- Final Cut Pro is my favorite
video editing software. I've used and taught Final Cut Pro for the last seven years, and I kinda love everything about it. I know it gets sort of
a lot of flack sometimes for not being as professional. But I think a lot of people
who make that criticism probably haven't used the
software very recently. And there's kind of an
infinite number of ways that you can use and enhance Final Cut Pro to be even more efficient and meet your needs more effectively. So what I wanted to do today
was share five things with you that I think are going to
be really, really helpful. And if you use Final Cut Pro or you're just starting
out with Final Cut Pro, they will make your life a lot easier. So these are five Final Cut Pro quick tips that I use in literally
pretty much every project that I make with Final Cut Pro. My first tip has to do with audio, which is often overlooked when
people start making videos. And the truth is, audio is half of video. So if you go into Final Cut Pro and you make a very simple command, if you press shift command eight what you will see on the
right side of the screen is that your audio meters
will start to pop up. And you can expand and
shrink your audio meters to your preference. I usually like to keep 'em
pretty narrow over on the side. But I always, 100% of
the time, have them on. And there's a lot of science
that can go into audio levels, but in general, the rule of thumb, is that you wanna keep
your main audio levels between negative 12 and negative six. That's gonna give the
viewer a really consistent, high-quality experience. If you go past zero you're
gonna start clipping and your audio's gonna sound distorted, and you're never gonna be able to fix it. And if your audio's too low and you try to increase the volume
it's gonna introduce a whole bunch of noise and
it's never gonna sound good. So never forget about your audio levels, and I would suggest never editing a video without your audio meters present. And again, that is just
shift command eight to turn that on and off. My second tip is all
about precision editing, and that's frame nudging
and frame trimming. So when you're editing your clips and you want things to
really sync up with music or you're trying to
match up audio and video I see a lot of people, especially students when they're starting
out with Final Cut Pro, tend to struggle when they're
just trying to line it up by hand using the mouse or whatever. And that's really really difficult. But if you use the comma
and the period keys, you can nudge things back and
forth one frame at a time. If you're editing a
video and you're trying to sync up some clips to a specific song, so right now there's a snare
hit right around this point where these two clips meet, but they're not cutting on it yet. (light music) It's a little bit off. So if I just select the edge of that clip and then use the period key
to nudge over a few frames, I can then sync it up
exactly how I want it. (light music) Then you can also do that with, if you have maybe a B roll
clip or an audio clip, and you want it to match up perfectly, you can use those same comma
and period keys to nudge things back and forth so that
they line up perfectly. Those little frame
perfections here and there really add up to make a much
higher quality product overall. You might think that people
don't really notice it and no one's probably ever
going to compliment you on how perfect your frame precision is, but it all does come together
to create an overall piece that people do notice the quality of. One of the most frustrating
but kind of rewarding things about video editing is when
you do everything right and you put so much work into it, then people don't notice it. So it's kind of like the
less that your viewer notices the more that you did right. 'Cause you want them to be immersed in the video and the story. You don't want them to be distracted by the technical stuff that went into it. And my third tip has to do with effects. Sometimes you might
have some color grading or a preset or a LUT or a
filter or a letterboxing, some kind of effect that you want to apply to a bunch of different clips. And sometimes you might have
a montage or a whole project that has like dozens and dozens of clips, and you're clicking
and dragging one by one to get them all on there. And I'm kind of embarrassed
to admit how long it took me to figure out this trick, so I'm gonna share that
with you right now. So in this project here
which was a vlog I made in Reykjavik, Iceland last summer. I stopped talking. The graffiti so it's really interesting. (light relaxed music) And then the music kicks
in and there's a montage. One thing that I like to do
is to letterbox my montages 'cause it just sort of separates them from the other parts of a vlog, but instead of adding
letterbox one to one, you just open up your effects, I'm gonna find letterbox, there it is, and then all I need to
do is find the clips that I want to letterbox,
highlight those clips, double click on the letterbox effect, and now it will have applied it to all the clips all at once. And you could do this by
merging the clips all together in a compound clip and
adding one letterbox, but I like to be able to go
individually through the clips, one by one, and not only
set the aspect ratio, but also adjust the offset
so I can frame each clip and make sure they look
as good as possible. I don't like to just add
a one letterbox setting to my whole video because
oftentimes it makes things look worse and it doesn't
make them look better, but this'll work with any effect, not just letterboxing. It's really, really helpful
when you have a lotta clips that you wanna add a color grade to. And you make your preset and
then you can just quickly add it to a whole bunch
of different clips. And tip number four is
all about compound clips. So if you have multiple pieces
of media on your timeline, whether it's video, audio,
a whole bunch of whatever, and you wanna smash them
all into one brand new thing that you can edit singularly, that is called a compound clip. And it's super easy to do that. All you need to do is highlight the things that you wanna merge and then
you can either right click and select compound clip
or you can press alt g and it will create a new compound clip. You can give it a name if you want, and then there you go,
you've got your new clip. That's a pretty simple trick that in and of itself is helpful. But where compound clips
become really, really helpful is sometimes when you need to
boost your audio a little bit because maybe you didn't
have your audio meters up and the levels are a little bit too low and you're trying to adjust things. So when it comes to dealing
with audio that's too low, I have an example clip
that I filmed when I was making a video about ND
filters for your phone, and I filmed this whole clip
talking about the filters, but as you can see when I play it, even when the volume's up,
the level's really low. It's between negative 30 and negative 20. So sometimes you find yourself in those situations in Final Cut. It's really easy to just
raise your audio up. You can go 12 decibels higher. But in a clip like this, and even though it is kind of a hassle to have to carry more things with you, that's still a little too quiet. As you can see when I play it, the audio meter's still bouncing between negative 20 and negative 12. I would like it to be higher above 12, maybe closer to negative six. But Final Cut won't let me
increase the level anymore. What I can do is I can
go into the equalizer and add in some gain but
that gets kinda complex and adds in a lot of noise. Here's a really, really
quick and simple way that you can boost your audio even further in those emergency cases when you need to. And only use this in an emergency, I wouldn't use it all the time. And to do that all you need to do once you've increased your levels to the maximum amount that
Final Cut will let you, you just create a compound clip. And when you create a compound clip it sets the levels back to zero, but it saves them at the volume
you had adjusted them to. So now I have 12 more decibels that I can increase that audio to and you can see the waveforms are getting much, much bigger and it's
looking much more audible. Out of your phone if you're
trying to film with your phone. It's pretty impressive what
these small cameras can do. And right now the audio's
exactly where I want it. It's right between 12 and six. It's gonna be nice and clear. It's not too loud, it's not too quiet. That's not gonna work magic
on totally damaged clips, but every once in a while
it can really save you. And finally my last tip has less to do with the Final Cut Pro software itself, and more with how you
manage your workflow. So every video that I've
made for this YouTube channel and everything that I've
done for my actual day job in the past five years has been edited on a 2013, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and this is like the mid-level model. I think it cost about $1300 new. So it was not the most
powerful computer in the world. I got it way before I
started a YouTube channel. But everything, all hundred
and something videos on this channel were
made on this computer. And it still runs great. I haven't done any modifications. It has eight gigabytes of RAM and a 256 gigabyte SSD
internal hard drive. And it's got a 2.4 gigahertz i5 processor. So it's a good computer,
I love this computer. I have tried to upgrade
twice over the years to like new touch bar MacBook Pros, but I spent so much money on 'em and they're really not that much better than this computer and
part of the reason for that is because of the way I've
chosen to manage my data and all of my media
files on this computer. Things are only on here for editing. The rest of the time everything lives on external hard drives. And these are a couple of four terabyte traditional hard drives. But if you can get an SSD
drive, a solid state drive, it's even faster. And that's going to help
your workflow tremendously. So whenever I'm done filming anything, I take my camera's memory
card, I put it in my computer, 'cause the old computer still
has an SD card slot, too, which is kinda nice, and then I just take all the raw footage and put it in a new folder
on an external hard drive. So my Final Cut Pro library, where all of my clips
and all of my projects and all of my important stuff is stored, is not on my actual computer, it's on an external hard drive. And that makes a huge difference because it keeps all that
stuff off of the computer, lets the computer run as fast
as it's capable of running, and then everything is
saved on a hard drive. With the cost of external
storage being so cheap now, it's a really good idea to store all of your project
libraries, all of your files, all of your raw media,
on an external hard drive and keep those as backups. And that's gonna help your actual editing computer run a lot faster. The fact that this is a
pretty base model computer from five years ago and
it still works great to do all the stuff I
need it to do every day, I even use it alongside an
iMac Pro at work every day, and honestly, I don't notice that much of a difference in speed. So it's not necessarily
the power of your computer when it comes to video editing, it's how you manage your media. So this tip might not be
Final Cut Pro specific, but if you start implementing smart and purposeful media management into your Final Cut Pro workflow, your life is gonna be a lot easier. And then what video would be
complete without a bonus tip? So here's a quick bonus
tip that you might actually not be aware of, which is if
you're trying to incorporate still images into a video
or maybe you've shot a stop motion project where you shot everything on still images, Final Cut Pro can actually
accept native raw files. So here I have a raw image
from my Canon 6D Mark II, and I can drag that into Final Cut, and the program will
just accept that raw file and I can use it and move it and edit it just like I would any
still image in a project. This is actually an
image of the computer lab part of my classroom when the building was still under construction, but once you have the raw
file imported into Final Cut you can go in and still
adjust all of the settings, not necessarily with the
same precision you would have in a program like Lightroom or Photoshop, but you can make some pretty
good corrections on it. You don't need any other software and you don't need to
convert anything beforehand. You can just bring raw
image files directly in to Final Cut Pro and I
think that's pretty awesome. So I hope this was helpful for you, and I hope at least one of these five tips will help improve your workflow
and your editing experience with Final Cut Pro because like I said at the beginning of the video, I really love this software. It's genuinely a joy to use
and I'm a huge fan of it, and I kinda feel like it's the underdog in the video editing software space, and so I wanna stick up
for it whenever I can and fight for Final Cut Pro because I think it's pro-tty good. (video game-like music)
