Final Cut Pro X | Adjusting Crop to Create a Split Screen Effect

you hello Final Cut Pro editors my name is Jared and I'm gonna show you another tip today I got a question on Instagram and this is the video that they sent me I'm gonna play this really quickly here what you'll see is there's three pictures one on the right one on the left and then one in the middle and they all animate onto the screen and essentially the question was how can I recreate that type of a transition so we're gonna build that in Final Cut um use some different video clips but let me play this again just so you can see this going through slowly you'll see the clip on the right kind of slides up the clip on the Left slides down and so you goes top down and then the clip in the middle kind of expands out from the middle and then they sit in there then there's some other transitions and um some other effects there but we're just gonna focus right now on how those three clips slide on to the screen because they all use this same type of effect or same type of feature inside a final cut that we're going to use to create that effect so I'm gonna do this from scratch inside a Final Cut you can certainly do any of what you see here on any project this is built into Final Cut there's nothing special there's no add-ons to make this happen so the first thing I'm going to do is command N on the keyboard and to create a new project and I'm gonna call it crop because we're gonna be working with the crop parameter so I'm just gonna call it crop I'm storing it in my stock media event which is this one over on the left here I don't have to worry about a starting timecode all my settings are gonna be stock and I'm gonna click on OK so there have created it I am gonna go into that my smart collections here I'm gonna go down and click on my favorites because I do have three clips that I've marked as favorite and it's these three different videos of cats pretty straightforward I'll skim through them you can see them there and essentially what I want to do is recreate what is in that other clip where it's closed on each of these cats faces but then we have them cropping or showing up on the screen so I'm going to show you how to do that we're going to start with this clip on the right side so I'm just going to sell the clip you can select part of it the whole thing whatever you want I'm gonna do shift-z to fit this in the timeline and if you're not used to Final Cut Pro 10 this middle area that's the darker area is what's called the primary storyline so essentially place this first clip on the primary storyline and then I'm doing shift Z just to zoom in to fit the screen there I'm gonna click and drag the beginning of this clip because there is kind of a fade in there I'm just gonna remove that from this stock clip and it goes all the way it's about eight seconds so that's perfect so there's the first clip now I'm going to drag the second clip down which is this one here and I'm going to drop it on top of the first clip and that's going to connect it to the primary storyline I do want all three of these clips to be about the same length so I'm gonna drag this to the left so it lines up at the beginning and then going to the right side I'm gonna hit the B key the letter B on my keyboard to activate the Blade tool I'm gonna click on the clip here I'm gonna hit the a key to switch back to the arrow and then in the dark gray area here I'm gonna click and drag across to remove the ends there now my timeline down here the clips are pretty tall so I can hit the clip appearance menu here and I can actually shrink these clips down to make them not so tall that way it's easier to see this top line zooms in and out I like to use shift Z just to fit the timeline there fit all the clips on the timeline and then the second slider here that makes those clips a little shorter they don't need to be so tall in this case and I can also even hit this clip here cuz they're all photos so I'll just skip out we don't need any audio to be visible so I have two Clips now and then I'm gonna get the third one which is this black cat and we'll put that up on the top again same thing I'm going to press the B to activate the Blade tool and I'm actually you can't see it but I'm still holding the letter B on the keyboard that way when I click I can now let go of the letter B and it switches back to the arrow tool then I'll click and drag it across this empty spot delete those extra Clips so again to summarize all I've done so far is added all three clips one of them is on the primary storyline because you should put something there and then we have two connected clips on top of them however right now the clip on the top is the one that we see because it's covering up everything below it so that's fine but what we want to see is just these cats faces in three separate panels so I'll start with the clip on the top which is the black cat I'm just gonna select it by clicking on it and then over in the inspector specifically under the video inspector here I'm gonna go down to crop I'm gonna go over to the right and click on the show button and now I can crop from both the left and the right and we'll just go and crop in roughly around the cat's head I'm not being too specific about where I crop or the size of it right now I'm just trying to get a rough cut for this clip now the next thing I want to do is position this clip so I'm going to position it over on the left side with this black cat so you have the X and the y parameters here that you can change the X is what we want to actually move here to move this cat over to the left side so I'll put the cat right about there is fine and that for me is good for this top cat here so I'm gonna now move on down to the middle cat which is this one sitting on the chair so I'm gonna select that clip and I'm gonna do the exact same thing I'm gonna clap crop the left side probably right here out there and I'm gonna crop the right side over onto that cat's face and that looks pretty good and now we're gonna go down to the bottom clip here which is the final cat however it's a little bit hard to see the full cat's face here so what I'm gonna do is actually select these top two clips and I'm gonna hit the letter V for Victor or Victor e on the keyboard and what hitting the V key does it just disables those top clips so with the Clips disabled I can now see this full clip on the bottom and I'll crop the left side I don't want to crop off the ear necessarily and I do want to crop a little bit of the right side we can do that there and then with this cat I like this counter I put this cat over on the right side so I'm going to use the X parameter to move them over there you could certainly activate the transform tool here and physically move the clip around however I like that this clip stays right centered and I only want to move it over to the right so doing that with the X parameter in the inspector I find is the easiest way to do that so that one looks pretty good let's select the top clip and hit the V key to re-enable the black cat clip and I see that one and that clip actually looks fairly good I don't know I don't see anything to wrong with that clip right now and let's go into the middle clip hit the V key to activate it and there we go we have the three clips on the screen so not too bad I do see one issue though these cats that their faces are a little bit too different in size right the one in the middle is really small the one on the right is really big the black cats kind of in the middle it's not too bad there so we may want to think about using a different clip especially for this one on the bottom but this is where you can go in and use the scale parameter to resize these clips and change how they look we might even want to crop in more on the left side with this clip in this case though we we actually are we don't have anything on the top and the bottom for this one so that might be a little bit of a problem but I'll show you how to fix that you know bit we'll do that at the end so actually we want to bring back some of this now this part we're now positioning these Clips a specific way so that they all fit together so you may want to go up to the view menu and turn on things like your horizon and your show title and action safe zones having these little guides on-screen might help you out here for example with these cats I can go in and position them maybe move up the Y position here for this cat so that the eyes are roughly on the horizon line might be nice to have them all lined up at the same spot so now I'm going to select the middle clip this one is the much smaller cat here in the middle so we're gonna blow that Kappa cat up by increasing the scale I'm gonna move it down with the Y parameter we'll just line them up with that horizon line and then using the X parameter I can move it over I know this cats in the middle so I'm using the horizon line roughly in the middle there to position it correctly and in this case since we do have the black lines showing up here I'm actually going to crop the top and the bottom of this clip as well so that they all line up roughly the same size here and you could spend a lot of times typing in numbers on the right side here in the parameters to to be very very specific however in this case uh I'm not gonna be too too specific there and then now we have the clip on the top here which is the black cat which the size of the face is actually pretty good I'm just gonna select it and then crop the top and the bottom and it's hard to see because this is a black cat so I'm gonna go up to the View menu and under View you you have a whole bunch of options here for how you can change how things actually look inside of the the viewer there so it looks pretty good I'm gonna turn off my horizon and title safe zones in this case so we don't need those right now and on the black cat it is hard to see but on the right side of it there is actually some more of that clip so I'm gonna drag that over to the left and I it's hard to see right because this is a black background in here so what I'm gonna do is create and actually put in a black or a background to fill in the black space there so I'm gonna do that by going over to the titles and generators sidebar I'm gonna go down to generators and then I can drag in a generator here and you could certainly use whatever you want I'm gonna use industrial uh let's see yeah let's use industrial we'll put that in the background here and drag this all the way over to the right you could certainly put in another video or something else to fill in that space but now that I have a background that's not just black I can actually see in the back here the spacing seems it'll be not too great so I'm gonna turn my horizon line back on because the horizon line actually has these little dashes to be able to show me where things are so now it's it's much clearer that the these dividing lines aren't in the right spot so I'm gonna select the top cat the black cat I'm going to crop a little bit more the right side will go right about here I'm gonna select the middle cat to correct the right or the left side on this one expand it out I do want a little bit of a gap in between those two cats there and then on the a right side of the crop we can bring that in that's gonna go to right about there select the bottom cat and we're cropping the left side out to bring some more of that back all right so to summarize again at this stage of it we've imported all three clips layered them on the timeline we then use the inspector on all three of the clips to adjust the position the scale and the crop parameter so that they're all sized roughly where they look pretty good there we use the View menu up here to enable and disable the things like the action save zones and the horizon there to help us align where those clips are so now going back to that QuickTime movie here essentially we have the three Clips on the screen of course these clips they had shots where the face filled the entire screen so we could do that as well here in this case I sized him down and cropped him so that they're all in these smaller little windows but if you have video where it's an entire portrait like that you can certainly zoom in and cover screw all the way from top to bottom so the next part of this is actually animating it how do we get all three of these to animate on just like you see in this video well that's gonna be with keyframes so let's go to the beginning of this project because essentially at the beginning here we don't want any of these three cats to be on screen we're gonna have it so that the one on the right comes in first the one on the Left slides in and then the one in the middle will slide out as if it's kind of expanding from the center and there are transitions that get you kind of close to this effect but you can do this really easily using keyframes it is a tricky process if you're not used to using keyframes but it's something that if you get used to it you can be very fast so to this I'm gonna first hide my brows around over on the left side using this little button at the top just to give us some more space in the viewer I'm also gonna drag the timeline down a little bit just make the viewer a little bit video bigger so you can see it there okay so here's how you create the animation the first thing is I like where all these clips are but we're gonna start at the beginning with none of them on the screen so with the first one I want it to slide from what didn't mean copy exactly what happened in this this video back here so the one on the right side starts by going from the bottom up and then the one on the left goes from top down so let me do those two so the black cat is the one on the left and it's going to start at the top and kind of slide down which means we're animating the bottom crop parameter so in our inspector here again you want to make sure the playhead is positioned correctly so with it positioned at the beginning of the project and the that clip selected I'm going to adjust the bottom crop parameter and notice I'm just dragging it up and if you're watching the viewer you can see how we're gonna animate it so it's starting like this and then it slides down and the cat will show up so I'm gonna drag this all the way up to the top you can certainly go much higher on your animation but try to get this pixel number here to be just off the screen so it starts showing at a roughly in my case yours gonna be different but in my case it's showing it about nine hundred and forty pixels so I'm just gonna drag this up so it's around nine fifty or so that way it's off of the screen then what I'm going to do is hit the little diamond button here on the right side which adds a keyframe to that parameter okay so that one's done now let's go down to this let's actually do the one on the right here I'm gonna come back to the middle one that's multiple parameters but the one on the right side here we want it sliding in differently instead of going from the top down we want it to start at the bottom and then go up which means we're adjusting the top crop parameter so it's a little bit backwards now with these parameters if you can't go all the way over to where you need to which in this case we can so we're okay but it for some reason the slider doesn't go it far enough you can go into these pixel numbers and actually click and drag the numbers up or down to get more numbers or you can double click on the number that's here and just manually type in a number and then hit return or enter to it to lock that in however my case the slider did work I was able to go down to about 7:20 there I'm gonna click the add keyframe parameter looks great I like where it is so I want these ones to animate on coming in at about two seconds so I'm gonna go to the two second mark using my timecode viewer in the middle there I can see them at two seconds and I'm gonna adjust in this case I still have the bottom track your clip selected which is this clip on the right so I'm gonna adjust that top parameter back to where it's just at the top where we wanted it there hasn't gonna be it at zero pixels notice it automatically added a keyframe because we'd added one before so that looks pretty good and then I'm going to select the black cat I'm gonna do the same thing only this time we're adjusting the bottom crop parameter I don't want to go all the way to zero I want to go roughly about here is that 196 that looks roughly where it should be you could certainly go in here under the view and go up to like 600 percent for example and then drag the little window down which is over here and then I could adjust this and kind of fine-tune it where it needs to be I'm not going to do that for all of them but you could certainly go in there if you wanted to awesome so that creates some animation so let's play this back so if I go back to the beginning hit the spacebar and you notice there's both of our cats animating onto the screen pretty straightforward right looks pretty good however if we go back to the original video here that we're trying to kind of copy here the one on the right slides on and then right is the one on the right is finishing the one on the Left starts so these need to be staggered Final Cut Pro 10 includes a really cool feature called the video animation editor which you can right-click on a clip or control click on it and you'll see an option to show video animation you can also use the shortcut here control V so with a clip selected control V shows the video animation and here's my trim that I did and these little diamond icons are the actual keyframes so I could just move these over so I know it takes about two seconds for the animation to complete so maybe I want one of them to start and then about halfway through we're a little bit further maybe about like 115 which is about a second and a half then the next one can go over so I'm gonna just drag this keyframe over notice that number I'm putting it at 115 looks pretty good and then same thing for this one I want to put it at I was at 4:00 4:15 all right so we're staggering over and just by doing that I've moved those where those crop parameter keyframes are in time hit the space bar now it's the one on the right slides in and then as the one on the right is finishing the one on the Left starts and slides in so pretty pretty cool right that's how you can create those crop perimeters and then the last cat here the animation is gonna start probably about four seconds that's roughly right when that one's finishing so we're gonna select this lazy cat in the middle and we're gonna have to add some keyframes for this one as well and in this case in the example video let me switch back over the video the clip in the middle is actually expanding both from the left and the right so we're doing multiple parameters here you could certainly click on all of them if you wanted to but I'm just animating the left and the right parameter a crop parameter so pick keyframes for those and in this case I need to shrink them down so that the crop is in the middle so I'm gonna move this over and this is where the horizon lines actually gonna really help out so I'm gonna go up to view say show horizon because I want it to expand roughly from the horizon line so I'm gonna crop it just past the horizon line same thing with the right side bring it over and it ends right about there it's gonna be that spot and cool so this is at four seconds I want it to take two seconds to come on so I'm going to move the playhead to six seconds and I've already added keyframes I know they're added because this keyframe navigation button is listed so I can just go to the left side drop that over same thing with the right side drop that over to the right awesome and we'll say that's good enough and that's it um if we go and play this just hitting the spacebar here you can see the one on the right shows up the one on the Left shows up with a crop and then the one in the middle shows up as well and again if you select one of these and hit control V to show the video animation a little on the timeline here you can certainly select these keyframes and move them in time so as an example I had all of these show up in two seconds is what the animation took but if I wanted everything to happen faster I could certainly do that let's say if I wanted everything to happen in one second on the first clip I'm going to drag this keyframe over so that it's at the basically one is the beginning here right so I'm going to take this over so that it's at two seconds for it to come on there and then we can do the same thing with the other one so getting selecting the clip hitting ctrl V I'm gonna drag both of the keyframes over so this one's gonna go over to 15 and this will be at 115 and then our last clip here is going to go over to to and then this one's going to go over to three I think if I did the math right there that should be roughly where it should go I'm gonna close the video animation on all of those go back to the beginning hit the spacebar and you can see they all come on the screen a little bit faster this one in the middle seem to be a little delayed but that's okay we're gonna select it hit control V and adjust these ones I think it should be 115 and 215 yeah roughly where it needs to be again you can use the timeline and the keyframe editor there the video animation to adjust those keyframes in the position there so that's how you create that effect that was shown in this video I hope that helps out one last little tip if you watch this video there's kind of a does this weird transition here you can see it actually changes all the clips that show up so there's some definitely some other effects being used and it looks like they're all over the place with that but one tip that comes in with this or a question I get a lot is how can you adjust all three of these cats or these clips at the same time I can actually just select all of these clips and keep the background there I'll just select all these clips you can do option G or right click and say new compound clip I've recommend aiming the clip here so we'll call it cropped cats clip and now all these cats then are grouped into one clip in and inside of that compound clip so if we make any adjustments to this they're all being adjusted at the same time so as an example I've showed this in another video you could option drag this up select the bottom clip increase the scale and then go into the video effects go under blur put on a Gaussian blur or another type of blur I might need to adjust the way these scales are and now you've created a blurred background for all of those cats so if I play it back notice backgrounds coming on and it's got a blurred version in the background since they didn't fit on the screen right so you can do all kinds of different effects that's just one example there that you can do so I hope this tip helped out if you do have questions send an email to Final Cut Pro help add me calm don't forget to subscribe and hit the little bell there you'll receive a notification when we go live we have a live show usually every single month that's answering all kinds of different questions and demoing different features so we look forward to those future shows don't hesitate reach out the person that asks this question did so on Instagram so at Final Cut Pro help on all the social medias to get in contact thank you so much everyone have a wonderful day

Channel: Final Cut Pro Support by Jared

Views: 53,249

Keywords: FCPX, Final Cut Pro Split Screen, Final Cut Pro Screen, plugin, plugin free, screen video, split screen plugin, split screen template, Final Cut Pro X, Final Cut Pro X Split Screen, Template, Crop, Tool, Multiple Videos, Moving Split Screen, Moving Split Screen Final Cut Pro, Keyframe Split Screen, Final Cut, Video Editing, Edits, Editing

Id: S8yhRwNYujs

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2019