Final Cut Pro X Essentials - Working in the Timeline

now that we've gone over the foundation of Final Cut Pro 10 let's get into the core of it all the Edit in this lesson we're going to go over the timeline getting deeper into the timeline basics like storyline magnetic timeline navigation timeline tools connected clips compound clips and lastly gap clips let's take a look you'll find that working within the Final Cut Pro 10 timeline it's quite different than other nonlinear editors and if you haven't used other nonlinear editors well let's take a look at really how they work and what it all is doing so the basics of the timeline is all built around the primary storyline the primary storyline is the vein of your edit it's the foundation visually in the timeline it's this main track right in the middle it is notated by the dark grey line versus the light gray up and below it and all timelines have a primary storyline so you have whatever you're building off of if you are within your timeline wherever your playhead is is what you'll be seeing in your viewer here you can see that I'm going up and low here from my primary storyline to another storyline and it's showing me only what's in the storyline here or what's in the primary storyline here if I go up and I actually move the playhead though it'll show me both of them as they are composited together now storylines are just a sequence of clips so beat your primary or your secondary is just a place to group things so you can group cutaways titles you can even group sound effects and music as a secondary storyline next let's take a look at connected clips connected clips are attached to clips in the primary storyline in the timeline they're useful for cutaway shots composited images and sound effects connected clips remain attached and synchronize until you explicitly move or remove them a sequence of connected Clips is a storyline now let's take a look at a connected clip what they look like and then how they move together and lastly we'll cover how to move the actual connection point which is something you'll probably need to do on a common occurence so let's take a look we'll just grab a clip here from our favorites let's see here maybe we'll grab the shot here there's not much going on with it so we're going to grab this clip and we're going to bring it down and it's a connected clip because you can see there's a little connection point right where the two connect and the other way to tell is that it's stacked here on the primary storyline so this goes you know and you can move it anywhere you'd like and it can be a cutaway so say I needed a cutaway to this shot and then cut back I can I can have that here and the thing is though is that they actually stay with whatever they're connected to if you move that main file within your primary storyline so let's take a look at that if I move the primary storyline the connected clip moves along with it and every time I move it it'll go and be connected to it so if I have like a sequence that I've made but I just want to move it somewhere else in the Edit they'll actually move together and that's really helpful so what if I wanted to change the connection point of my connection clip there might be a lot of different needs for this but it's really this connection point that's right here what if I didn't want these three clips to be connected but rather I wanted this clip to be connected to this clip because it was this clip that triggered my need for the b-roll what if I had added this and had been over here so I did the timing but then I wanted to change the way it all worked well the connection point is still at this clip so I can still move those together you might want to write this down because it's something that you'll probably have to look up dozens of times so write it down on like a sticky note of some sort and stick it next to your monitor because you will get frustrated with this if you have been editing and you need to move that point instead of going having to look it up again just write it down and it's command option click so command option click and I click on the top of the clip that I want to change the connection point to where I want the connection point to be so right now you can see the playhead is right there with my cursor and if I press command option click there it moves it and see I can move it wherever I'd like but I want to move it to here so now these two clips are connected and it's real simple real easy but you will definitely run into this issue from time to time so write it down now let's look over compound Clips the idea of a compound clip is that I have a storyline here and I want to group them together so that I can affect them gather either by changing their size or maybe colorizing them or doing something maybe I'm going to a dream sequence and this is going to be the dream sequence together but I want to cut away to it what I can do is if I highlight both my clips and you can do a keyboard shortcut of option G or you can right-click on it and go newb compound clip or you can press ctrl click and you go a new compound clip so let's do option G so highlight them both option G and now it wants me to name this compound clip so let's call it compound spelled right clip example one I'm going to go okay and so now you see it's actually one piece of video so if I wanted to then change the connection point of this compound clip I can do it the same way so now I connected here those two are connected there and then I can choose it here and they'll actually be moved to that clip so let's take a look at what this looks like so what this actually is doing is creating another storyline that you can then go into by double clicking on the actual compound itself that is going to make the video that you have as a connected clip but now it's going to have its own primary storyline so let's double click and take a look at that I double click on it and now you can see primary storyline secondary storyline I can organize this just like it's a whole separate edit and then once I am done with my sequence of what I'm doing I can go back into my main project and go back so you can see this is my project name compound clip example 1 if I just go back it now has it here it'd be very helpful if I want to resize my compound clip or whatever I'm doing so that I can now manipulate it as a whole instead of a bunch of separate videos one last thing to add is that compound clips can be made up of video audio and titles or really whatever asset you need to use they work just like your primary timeline they're just grouped together now let's talk about gap clips you might find yourself with the situation where you're trying to show a cut and you want to dip to black you want to be on black because you're going to have some titles there maybe it's for some kind of movie trailer what-have-you that you're creating some drama with and then you want to go back to video now so far we have the magnetic timeline and if I grab a clip and I bring it to the end here it's just going to snap right to the back end of it but say I wanted to go to black and then I want to go back to my video what do I do it's called a gap clip and it's a blank clip also known as a slug or mat or color mat depending on what nonlinear editor you're working on and they have no sound all you need to do to insert a gap clip is to go into your position tool if we go to our little tool box here we can go down to position or we can hit our keyboard shortcut P and you can see it's an arrow without the handle there all I have to do now is I can grab this clip if I bring it back a little bit now a gap clip has been created and that will be in any length you want so if I bring this clip way back here it'll make the gap clip an actual clip you can adjust you can edit and whatnot it will go along with you so I want to shorten it or I want to make it longer you can do all of those things one thing to pay attention whenever you're using the position tool is because it looks so much like the Select tool you might find yourself moving stuff around while still using that tool so make sure you press a to get back to your Select tool because if you don't you'll be adding gap Clips just about everywhere and it's frustrating so just make sure to go back to your Select tool so that you don't have any unwanted or unneeded gap Clips another thing we'd like to cover is the timeline index timeline index will help you find specific clips and markers within your timeline and it also help you find keywords so if you just come down here the bottom left you click on this button here and your timeline index will open up and I had been searching for a gap clip and see there it actually shows you the gap clip and if you click on it it'll highlight it in white so you can find it quickly and if this was a really complicated edit it would help you find things this is a 20 second edit so it's not necessarily the hardest thing to navigate but it'll help you find when you're doing a real complex edit where you have lots and lots of parts and aspects to your edit and you'll just be able to get right to them really quickly now we've already talked about it a little bit but let's dive in deeper to the magnetic timeline the magnetic timeline automatically tracks clip relationships as you rearrange trim and add clips it lets you easily make changes in even the most complex sequences so let's take a look at it in action it's really quite simple it's just like things are attracted by magnetism they just snap right to each other so that's really cool if you just want to arrange things really quickly if you spent a lot of time organizing you have your favorites full of all your clips trim the way you want them you can just now put them in order and they're going to magnetically clip to each other and it's just going to make it for a quick edit the magnetic timeline is affecting clips within the storyline the main primary storyline and the clips outside of the storyline everywhere magnetism is happening there are two ways to delete Clips to invoke or ignore magnetism so let's let's take a look at the first way which is if you just delete a clip between two clips the outside clips are going to now go together like a magnet let me get rid of this clip here and if I press Delete you'll see that boom the outside clip comes and meets with the clip just prior to the one that I deleted say that's not what you wanted to do instead you want to keep that timing but you want to have a placeholder or just to keep the edit you want or maybe you want to make sure that the connected clips that are there are there instead you can then if you press shift and backspace at the same time it's going to put a gap clip between those two clips and the timing is going to stay as designed let's look at how to navigate the size of your timeline so if you'd like to get in close to a place for an edit and get into the frames you can do that or if you just want to look at one little area so your timeline is an hour long you just want to look at five minutes or what-have-you the way you can zoom in and zoom out and then fit to zoom so first let's take a look at how to zoom in and out there's a tool that is called the zoom tool and it looks like a magnifying glass you can also get it with a keyboard shortcut z and what it does is you can either draw an area that you want it to zoom so if you want to get into just this little area to do a tighter edit or get in there frame by frame and really perfect it you can do that and when you get closer as well just any given point you can click and get closer as well you can use command plus and command minus to zoom in if you're just doing keyboard shortcuts and you don't want to change tools if you press optioning click you will zoom out and that'll be nice because you want to get it into a certain view or you just want to get out zoom in zoom out you're not necessarily drawing the space that you want to go to you're just in the Edit and really focusing another nice keyboard shortcut to use is zoom to fit and if you press Shift + Z it will zoom in to just your active timeline area so that you don't have any empty space if I am zoomed out here so it's showing me about a minute and I want to fit just to my active timeline shift Z and it gets it done now next is a thing called snapping now I'm going to change my tool I'm going to press a and get back to my arrow or select tool and I want to show you how snapping works so snapping if you see my cursor the playhead that's connected to my cursor is going right along and as keeps it up with that line but as soon as I get close to an edge it snaps it and see it also changes the color there but it jumps from and goes right to that cut that could be a pain if you're trying to do things that are off timing from cuts so turning on and off snapping is helpful the N key is your keyboard shortcut and you can turn that on and off and you can see over here on the corner of your timeline that the light as it turns on and off will turn blue so this button will turn blue when it's on and turning off on off on so real easy to turn on and off and you can also click on that icon to turn it on and off now the next thing that you can turn on and off in the same menu is skimming now skimming is tied to audio skimming so right now it's just got video skimming on but I can turn audio skimming on as well and if I come up to my Clips here both the video and the audio skim now if I go back down to that menu and I turn off just skimming in general it will turn them both off so you can have just video if you want which is turning off audio skimming and have skimming on you can then have audio skimming on and both of them on so it's skimming both video and audio and to turn skimming on and off as s and turning audio skimming on is shift s let's turn that off because I find it a little bit annoying only when I'm just trying to do an edit if I'm up in my clip menu it's actually really nice to have on so let's turn that on but I'm gonna turn audio skimming off because that actually is a little bit more pleasant let's finish up with some keyboard shortcuts of some small actions that you might want to use so first right off the bat is soloing now if you just press option + S it will turn on and off soloing and it'll solo whatever you're clicked on so right now I'm clicked on this video clip of me on a zipline and if I hold option S it'll turn it on or I'll turn on this button over here on the top right of your timeline and you can see that it Gray's everything else out so it's just soloing this one video so it's whatever your highlighted on it will solo I might be doing this because I really want to get the audio right and the music underneath it was distracting and I don't want to hear it but I don't want to like turn it off or disable it or anything like that I can just solo and now I can watch just this clip just by itself now to play other things but I'm just hearing just that next if you want to go in and out of frames let's turn off soloing and you can go between frames if you want to go forward a frame you press the forward key and if you want to go back with the backwards key if you press the J key it'll play backwards and every time you press it it actually get faster the K button will pause so if I'm going forward just press spacebar and I press K it'll pause and then if I press L it will move forward just like Jay did backwards so every time I press it it'll go faster so there you go very fast now lastly this is a really helpful tool just when you're trying to really get in and make sure your edits is just absolutely perfect if you want to nudge your clip 1 frame back or one frame forward use the comment period comma will go backwards in time and period will go forward in time so backward or forward and it will just adjust that clip and move it in time the whole thing one forward one back or how many times you press it and lastly if you want to change your timeline time you just click on it until it changes like that type in your timecode so I want to go to five seconds and bam it goes there and that concludes working in the timeline in our next segment we're going to be covering trimming tools and editing types

Channel: Videomaker

Views: 75,369

Keywords: videomaker, video production, filmmaking, final cut pro, final cut pro x, fcpx, apple, editing, timeline, magnetic timeline, editing videos for youtube, final cut pro x tutorial 2021, final cut pro x music video editing, filmmaking motivation, final cut pro tutorial, filmmaking techniques, editing software, final cut pro x tutorial, final cut pro timeline, fcpx timeline tutorial, final cut x tutorial, fcpx tutorial, final cut pro x timeline, final cut tutorial, fcpx timeline

Id: zuXz4rbhOpE

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2016