7 Hidden Features in FCPX | Final Cut Pro Tutorial

hey guys welcome to another final cut pro video in this one i'm going to talk about seven hidden features in final cut pro that you should know about if you're new to the channel my name is brad and on this channel you'll find filmmaking and photography tutorials as well as the occasional travel vlog when donna and i get the chance to travel so if you enjoy that sort of thing then please hit that subscribe button and that notification bell so that you get notified when we post new videos in last week's video 10 best free plugins for final cut pro i mentioned a giveaway to win a massive pack of more than 300 transitions over 700 luts more than 150 gigs of lens flares dust mats light overlays bokeh overlays sound effects and so much more if it's not yet the 8th of october 2020 at the time that you're watching this then you could still be one of three people to win so i'll link to that video down below and up here okay let's get into the seven hidden features in final cut pro i call these features hidden because unless you know about them already they aren't blatantly obvious or necessarily the easiest to find in the final cut pro interface having said that the first hidden feature in final cut pro that you should know about is optical flow optical flow is going to help you to create super smooth slow motion footage like this [Music] when you're slowing down footage you're limited to how much you can slow the footage down by by the frame rate of your footage and the frame rate of your project let's have a look at this example where i have 120 frames per second clip which means i can slow it down by a maximum of 20 on my 23.976 frames per second timeline here's the clip played back at 20 percent and this is what it looks like if i tried to slow it down by more than 20 let's say at about 5 see how it stutters and just looks really bad this is where optical flow comes in optical flow analyzes your footage and then it generates new frames based on that analysis allowing you to slow footage down even further than normal let's take that same shot at five percent speed and we'll go over to the speed icon over here down to video quality and select optical flow it'll take a little while to analyze the clip and when it's done it looks like this [Music] much better right i'm planning on doing a more detailed video on how to create super slow motion in final cut pro using optical flow which if it's up at the time you're watching this video you'll find a link down below or up top here if it's not make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you get notified when i post it the second hidden feature in final cut pro is the ken burns effect if you're not familiar with it this is what it looks like the ken burns effect creates a pan and zoom movement with start and end points that you can set you can find it by clicking on this drop down menu over here and selecting crop you can then activate the ken burns effect over here you'll notice that you have a green outline labeled start and a red outline labeled end these outlines indicate what your start and end positions will be for the movement and you can adjust these let's start with the end position i can resize it simply by dragging the corners but if i hold down option or alt and drag one of the corners i can keep the center position exactly where it is let's set the start position as well maybe somewhere over here once you've set your start and end position you can click on this preview button to play back what you've done if we go back into the ken bones editor by selecting the clip you can click on these two arrows up here in the corner to swap your start and end positions to reverse the movement the third hidden feature in final cut pro is the precision editor which is not something you'll use all the time but it's really handy to have in certain situations to access the precision editor double click on the cut between two clips you'll notice an expanded view pops up each of these markers represents another cut in your timeline there are a few ways to adjust the edits using the precision editor you can grab these little markers to create a roll edit which basically means you're shortening one clip and extending the other at the same time you can also drag either end of the clips to create a ripple edit which basically extends the clip and moves the other clip so you'll see if i pull this out here the other clip moves along and it's not affected my favorite way of using the precision editor and what i find to be the most useful use for it is to skim over the first clip until you find the exact point you want to cut it like right here and simply click to adjust the outpoint to that position you can then do the same for the second clip like this and then you can move through the rest of the cuts in your timeline to precisely adjust those edits this works well when you need to cut at an exact point in time like in the case of these two shots here's donna turning a door handle to open the door and the next shot is on the other side of the door as the door handle opens so let's open up the precision editor scrub through to where her hand has pressed the door handle all the way down and the door just starts to open i'll click there to adjust the out point of the clip to that exact frame in the next clip i'll scrub through all the way until the handle is down and the door is just starting to open as well and i'll cut there to close the precision editor just double click on the cut marker if you play this back you'll have a seamless sequence that cuts in all the right places number four is the automatic speed feature i love this feature because it saves me so much time essentially what it does is make sure that every frame of a clip is played back regardless of the frame rate now to get the most out of this feature you'll need to know a little bit about frame rates possibly slow motion footage and what the automatic speed feature is actually doing to your footage let's assume you have a 23.976 frames per second or 24 frames per second timeline and you put 120 frames per second technically 119.88 frames per second clip on the timeline when you play that back final cut pro is going to drop frames in order to make sure that one second of 120 frames per second footage is equal to one second on a 24 frames per second timeline if you do the math and take your timeline's frame rate divided by the frame rate of the footage you get the minimum speed that you can slow the footage down to without dropping any frames using 120 frames per second example on a 24 frames per second timeline you get 20 when slowing that footage down on the timeline the closest you can get with a preset speed adjustment is 25 which is fine but you could go slower and to do that you'd have to go and set a custom speed of 20 if you're doing this for a lot of clips it can be a really tedious process especially if you have a bunch of different frame rates on the timeline as well that would need to be set to different speeds for example let's say you have gopro footage shot at 29.97 frames per second on a 23.976 frames per second timeline that could be slowed down to 80 without dropping frames let's say you have a few 120 frames per second clips on the timeline and a few 29.97 frames per second gopro clips on your timeline you can select all of these clips go to the clip retiming options drop down box and select automatic speed the speed of all these clips will be adjusted so that every single frame plays back on your timeline you'll see here some clips are set to 20 and some are set to 80 number five is the skimming tool in the effects window you probably already know that you can hover your cursor over some of the different effects in the effects window to get a preview of what it looked like before you apply the effect but what you might not know is that you can preview the effect at different opacities before applying it to your clip let's have a look at the different looks effects that final cut pro has built in if you hover over these you'll see a preview of the effect at 100 opacity if you hold down alt or option and scrub over the effect you can see what it might look like at various opacities this is helpful when trying to find an effect that will work for your shot especially since most of these looks are just too much at 100 opacity and it saves you time by not having to apply the effect change the opacity and realize it's not working and then delete it and look for another one it doesn't work on every single effect obviously but it works on most of the stylized effects number six is the bat sharing feature this is a really simple one but super handy if you often need to export multiple edits one after the other before discovering this feature i used to double click on timeline number one hit command d choose the destination and export and then double click on number two and repeat for all of the timelines i needed to export but with bat sharing all you need to do is select all the timelines that you want to export by shift-clicking or using command to select the individual timelines and then you hit command-e to export them all to the same destination one after the other like i said it's a really simple one but a huge time saver if you didn't already know about it number seven and the last hidden feature in final cut pro on this list is the ability to save effects as presets this is a super useful feature that i have recently started taking advantage of if you have a bunch of effects or even a single effect with specific settings that you find yourself repeating over and over again in your edits then this one is going to save you a lot of time let's say you have a bunch of effects that you've added to a clip like a lut maybe a curves plugin and a sharpen effect you've already selected the lut you want to use adjusted the exposure curve done the necessary color adjustments and added a slight bit of sharpening and now you want to add that to other clips or repeat the effects sure you can copy the clip using command c and paste the attributes using command shift v to quickly copy the effects from one clip to another but what if you're working on a totally different edit days apart and you know that you'll need that same group of effects instead of having to apply those effects again from scratch or open the other library and copy and paste the attributes you can create a preset using the little save effects preset button down here you can choose which attributes you want to save to the preset choose a category for it and give it a name the next time you want to use it you can simply navigate to your preset in the effects window and drag and drop it onto your clip and all of the effects will be applied to the clip that's it for the list of seven hidden features in final cut pro but i'd love to hear from you which hidden feature do you think will be the most useful to you and are there any features that you'd like to see a more in-depth video on let me know down in the comments below if you found this video interesting and you'd like to see more videos like this then please hit the thumbs up subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so that you get notified when we post new videos and i'll see you guys in the next [Music] bye

Channel: Brad and Donna

Views: 59,307

Keywords: Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Pro x, hidden features in fcpx, Final Cut Pro features, post production, video editing, video editing in fcpx, Final Cut Pro x tutorial, fcpx tutorial, Final Cut Pro x effects, Final Cut Pro editing tips, tips for better video editing, video editing tips, video editing Final Cut Pro, fcpx workflow, Final Cut Pro editing, Final Cut Pro tips, Final Cut Pro tips and tricks, fcpx tips and tricks, Final Cut Pro basics, Brad and Donna, how to fcpx

Id: 9YEsq_2dJ2Q

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020