Fast Final Cut Pro Editing Workflow

hello Harvey do a lot of stuff welcome back would you like to speed up your workflow in Final Cut Pro actually don't answer that question I already know the answer [Music] speed is the name of the game and time is money so here's a quick rundown of things I do in Final Cut the speed up my editing so I'm spending less time in front of a computer and more time getting content out there guys that have been using Final Cut for years will see a couple of these tips and go huh I knew that because I do cover a few of those bread and butters hits but either way I think you're gonna get a kick out of seeing how I did it so let's do it something I highly recommend you switch on is your background lenders if you go up to Final Cut Pro preferences playback and then make sure this button is ticked for background render and that just means that if you leave the computer it'll render Wasps you're not there and you'll come back and everything will be nice and fast and you'll be able to play back no problem if you're someone who still collapse at the beginning when you hit record so that you can sync up your audio and your video it's the future you don't need to do that anymore get with the program so forget spending time on zooming and really close to line up your audio and your video perfectly it's not necessary instead just select your audio track and your video track and right-click and she's synchronize clips just go with all of the default options and click OK and BAM fully synched up audio and video and I know for you guys who've been using the program for a while you can obey it this stuff it's easy you know but for those who haven't seen this before this is a mind-blown moment you'll love it if you're still in the habit of adding effects directly to Clips it's time to stop it's time to start using adjustment layers Adobe Premiere Pro has had this function for so long and it's really useful now for Final Cut you can get lots of free versions for some reason it still doesn't come with the program but just Google adjustment layer Final Cut Pro free plugin you'll find one just a stretch if your footage and apply your effects to it I guarantee this will save you so much time plus a Final Cut Pro seems to work faster with this in place I don't know about you but I feel like I spend way too much time on color grading when in actual fact I should be uploading you know delivering to the client I should be just finishing products and getting them out there so what I've been working on is having a really repeatable style of filming and I'll mention this again but it's about having it a consistent exposure having consistent white balance all of those kind of things so that we can have a template and copy across and then we only have to make minor adjustments to the grade when I film this session I made sure that I used exactly the same settings as previous sessions I've written them all down I copy the grade over and bam I've got my color wheels my color curves my lot and a little bit of sharpening and that means I've got so little work to do and this has saved me a huge amount of time I get a lot of questions about my audio quality people saying they like the way it sounds how do I do this how do I do that the truth is it just takes a bit of practice and a bit of time and obviously time is not our friend the time is the enemy so how do we speed things up well for me it's about having a repeatable style of recording audio and what I mean whether it's by having similar levels having the mic in a similar distance to a talent every single time so that you can go back and actually copy settings from project to project if you can do that it means he won't have to mess around adding tons of eq compression and a limiter whatever you need to make your audio sound good for every single project you'll have almost like a template that you can copy across and it'll save you so much time so in our project you can see that this audio is gonna be way too quiet and way too dynamic so it's gonna need some a huge impression and probably a limiter so it sounds good on every single device and here we can see the audio from the last project they did and you can see it's gonna be a lot louder a lot more consistent can sound better on a phone a tablet laptop or big speakers so this is what I want for the new projects so I'm going to hit command C to copy those audio settings but with our original projects and we need to copy our audio plugins in I will go into shortcuts in a bit but for now we're gonna hit shift command V and what this allows us to do is to selectively paste plugins into our clip obviously we only want the audio attributes to be copied in so we need to deselect all of the video attributes and bam a working template for our audio of course you may need to tweak from here but it gives you a nice template to work from so it probably would have taken the best part of ten minutes to get the sounding really good so that's 10 minutes saved on this project there are so many shortcuts you could remember with Final Cut Pro but I think you can get by with just the basic ones I'm not going to run through many but these are the ones I use all the time and they we'll save you so much time if you just memorize these ones of course there are the obvious ones which everyone should know command C to copy command V to paste command Z to undo come on X to cut but by far the command I use the most is command B which is the blade tool if you hit come on B it will just make a blade cut to your main timeline however select multiple layers and it will cut through the lot super handy I use it all day there are a couple of copy and pasting shortcuts that you definitely should know the first is to use option command and then V and what this does is it actually paste all of the effects from one clip to another this includes all of your plugins including your audio ones the other is to use shift command V and what this does is it pastes the attributes and this basically lets you be completely selective about what you actually pasted onto your clip of course both the option command and shift command variants work with the X or cut tool and that means you can either remove all of the effects from a clip or just select the ones you want to remove it's brilliant let me show you a couple of examples let's say you're working on a project which has multiple areas each with its own adjustment layer and you decide you actually want to make some quite big tweaks to the plugins you use in this example I'm going to go for a drastically different exposure instead of going into our adjustment layers and doing all the tweaking manually we're going to use option command X and this will remove all of the plugins from our second adjustment layer then just highlight our first adjustment layer and press command C to copy all of the effects and then simply press option command V to paste our effects on to our second clip and we're done of course if you want to be more selective about what you pasted onto your clips we can use shift command V so again let's clear the effects off our second adjustment layer by pressing option command X once again hit command C to copy the effects from our first adjustment layer and then hit shift command V to select what we want to paste onto our clip as you can see we've got color wheels color curves our lutz and sharpening i'm just gonna add the LUT just for a laugh and then we have it ridiculously handy bear in mind that this paste attributes function works with everything your plugins your audio plugins your crop any adjustments you've made to your clip you can paste selectively and I love it for super shortcut junkies if that is such a thing you can actually customize the shortcuts yourself just get into final cut commands customize and there you have it the full control panel where you can just go nuts and create your own crazy shortcuts it's just so amazing and customizable it's honestly not a function I use myself but I know people that do and love it so it's just good to know that it's there lastly something I do all the time is to open the clip and look at our video animation and the reason you'd want to do this is to edit things like fade-ins and fade-outs and you can also edit your keyframes from this panel you could just right-click the clip and choose show video animation but then I feel like it's easier to use shortcuts on the keyboard the shortcut you need for this is ctrl V and that opens and closes it so it's really quick and easy of course adding fade-ins and fade-outs to Clips is super easy just drag the slider along and that will control the opacity of your clip so super easy and looks good however I think there's an even better way of doing it and that's to use keyframes at this point you're probably thinking behalf keyframing isn't quick that's not gonna speed things up that's gonna slow me down but I feel like if you know the shortcut and you'll practice in it it's just second nature and it won't take you any time at all so we're gonna create a really slick looking fade-out so just hit option K to create a keyframe create another one right next to it drag the keyframe that's nearest the end of your clip down and that will create our fade out but of course that's not gonna look slick enough for me so just right click somewhere along the line and select ease and this will add a kind of ramping effect and it will look super classy [Music] another function I use all the time to keep me efficient and organized is the workspaces function so I thought you'd really appreciate seeing how I use them in my workflow to keep me speedy let's say I've been editing for a little while and I've moved all my spaces around and I want to get it back to my standard editing layout this is when you can use the workspaces function to your advantage I've actually got three presets for I use my half standard covers all the bases workspace a specialized workspace for grading and then another one for audio so if I select half it'll snap back to my does everything all-purpose workspace then if I select my grading workspace you'll see that my waveform pops up automatically nice and big so I can see what's going on but finally when I select my audio workspace you can see I've got a nice clear view of my timeline plus my audio meters are really clear and big I can monitor it nicely and that's it for now thank you so much for hanging out with me today as always I've loved making this video for you and if you're still in the mood for more dope videos about video I'll pop a couple of interesting ones over here and if you're not subscribed just hit this blob right here and until next time it's help each other out and shoot better video [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Harv Video/Audio Stuff

Views: 191,471

Keywords: harv, video audio stuff, james harvey, sony, a7s ii, canon, nikon, harv video audio stuff, videography, photography, Fast Final Cut Pro Editing Workflow, Final Cut Pro Editing, Final Cut Pro, final cut, fcpx, video editing, video editing tips, editing tips, fast editing, fast video editing, fcpx shortcuts, shortcuts, final cut shortcuts, walkthrough, best, 5 tips, 10 tips, how to, edit video, fcpeffects, video money, editing money, workflow, premier pro, adobe, pp, davinci, resolve, lut

Id: 9lTDaaYEyf0

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/AdventureBum]

Already knew most of these, but for some reason I missed that you could right click in the middle of a keyframe to change the spline. I've always just right-clicked on the control point of the fade handles at the end, and had no idea how to change the spline of an actual keyframe. Thanks for the tips!