now this favorites it you can see that there is a small green line above it here and you're going to go through watching all your clips actually i see she's got an elastic on her wrist there we got that off here okay so yeah let's use these ones another favorite and you can just really quickly the big goal here is just to like remove all of the junk so i'm going to press i and oh in that general section this whole take is junk so i'm going to select it and press delete it works better for you sometimes i use the mouse and just select the good part like this good old-fashioned click and drag oh and this kid he ruined the shot and you're gonna go through and watch every single shot that you took and select your favorite parts of it now why are we doing this because at the end instead of viewing all clips you can just view favorites and these are just the sections that we decided are the best and this can take a few hours so i'm just going to quickly show you this is what it looks like on the completed project so you end up with a lot like favorite everything you think you might possibly use so you have a lot of clips to choose from anything that doesn't get favorited might get lost in the future and probably won't end up in your final edit and then a beautiful thing if you shot things in sequence which i don't know we kind of did here like this is all just b-roll so there's no real sequence but if i select everything that is related here in the favorites and i drag them down into the timeline i like i basically just have a watchable video now it's like it's it's edited i mean kind of like this is not the final thing so we're gonna have to delete a lot of this and the reason for all this is it's scalable and non-destructive so you can always go back and find alternate versions that you liked you're not like losing stuff which can happen if you add it straight to the timeline it's very hard to go back and find another version of a take that you might have liked if you want to know more from thomas grove carter he's been on the podcast a few times and he is a damn genius when it comes to final cut pro so check out those episodes and check out his tutorials too great guy that technique of favoriting everything is really great for b-roll or if your shots are broken up a lot when i do videos like this that i'm recording right now it's one long take of a-roll and then i cut that up so i'm gonna open up a new project so in this one i was breaking down my c200 rig and i treat this very differently so what i do here is i drop the whole thing on the timeline here is you know beginning to end all the bloopers and everything in between and then instead of just starting to cut the important step is first i press option g and create a new compound clip and this can just be called a roll clip whatever like totally doesn't matter what it is the point is now when you start editing so i put some you know random cuts in here chop it up delete something if i double click and go inside the compound clip everything is still there and i can make changes that are now affected all the way through so for example this has absolutely no color in it if i add the saturation back into the log it is all the way through that whole thing and this is so helpful for long clips if you're trying to keep a whole bunch of stuff in sync that was shot at the exact same time it's way easier when it's inside a compound clip and this is how i edit things this might be super basic if you've been editing for a while but if you haven't seen this yet it'll change everything for you okay i'm not doing this for real so it doesn't really matter what i'm saying here i'm just going to go through and okay i know that this is a first take and what you might do the most basic thing is to select the blade tool with b cut then you'd go back to select tool click that and delete it that's one way to remove things now the thing that you should start doing and hopefully you already have been is you go to the part of the timeline where you want the clip to start and you press option left square bracket and it will trim a ripple trim everything before that point so then at the end of my take i will press command b for the blade tool it'll just cut things and then i go to the beginning of the next take i can tell those are false starts uh i think this is the real one over here and i press option left square bracket and it will trim everything to the left now i could also do that in the other direction i could go to the beginning the next take over here press command b and then from here when i start looking at my phone i could press option and right square bracket and it will trim everything to the right this is essential to being fast in final cut pro if you are not editing this way you are probably editing much more slowly and to take that further i actually go in and i customize all of mine so if i switch over you can see i've already saved it and all that's doing is i've got like trim and trim start i assign those to just be the left and right bracket without any modification keys because i just use them so much and now i'm going to jump back into north water here i've added those favorite clips into a timeline and let's say i've added everything but it's a little bit too long very important is to create duplicates as you move along now something to keep in mind is the difference between duplicate and snapshot project is something i just learned i didn't actually know this difference if you're using compound clips duplicate will make those compound clip changes propagate through all of the different versions so if i duplicate this northwater fall 1 will have any compound clip changes or multi-cam clip changes whereas if i go snapshot project now those compound clips live completely on their own so it depends on how you're structuring things snapshots are kind of the safest where you're least likely to screw things up but as you go along and especially when you're making shorter edits of your project be sure to save them by duplicating and snapshotting your project as you go so you can revert back to earlier changes and now since we were so organized as we created our project i've got i've got a new tip i just figured this out recently so as a youtuber i create too much footage like this is 4k raw that i'm shooting in right now and i do not want to keep all of that but i do want to keep all of my favorite b-roll shots so when i'm done editing everything if it's the kind of project where i can throw the other stuff away not every project is like that if you're working for a client make sure they know if you're supposed to hold on to all the footage or not but if it's that kind of project where you get to make decisions you can go and select all your favorite clips here which is actually not that much footage go to file and send to compressor and it will send eight clips in this case all to compressor and i'm going to select all and depending how important the project is i'll either use prores 422 or prores lt start batch and now it's just going to save my favorite moments of the most important clips so what i can end up archiving is a really small folder that has everything that i used in the edit plus a little bit more and it's just it's really easy to go back and reuse those clips for future youtube videos but you've got to be warned this can break your final cut project because now these are new video files they won't line up with the ones that you are editing with so there's some caveats this is just a way to store b-roll footage so in my case i like to create a bit of an archive of older clips that we've shot in previous videos of say products that might show up in future videos but it's way smaller than holding on to the all the originals and i've got one more quick one but after i thank squarespace for sponsoring this video which is the best place to host your video portfolio on the internet of course you can upload to youtube or vimeo or instagram or all sorts of social platforms but in the end you don't really own or control those spaces squarespace is somewhere that you can completely design the whole website to fit your brand you can customize the domain name and most importantly you have full control forever because you own this website their templates and design tools make it just as easy as using a social network to set something up that feels like it's yours and that looks beautiful to your audience but they won't know that it came from a template because you can customize it so much so easily squarespace's seo and analytics tools are also everything you need to really run a professional website so let's say you're building a store and you are trying to sell a product you can keep an eye on every detail of it both of making sure that people find you online and where they are visiting on your site to make sure you get conversions there is so much you can do with squarespace so go check them out today at squarespace.com and once you've started a free trial and built a simple website in just a few minutes then you go to squarespace.com tyler stallman and using offer code tyler stallman you can get 10 off your first website or domain i've been using squarespace kind of forever and i'm going gonna keep using it because their sites are beautiful and easy to use and thanks again squarespace for sponsoring this video so i've added some music and voice over to this clip but in order to hear it we're gonna have to turn down the music now in the olden days what i would do is that option click to add different points on the audio track and then i would drag them down let's zoom in a little so now we've got a little fade as it's going there's a way easier way to do that that i didn't know about till recently instead i use the r key which stands for range i select the range of my voiceover and i just drag down on the audio and now i'm ducking in exactly that spot who knew i mean maybe you did let me know what great tips i missed in here because i'd love to do this video again with all sorts of new things thanks again for watching guys and don't forget to check out the podcast stallman podcast on whatever podcast player you use and i'll see you in the next video did i already say that anyway bye guys you

Channel: Tyler Stalman

Views: 112,313

Rating: 4.9662151 out of 5

Keywords: fcp, Final Cut Pro, Mac, video editing, tips, tricks, hacks, how to, basics

Id: JJnGqBGKV54

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/GlucoseQuestionMark]

ok but can we admire how great Tyler is at his thumbnails? this is a *clean* thumbnail.