Final Cut Pro X - FULL CLASS

hello everyone and welcome to the class this is david a cox with pcclassesonline.com the world's first completely free virtual classroom service you can check out our website we have members in over a hundred and sixty countries and our website of course is pc classes online comm today we're going to be discussing the brand new version of Final Cut Pro version 10 and this has been one of the most requested classes we have ever received and the reason why it took me so long to produce this class is I really wanted to take my time and do the absolute best job that I could to put out something out there that would teach anyone who's brand-new to the software how to use it I do a lot of resource research rather before doing any of our videos and I looked on the internet for other people who had done classes on Final Cut Pro and I found one of two things usually to be the case the people who were good were typically charging two to three hundred dollars in order to buy the video on to learn how to use Final Cut Pro the others were typically kids who some of them seem to how do we say their voices hadn't quite changed and really skipped a lot of key features that someone who would be a new user would really need to understand in order to grasp the concept so it is my goal today to hopefully explain this as clear as possible I'm going to try to keep the pacing very even so that all of you can follow me you'll also notice that as you're watching this video I'm going to go that extra mile in this class and when I click I'm going to zoom in and make sure that you can really see where I'm clicking just to make that learning process a little bit easier now if you have not yet purchased Final Cut Pro you do it through the app store on the Mac so you just go to the Apple icon at the top left of your screen go to app store and find it in there it is 299 dollars if that sounds like a lot of money it's really not considering the last version was around a thousand so the other thing you are going to want for most people if you're going to be using Final Cut Pro is a really good external hard drive to store your footage now different hard drives I would recommend for different people based on need and if you want to see all the hard drives that we recommend you can go to our website at pcclassesonline.com and you'll see that we have a brand new store page and this is just a place where we put links to all of the products that we recommend because not all hard drives are made equally to give you an example the worst hard drive out there I've said this in past classes that we've taught our hard drive is made by the company let's see they have a very high fail rate and I am NOT a fan so when you open up Final Cut Pro this is going to be the kind of screen you're going to see and I'm going to go over the different aspects of editing how to add things like effects titles and music and a few other tips that I pip a few other tips that I've picked up down the road so when you first open up the software the first thing you're going to want to do is to create a new project and to do that you just go to file and new project it just means you're creating a new video from there you're going to start to create a series of events and the easiest way to think of an event is an event is like a folder for your footage so let's pretend you're going to be creating a video about your honeymoon and maybe you go on a cruise okay all over different countries one event might be the location that you are on day one or maybe the flight to get to the cruise event number two might be the first country you visit event and so on and so forth it's just an easy way to organize your footage if you're shooting a real film where you have actors and multiple cameras event one is probably going to be scene one event two is going to be seen two et cetera and important to know if you're going to be using an external hard drive before you create your event make sure you're clicked over here at the top left on that external hard drive when you create the actual event because we're doing a demo right now I actually already have one here pre-planned we're going to be using some footage that I shot several weeks ago but I'm going to still walk you through the process so go back up here to file hit new event it's the third item down and it's going to ask you to click here to import your media pretty simple so we click that it opens up a browser now if this is footage that you have you can just select the files individually all at once whatever you like if you have an actual camera at this point you would plug in your camera to your computer and it will walk you through the import process so this footage that we're going to be using for those of you who have never heard of us or myself one of the things I do is I'm actually a drone pilot I have an aerial drone that I use for photography and videography purposes so we're going to be using some of the footage that I shot just for fun couple weeks ago and it's going to ask us are we adding this to a existing event or this technically is another place where you can go to create a new event so we'll hit import and one of the things I love about this is that even though I just clicked import you can immediately start to use this footage even though it's not done analyzing all that footage you still can start the process so let's go through how to actually import your footage now there's different ways to do it and some ways just tend to be better than others and we're going to start off with talking about some of the features you see over here on the left hand side of my screen so let's talk about some of the buttons first this little icon that you see right here all the way on the Left will simply hide that event library so if you only have one event that you're really working with you can just click that button to hide it and you can have more space to see the actual footage that you're working with the little gear icon here is your different options to group events we're not going to really be going over that today if you'll see these two buttons here these are just different ways to view your footage the way I recommend is the one that you see currently the one on the left you go to the one on the right it sort of is like Cover Flow view on the map or in iTunes and you can click through these different clips it just isn't for me as pleasurable I guess a way to view your footage so I don't really recommend it now what we're going to do is we're going to start the process of determining end point and out points to our footage so saying what is the beginning part of this clip that I want to create and what is the out point and then the process of bringing it here into our storyline that's what the bottom part of the screen is called to actually do the Edit now I'm going to start up here and you'll notice that as I move my cursor over the footage not so much now let me try to get it there we go now you can see it a little bit better as I move my cursor it's showing me on the right hand side of the screen where the footage is that process is called scrubbing so what I'm going to do is I'm going to find here let's find just before I take off and I think I'll cut in just as I'm sludge is starting to take off okay so right here seems to be a good place and the easy way to create an end point is to tap on your keyboard the letter I pretty easy in I for endpoint Oh for out point so we'll tap I and now anytime you want to play the footage wherever your playhead is all you have to do is tap the spacebar okay so we're now up in the air and now I'm going to pause it let's say I want to now cut and I want to already be in the air so now to create that out point once again I'm going to tap the letter O and you can see it's kind of cropped my shot right there now to bring it into my storyline there's a couple different ways I could do it I could theoretically just take this clip drag it and drop it there but if you're dealing with a lot of footage that can be kind of cumbersome so there is an easier way to do it and it has to do with these three buttons that you see right here now if you are on an American keyboard I want you to look at your keyboard right now and you'll notice that the letters Q W and E are all right next to each other those are the three shortcut keys for what I am about to show you and if you ever want to change any of the shortcuts that I'm about to show you throughout this class please stay tuned because at the end I'm going to show you where you can go to find all of those shortcuts and also how to modify them so here you'll see we have three buttons the first one here is what you would if you tap the letter Q it's going to put it to the top part of your storyline so typically in most cases that would be b-roll so if I'm doing an interview sometimes you have a say you're interviewing someone who works in a restaurant you'll have the interview it'll go back and forth between the subject and the person who's asking the questions and then you'll cut to b-roll of them in action waiting ok waiting tables so that would be a case where I'd probably use this button the next one here is w and the w key is going to put it in between two clips and if you look at this icon here it pretty much shows just that so if I have two clips that I've already put into my storyline and I want to drop that in the middle that's the easy way to do it and finally the one that personally I use the most is the is used by using the e key which will put it at the end of your storyline ok now because it's the very first clip it really doesn't matter which one I use so let's just tap the letter e and you'll see it puts it right down here into my storyline let's grab some more footage here okay and I'll just hit the I key let's play it out a little bit still working on creating some better stabilizers for my drone so that I don't have so much shaking here okay this is just a dummy clip so I think we can not be so picky about what we use now let's scroll through here and let's just do some here okay so now we've got a few clips that we can start working with a couple other things I do want to show you here are these three buttons here you see we have a green star sort of a hollow star and an X now this tends to be more than anything for people who are using who are creating an actual video with actors where you have different takes so let me give an example where this would be be helpful so the green star when you footage that is highlighted the green star means it's a good shot thumbs up favorite in this case the hollow one means that if you've already marked it as favorite and then you see another shot that's even better this will basically undo that selection finally here you have the X which is reject it will actually delete that portion of the clip it's an easy way if you have a lot of footage you can just kind of go through everything everything you don't like it just gets it out gets it out of your event so that all you have left is your good shot it's a handy feature also here you'll see that we have a little key icon and that is your key word editor so if let's say I want to Sam this is going to be a collaboration of drone footage from Cape Cod I might assign a keyword to this shot called lighthouse so that as I compose all of my footage together I can just go to the keyword lighthouse and I'll see all the different lighthouse shots that I have as an example next I want to talk about this little button right here now this for most of you it's going to actually look like this I was doing a little prep work before we started today so this arrow is where you would find a lot of the different tools that in the previous version of Final Cut Pro would have been over here hanging out on the right-hand side so you're select tool is pretty basic it's the arrow key all right the T that's the hotkey for it is trim so let's say this shot here you know what I really don't like the way it ended I want to bring it in a couple frames I just put it here and I just dragged a little bit to the left and you can see it's cutting in okay so it's indenting it at the very end next we have the position key now position key is great for moving around clips also let me give you another example let's say I want to have some black space in between these two maybe I want to have titles in between the shots well what I can do is I can take this and I can just move it and it'll stay there okay so I can have this space here to put another shot or do whatever I want I can also use this to move the clip up above or below the timeline some people like to do that next here we have the range selector and the best way to explain how the range selector works I can't really show you right here but let's say you are dealing with actors and there's a portion of a clip that you need to change the levels on maybe you need to bring it up got very very quiet one of the actor starts to speak very quietly you don't want to bring up the audio levels for the entire clip just a portion so what you can do with the range selector is tell it okay just select here through here and whatever changes I make it's not going to affect the bount the outside boundaries of this clip but I could tweak the audio levels just for that portion okay that's my best example for what that does the blade tool creates cuts so if I want to take this shot here and I want to cut it into two separate shots I can just tap the B key on my keyboard or I can go up here and go to blade and then I just put my cursor where I want the cut to take place and click and you can see it's now separated into two different Clips next we have the zoom key okay now you can also use this little slide bar down here but this will really go in far so if I want to get down to the nitty-gritty and I want to get on the exact frame that I want this clip to start I could just click right here and the more I do it's going to really zoom in on it so now maybe I want to trim it to exactly one frame in and that's how I would do that next we have the hand button here don't know really many people who actually use this because if you're on a laptop or if you're on a desktop and have a Magic Trackpad you can just use multi-touch to kind of go back and forth other than that it doesn't really play much of a role so personally I almost never use that now let's get to over here on the right hand side and some of the different tools that we have one of the ones I want to go over today this is definitely something that I would normally teach in a more advanced class but I want to talk a little bit about color correction especially a trick that is going to for those of you who use this kind of tool is going to be very very helpful so let's say I want to color correct this clip the way it is right now this is the raw footage it's kind of bland we can brighten up all the different colors here's how you do it go to this little magic wand icon here and you can see what we can do is we can go to show color board and now over here at the top right where I would normally have the inspector I'll show you that in a little bit I can deal with the saturation or the color and there's a couple of different dots here so the there black the gray and the white these are your shadows mid-tones and highlights so you can see that if I play with any of them it changes the overall look of my footage okay sistahs going to warm it up a little bit actually when you warm this up a little bit it looks almost older I can change the mid-tones make those a little bit darker take the highlights get them however I want them to be just give it an overall different look and this one right here is kind of your master it's the global settings so it'll if you want to give the whole shot a real twist if you want to tint it this is one way that you can do it usually though when you use this feature you're going to have to tweak these as well to give you that really perfect look you also can go over here to saturation and have access to the same thing so one of the tricks I always use in my clips that I do is I always up the saturation more than anything I usually deal with the the shadows but let's see how it does here okay so it's really just making certain colors pop if I want to tweak it a little bit you can see right now I'm dealing with the highlights when you up the highlights more than anything I find your sky gets to be that really perfect blue shade the shadows we can see how those and look so now we've got that kind of very interesting look to it okay so we've got that that is one of the key things I want to show you in regards to color alright now here's one other key critical part I want to show you now when you're not here in color mode you're going to have this little button right here which is your inspector now normally on the Mac when you go into the inspector it always it's almost always a lowercase I in a circle for some reason on Final Cut Pro it looks like this icon right here so this is all your different effects that you've got going on so whether you're dealing with color correction or if you're like me you're going to be dealing with stabilization as a drone or a rolling shutter effect as you're doing this and you're adding different effects to different shots especially color correction you're going to find that you're going to have to theoretically you want to make this effect consistent for all of your videos so let's actually move this clip over just so that it's right next to our just so it's right next to the other clips here now right now these shots look completely different and instead of having to go through every single shot and color correct every single shot there is a way that you can apply every effect that's on this clip to the other clips here's how you do it if you were doing a word document and you were going to do this you do copy and paste right and everyone knows copy is command C and paste is command v as in Victor it's very similar but not quite the way you do it is you highlight your clip here so that it's yellow you're going to hit command C on your keyboard and now for whatever reason it's ever so slightly different it's command option V and as soon as I do that you'll see here now this clip has the exact same color match so it really does look very consistent I can do it here too oops sorry I did I hit the wrong key right here so command option V and now this shot there we go has the same color tone to it really handy trick to know command C to tell it what clip you want to use as the base command option V to apply it to other clip okay couple other things I want to go over here let's go over these different options right here okay we're not going to go over every single one of them so we don't have time but we're going to go over the key elements here okay the first one you see here is four different audio and video effects so sometimes you might be working on video and you want to make it look a little different a little funky okay well there's a whole bunch of different ones that come with Final Cut Pro you'll see on my screen here a few that actually don't come with Final Cut Pro I'm going to give you tips on how to get access to those at the end of this class it's a really handy trick so let's say I want to make let's see I find one that looks good let's say I want to give it a little bit of a film grain effect okay well all I have to do is take this and just drop it onto whatever clip I want so now you'll see that that shot has that kind of aged film look to it let's go to the beginning here alright so it adds that little grain to it now of all of them are amazing some of them are just kind of cheesy frankly and we'll go over the extra ones that you can get in a little bit the next one right here very very similar to the way I photo works actually identical or a rather iMovie you can have access to all of your iPhoto library here so you can take photos and just drop them into your project into your storyline okay you can actually use those same hotkeys over here if you like I'm going to delete that shot right now next we have music so if you want to add some background music to your film you can add anything from your iTunes library they also do give you access to up here you'll see Final Cut Pro sound effects so it comes with the program itself but you have access to a whole bunch of different Foley sounds it's just another way of saying sound effects and also here under iLife sound effects you'll find in here mixed in if you organize by time you have access to some generic music okay a lot of these can tend to get overused and one thing to be aware of is that if you take music let's say from iTunes that you've got maybe you saw a second ago song by Beyonce if you take a copy written song and you put it into your video and then upload it to something like let's say YouTube the one thing you should be aware of is that technically speaking you're not really supposed to do that because of copyright laws now I've done it in the past with certain songs and I get a email from YouTube saying we're not going to allow your video to be viewed on a mobile device so you can't view it on an iPhone you can't view it on an iPad other times absolutely nothing I don't get any grief from them at all I recently did a video just of some drone footage just for fun and I used a song by Daniel Powter and no problem not even a notice of any kind and it was fine it can get to be troublesome and by that I mean legally complicated if you make money off of it if you're doing it just for fun a lot of times they'll let it slide but if you're doing it for promotional reasons like if you make a commercial and you use song by let's say Lady gaga you could get in trouble for actually doing that so just please be aware before you go using copyright copyright anew sixth we're going to talk about is transitions so now transitions they have a whole bunch of them here some of them came over from iMovie and there's a whole bunch of new ones too they work the same way that iMovie works at this point if you want to add a transition you just take it and drag it between your two shots and that's it so if I want to cross dissolve I drag it between these two it's going to render it real quick and I hit spacebar and it will transition from one to the other you couldn't really see that because it's rendering we'll talk about that in a little bit just look trick I want to show you about render times T stands for text if you want to add in text whether it's going to be a title or subtitle some sort of a thing you want to have at the bottom you can see here once again we have a whole bunch if I'm here under all whole bunch of different options some of them can be a little funky watch out about getting too crazy with this same thing by the way goes for transitions when kids at work with things like Final Cut Pro and more so iMovie they tend to get really crazy with the transitions and they have things flying and popping out of everywhere it can be very distracting to your viewers so I recommend keeping it at a minimum so for the most part I use some some pretty basic titles nothing too too funky if you want to add a title to just text or to your shot when you go to drag it on you drag it on top of your shot so see how I have a little purple bar there well that's where that shot is going to stick come on sorry oh I picked of course I picked the wrong type of title to use some of these you can layer some you cannot let's do let's do this okay so I can drag this on top of this shot and you see my title is on top of the shot to actually put in the text all I have to do is click here on this little purple bar and now I click over here and my inspector becomes where I can type in text if you want to change things like the font on most of these you can I don't know if you can on every single one I don't believe you can on every one rather you can go here and you see we have a bunch of different options here and you can sort of mix them up a little bit too so let's say you like this platinum look you can choose platinum and then change it from Helvetica to pretty much any font in your computer so you can go crazy with that okay and as you scroll down here of course you'll see all your different text options if you want to align it to the left the right center change up the line spacing tracking etc that's all right there okay let's delete the text and move on to the next one which over here is video generators now you're not going to use this probably a lot it's if you want a background more than anything sometimes if people are doing green screen they'll get into using generators so you'd have a background of some sort that would replace a screen that you're standing in front of we're not going to really go over that today that's more of an advanced class and we'll probably do a video on that in the future now the next one we have here is four themes so this is if you want all of your text and your transitions to kind of have a theme to them you can do it here so for example if you want to use their stock documentary option you'd click on documentary you'd see their video generator for documentary their transitions and their titles you by no means have to stick to this and personally I don't even really recommend it but some people like it and it is there if you want it now you also see over here we have the universal symbol for share so when you're done with your project Final Cut Pro is pretty good as far as having a lot of flexibility what do you want to do you can create a DVD right from here you can create a master file that's the default thing that it does when you're going through this process one thing that's probably worth noting is there is no Save button it is automatically saving every step that I do so if something happens if the power goes out if my computer crashes which almost never happens it seems it will automatically save I'll pick right back up where I left off you can go right from here to YouTube Vimeo Facebook you can convert it to 720p for a Apple device like a iPad 2 as an example Apple devices that run 1080p for example an iPhone 4s or later I believe or you can just tell it where do you want the file to go and create an actual file ok let's go over a couple of other things here let me throw in some music for a second here we'll use some generic music so that this video doesn't get flagged for copyright infringement and I'm going to just zoom in a little bit so you can see here what I'm working on okay go back to arrow now as you're going through and dealing with things like audio you're going to probably want to create transitions and fades now I'm zoomed in right now on this audio because I want to show you how to slowly fade in that music so it's not quite so abrupt if you look over here toward the left-hand side of this clip there's that little dot do you see that there well I'm going to just take that dot and drag it and you'll see it's creating this curve effect and so what that means is this is how long is it going to take to actually get to the real volume so I'm going to do 25 frames right now so that's about one second so when I hit play you'll notice that it's not immediately there let's hit sear okay now you can also create other points where if you want to adjust the audio you can actually mention this when we're talking about the range selector so let's actually just do that right now just so that you have an idea of how this works so I'm going to use the little range selector tool here and just pretend with me if you will that this portion of the clip gets a little too crazy it needs to come down a little bit well with that selected I can put my cursor on this little black bar right here and just drag it down see if I can do that okay and it may be a little difficult for you to see this but what it's actually done is it's automatically transitioned it so it's not just going to suddenly play at 19 decibels lower you're not going to even be able to hear it at that point but it's going to transition down it's also going to transition back to where it was before we started this so if I play it you'll hear what it sounds like okay that was a horrible example but I just want to show you exactly how that feature works now as you're dealing with audio levels here okay you really want your you really want the audio to fall somewhere between negative 12 decibels and negative 6 if it's much more than that it's going to start to distort that's always kind of been the standard as far as where the audio should fall between another thing I want to show you right now which I alluded to earlier was how to find all of the different shortcut keys that have just gone over because that can be a real nightmare to try to remember some of you I'm sure at home writing down on a piece of paper all these different shortcut keys and they are very helpful and here's the easy way that you can access all of them on your keyboard all you have to do is hit option command and the letter K and that will show you your keyboard layout and what all these different Keys do so let's say I'm having trouble remembering what any of these keys actually accomplishes so let's say I can't remember what does the letter e do well I can just click here on e and it'll show you that when I don't use any modifier keys modifier keys would be like command option shift etc it's going to append it to the storyline so it's going to put it at the very end of the storyline whereas if I hold command and hit E it's going to export using default share destination so you can it's a good thing to have access to you might even want to maybe even print this out I don't even know if you can't print it out but it's a good thing to have access to command option K reveals this screen now the next thing I want to talk about has to do with the rendering times now as you add certain types of effects to your shot it's going to need to process that change and that's what we call rendering and in the previous versions of final cut what it would do is you'd have to hit command R and it would go through and it was very painful and it would render each individual shot well one of the big changes in Final Cut Pro 10 and I love this change is it automatically starts to render it if you stop working so you'll notice right now I have absolutely nothing left to render because as I've been sitting here chatting with all of you it's been rendering in the background now here's where you can go to access those settings and this is a good thing to go over go up to Final Cut Pro and go to preferences okay we have four different tabs at the top I want to actually start here at the very beginning which is editing and just make sure that it's the way you like it so for example here's an important one when you import a still image how long do you want that shot to be do you want to be four seconds or longer or less if you're doing a Ken Burns like film you're going to probably want it more than four seconds transitions the default time is one second if you want it longer you can click the little arrow up to go up or down to go down here under playback okay this is what I'm talking about with render at the very top make sure you do this go to check this box that says background render now by default I believe it's actually five seconds and you'll find that there's not a lot of there's not many times where you aren't doing anything for five seconds on your computer so I put mine all the way down to two so that even if I'm taking a quick little break and just grabbing something on my desk it still has time to do something in the background it'll start that render process okay a couple other things here you should probably check out under import just you can check out these different settings here you know organizing it you want to copy the files to the events folder importing keywords side on them you don't really need many of these under destinations this is the share button here so if you want to custom create the different destinations if you want to add some locations you can do that too well everyone before we go I have two other little tips that I would like to give you if you want to jazz up your project and add different generators and backgrounds plugins all sorts of different effects there's two resources I would really like to give to you the first one is a free option it's FCP dot c-- oh you do have to join you have to become a member but they have tons of different forms where people post different plugins that you can download for free also another one these guys saved my but when it comes to using my drone these guys have every effect out there you can imagine if you're creating something a little bit funky maybe a music video something with a lot of action be sure to check out their website it is FCP effects calm everything you can imagine you'll find there well that does it for today I hope you enjoyed this class if you happen to be watching this on YouTube we really do appreciate it if you click that little like button leave us a comment below if you're watching it on our website if you liked it leave us a comment there and please be sure to check out our website and join if you haven't already done so as I've said several times we are a completely free service we teach live and pre-recorded class you can check those all out on PC classes online comm this is david a cox you all have a wonderful day and thanks for tuning in bye-bye

Channel: Tech Talk America

Views: 1,020,351

Keywords: Final Cut Pro X, how to use final cut pro x, final cut pro x tutorial, Tutorial (Industry), Final Cut Pro (Software), final cut pro class, Video Editing Software (Software Genre), editing basics, Editing (Profession), final cut pro 10, final cut pro x, fcpx, tutorial, mac pro, final cut tutorial, editing software, final cut king, green screen effects, final cut x, best video editing software, video editing

Id: nklZhdbP5cw

Length: 36min 2sec (2162 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2014