Final Cut Pro X : Full Introduction Class for Beginners - Import, Edit & Export - FULL TUTORIAL

Hi there it's Ben Halsall and in this introduction to Final Cut Pro we're going to run through how you import, edit, make adjustments and then export out your project in Final Cut Pro. This tutorial is designed to quickly introduce you to Final Cut Pro so we'll be running through things and skipping over some details but you can always refer back to some of my other videos or drop me a question below if you have any questions that pop up. Basically by the end of this video you'll be able to create a project you can upload to YouTube, to Instagram, to other online platforms or that you can export to DVD and you'll have the core skills that you need to do that. So when you want to start a new edit in Final Cut Pro the first thing you'll need to do is make a new library now the library is going to contain all your media or your image files all your audio that you're collecting into Final Cut Pro to put into your project so to put into your project edit timeline. So I've got a Library up here and this is where you'll see your Libraries set up and if you don't see the same screen layout as me or you've adjusted it in Final Cut Pro then just go to Window > Workspaces > Default and that will reset the default layout. You can see here that if we flip between the different workspace layouts we can always jump back to the default layout which means that we're all looking at the same thing here. We'll bring up things like Effects and Transitions as we move through this tutorial. So essentially the first place we're going to start is right up here on the top left where we're looking at our Library. So we might see a list of different Library projects down here, you can have more than one Library open at a time although I'd recommend that you try to keep that to a minimum because every time you open up Final Cut Pro it will read those Libraries and it's also not a good idea to store lots of edits or lots of different things that you're working on in one Library, to keep them separate. So every time I start something new in Final Cut Pro I will close the library I'm working on. So I'm right-clicking and closing this library and we're gonna go ahead and create brand new Library. The other reason for doing this is that Final Cut Pro in its default Library when you kind of first fire up the software will store the library on your hard drive in the Movies folder in your home folder and that's not always the easiest place to find stuff. So, when you're first starting out you might want to save stuff to the Desktop and move it around later. So that's exactly what we're gonna do we're gonna go to File > New and Library and we're gonna create a new Library called "Introduction to Final Cut Pro". We will press save, and that saved our library. Now we're not create a new timeline or anything like that we just basically created a Library where we can start to import media. So let's go ahead and do that so if you've put a camera card into the SD card slot or plugged in your camera into Final Cut Pro then the import window should pop up. So here we're going to click on Import Media and there's a couple of different places you can access this Import Media window from so one is File > Import and Media the other is the little arrow to import media which disappears once we've actually imported some media. Now we're gonna to go ahead and jump into this Mexico 2017 folder. We're just gonna grab a few project files from here. So once we're in here we can move through these folders and make selections for clips that we want to import. So I'm just gonna grab a selection of clips here by holding down the SHIFT key to select a list of clips. I can also remove clips in those selections by holding down the COMMAND key which is just to the left of your SPACEBAR key and we can remove Clips from that selection if we have clips that we don't want to import. And then we can go ahead and import those, now before we import them and we're just going to have a look at some of the options on the right-hand side here. So we're going to add them to an existing event I'm so basically Final Cut Pro by default puts today's date on the event or we can create a new Event if we want to add them to a specific Event. Now this new Event would be contained in the existing Library that we have open or another library that we have open. We'll stick to the add to existing Event you don't really need to change that for the moment. At the moment I've got leave files in place selected but I'd recommend that when you're starting out Final Cut Pro that you copy those clips the Library it's going to make moving your Library files around a lot easier. And also one thing you want to think about when you're creating a Library and saving it especially if you're not working on your own computer. So that might be if you're a student college or university you might be working on the college computer. You want to make sure that you know where those projects are saved and also be aware that the tech guys that setup those computers might wipe the best tops or the Desktops might be set up on a network which is going to make editing slow. So I would recommend buying an external hard drive to edit with, particularly if you're working on a college computer, that you can save your projects to otherwise you're gonna find either editing slow or somebody's going to wipe your files in your project from the computer. So keep things backed up which means keeping a couple of copies of the same project and then also make sure that you know where your projects are stored. Now these options down here we're not going to assign any roles or any keywords for the moment and then under Transcoding this is a useful option. If you're working on an older laptop then working with Proxy media is a really useful thing to do and creating optimized media is useful to do as well. It means that you can move through your footage a lot more easily, um, with optimized media rather than with the original footage. So we've got our selection we've set up our settings here and you can basically copy the settings that I've got on this right-hand side and then we'll do import selected which is going to import those files into Final Cut Pro X. So now we can see little bits of the interface coming alive. So on the top left here we have our library and with smart collections and the events. That's what this little starred folder is and then just to the right of that we have the browser which allows us to move through and scrub through our footage. I'm just going to turn scrubbing back on so on the right in the middle here we have scrubbing and audio scrubbing I'll leave audio scrubbing off otherwise we're going to get lots of little bits of sound popping up. And so now when we hover over these clips we're going to see a preview, of the clips in our viewer in the middle here. So we don't have an edit timeline yet and that's really what the the next thing we're going to go ahead and do. So once we've got our Clips up here we can click here to create a new project obviously once you've created a project timeline then you won't see this so you can also access File > New and Project up here. So the project is your timeline essentially and that's where you're going to edit and create your final video. So we'll call this edit "San Pancho" which is the location and we'll leave it at 1080p, 1920 by 1080 and 30 frames per second. And we can also use the automatic settings for our video edit now if you're working on a slower computer you might want drop down your format to 720p. It's still going to give you a good high quality resolution depending on what you're editing but it will mean your computer runs a lot faster. Working in 1080p and certainly in 4k a 5k is gonna really challenge some older Macs so if you're working on a 2011, 2012 laptop to edit HD with then you notice things slowing down first of all try proxy edits and then maybe drop the resolution down which is going to make rendering our effects and other things a bit quicker. Normally you'll want to work in 1080p though which is what this footage is shot at. And we're rendering Apple ProRes 422 which is fine and it's a good quality codec to render in and then our audio is going to be stereo or 48 kilohertz. So we don't need to change anything here if you want to you can just use the automatic settings and set the Edit based on the first clip so we'll click OK here and one of the things say about the resolution that you set your project up at is the latest stage you can always drop that resolution so if you want a smaller file to upload or to share online and it's taking a long time to upload your footage you can always drop that resolution down so it's sometimes better to edit in full HD if you can and then drop the resolution down when you come to uploading so the first thing we can do is drop a clip onto the timeline so we'll just grab this first one and you can see we've begun our edit so now when we've had we have clips on the timeline essentially this is the edit that when we hit export that we'd be exporting so we can drag down a few different clips and when you're dragging down Clips is a couple of options here so we can drag Clips down to the end of our edit or we can drop them in between clips and you'll see with the magnetic timeline that the rest the timer will kind of bump out of the way depending on where you want to drop that when we see this white icon here it means we're going to replace that clip so normally when you're starting out editing you probably won't want to use the replace option you'll want to just be dropping the clips in place on the timeline now with three clips on the timeline we can begin to edit and trim those clips and kind of think about how we modify those clips on the timeline so the first thing to note is that we can highlight a clip and then using the backspace key we can delete it and that will remove it from the timeline and everything will slide back so you can see if I do edit and undo then we've put that clip back in if we press Delete or forward delete on the keyboard it's going to remove that clip that it's going to leave a slug in place so it's going to keep the timing of those subsequent clips but leave a slug in place there I'm going to do command + Z or had it undo again and so we can select any one of the clips that we have here and you can see the scrubbing is meaning we're kind of jumping around here in the viewer so I'm going to turn that off for the moment so things aren't flashing around on screens quite so much it's going to help us to focus on things so once you've got the timeline set up have got a few things that are worth mentioning here so what we see in the timeline here is this red playhead we can move that around okay if we count to the middle here we can hit the play button and it's going to play our video and you can see them some sound popping up here but I've got it turned down so that it doesn't get noisy behind my voice if we press the pause button it's going to pull us that video and obviously we can drag back to a different spot in the video as well so that's how to play through your timeline how to move around your timeline quickly we can also zoom in and out of the timeline now the zoom controls across here on the right hand side so if I press this little thumbnail I can increase the height of my Clips which is useful sometimes as you're editing into an audio track to see the audio waveforms we can also change the view options so I can't remember which is the default option but you might see something different to mine but we can move through these different view options to see just the audio to see audio video and in different mixes or to see just a very thin strip of track which is useful if you're working with a lot of layers of video so I'm gonna use this fourth click display option and as I mentioned before we can increase the height we can also zoom in and out of the timeline here as well now if you're using a trackpad you can pinch on the trackpad to zoom in and out as well if you're just using a regular keyboard you can use command plus or minus and it will zoom in on the playhead and we also have we zoom in then the scroll bars for scrolling around I read it as well and we also have the the hand tool which I find super useful which in here in our tools on the Left allows us to just kind of drag around the timeline without moving Clips around so we can't select a clip with the hand it's kind of a nice non-destructive way of working and then we can jump back to the selection tool when we want to select parts of our clip another useful shortcut here is Shift + Zed which allows you to zoom to the whole timeline so basically here we can zoom to the entire timeline and that's going to allow us to see the entirety of our edit whether we've got three Clips as we do here or 100 and clips in our edit we're going to see the entire timeline so the main tool you're going to use is the Select tool here as you start out and one thing it allows you to do is to trim the clip so if we play through here we've got quite a long clip at the beginning of this and we can kind of see what he's doing after maybe two or three seconds so I think just when he puts that meat onto the the barbecue here we're gonna trim to that edit point so I'm going to position my playhead and what's important here is that once that goes on so I'm looking for the drop of the chicken onto the barbecue or the the meat and once that's on there then I'm gonna make sure I've got snapping turned on so this is highlighted blue here on the right hand side and then I can come across my the out point of this clip and you can see I get this symbol which indicates that when I click now and drag back it's going to select the out point of that clip and you can see that changing on the left hand side in my viewer so now I can trim back and I can trim at the beginning of the clip so here now we've got some source and obviously the cut here shouldn't be to the logs we're gonna grab this clip at the end back and we'll just cut in when he's going to grab the other piece of meat so he's gonna put one down and then pick one up and we've got a nice little edit there that flows quite nicely so from a videoing point of view one thing you want to make sure when you're videoing is that you've got a nice coverage so I've got a wide shot here and then it closed up and then also close up with the flames as well which I might cut in there at some point so we can trim the ends of our clips and you can see that when I'm trimming we kind of get this big black space on the left-hand side which will disappear if you do shift and Zed it's gonna remove this but essentially when we trim from the beginning the beginning of the clip is now here it's just expanding this space to help us visually so things aren't jumping around too much so if I drag from the end here on this clip you can see in the viewer I'm seeing this preview of what's going to be the out point of that first clip or I'm seeing the preview of what's going to be the end point of that next clip so I can decide where I want it to cut to as I'm editing here so I'm just going to hit shift Mazzone again so that's the basics of editing one thing to know when we're editing here is that we reading in a nonlinear editor but it's also non-destructive as well so we're not affecting these original Clips these remain intact and what you can see up here in the viewer these orange bars is the selection that we have on the timeline so those are the bits of the clip that are being used on the timeline so if we jump ahead here and I'm going to turn the scrubbing back on here now so on the right hand side you can see we can make a selection of a clip as well up here so I can drag in these yellow bars and there's some shortcuts we can use for this as well so if I hovering over part of the clip I can press o to mark an out point and you can see that yellow selection moves or I can press I to mark an in-point and we can use those in the browser here but also down on the timeline so now if I click and drag instead of dragging down the whole clip as I did before I'm just dragging it down that selection of that clip so a couple other things that we'll run through in this quick intro so we can make selections up here and we can drag them down to the timeline and we can also trim our clips on the timeline too and then we can use the play button here or the spacebar to play through our clip out of space but we'll also pause our clip as well we can move around with the playhead and that's really the kind of fundamentals of moving Clips around the timeline we also know that we can delete Clips we can add other Clips as well as connected clips too so for instance if we needed the audio from these guys talking but we wanted to cut to a picture of a wave above them then we can drop a clip in a layer above so you can see now we've got a connected clip up there and I'm going to zoom out so I can come up here to zoom out so I can see the end of that clip or I can use commander - or pinch on the trackpad and then I can trim that click down and this is what's called a cutaway in Final Cut Pro so we might have some narrative from these guys then we cut to the wave breaking and then we cut back to them and then what you'll see is when we move Clips around that connected clip is connected to this specific clip so when we move the dog video here for instance to the end the clip moves with that other clip so we can stack up our layers and this is also the same way that we can add audio to our edit so I've got a few audio tracks up here that I can use so I'm going to jump into my audio and then we'll go into sound effects and none of these quite match I've got water ocean pier that'll work so if I drag this down now you can see I've got this sound effect below that so that could be a music track or another audio track that you add below your clip so if you don't want the audio from your original video to interfere with the audio track you're adding so if it's a music video for instance then we can drop down the audio levels for these clips here so just by hovering over this middle bar we can drop down those audio levels so now by going to minus infinity which you can see there in the little black box that's popped up we've basically removed the audio and we just have the audio from that water ocean peer track so we can search in here as well oh yeah we've got a beach with children track so I can delete those clips in the same way and when you're deleting a connected clip what you'll have noticed is that when I delete it it doesn't affect the timeline duration is the connected clips behave slightly differently so let's drag this one down so now you can see we've got our audio meters here and if you want to see these audio meters a bit larger we can click here and it will pop up on the right hand side you've got quite a low sound mix there just kind of a background track we've got our video playing if we want to cut the audio track here then we could use another tool which we haven't mentioned yet which is the Blade tool and we can just slice there it's going to create a slug to connect that second track to and then I'm going to grab a selection tool and just delete both of those so now we have a very short edit of these different clips but that's basically the nuts and bolts of how to move things around technically in Final Cut Pro on the timeline and essentially we have something that's ready here that we can export so one thing that we can also add in here as well before we export is some effects and perhaps also some transitions so if we want to add transitions we can come to our transitions across on the right hand side so we're looking at skimming and snapping and we also have transitions here on the right hand side so the default transition that a lot of people use will be the cross dissolve and so if we go into zoals we can see that and we can drag that onto our edit points so essentially we're dragging the dissolve on to the Edit point so once we've got that on there we can play through that and you can see it dissolves from one clip to another I tend to try not to use too many dissolves but they can be useful in some parts of an edit we also have some other transitions that we can use so for instance a drop in transition and so if we watch this back this drop in is happening and this drop in effect has a little bit of smoke with it as well so it's not really working here but you can see it kind of has a puff of smoke that drops in when it plays back okay to delete a transition which we're going to do with this one it's not quite the right one we can highlight it and press the backspace key and then we can choose other transitions as well so for instance a page curl transition will turn the page and then when we use that it will have some options up here in the inspector now if you don't see the inspector at the moment just go to window showing workspace and inspector and you'll see that inspector popping up on the right-hand side so here with this effect we can change which direction it's coming from or we can have a custom direction which will mean that we can let's just bring this halfway through we can change the the way that it's turning so you can see here we switch to preset to custom then we can change the direction in which that page is turning as well we can also change the radius of the page turn as well so we can have a bigger radius or a smaller radius and then we can also change the color in the background so we've got a few different options for some of the different effects or transitions and that will pop up in the inspector and the inspector is also useful for working on Clips so you can see when I click on a clip here I have things like the transform options so the scale you need to increase the size your footage the crop and the distort so that's how to add transitions just by dragging them from the transitions here or you can highlight an edit point like this and then just double click and it will add that transition in there you can see that's padded in there now and again with things like the push we're going to get options for left to right top to bottom up there in the inspector so the other thing we want to mention here is the effect so if we jump into the effects panel on the right hand side here we'll go for a basic color effect so we'll colorize one of our clips so let's drag this onto the ocean picture and you can see that we get this colorize effect here and again if we highlight it we get some options up in the inspector for mapping things to different colors so you can see we can get some cool effects here on our video is starting to look a bit psychedelic now so we're basically mapping the blacks here and the whites hitter to different colors and we can increase or decrease the intensity of that color adjustment depending on what we want the main point being is that add an effect even something like a blur we could grab a Gaussian blur drag it onto a clip and then it's gonna add that blur in there so for something like a blur we can also do things like keyframing our Clips as well so if we want to begin with a blur and then come into focus we can add keyframes for this effect so you can see up here in the inspector for the blur we've got the amount of blur that we're gonna add we don't need to change the horizontal or vertical blur boost or anything like that and we can add a keyframe partway through our clip so I've moved the playhead partway through our clip and then clicked on the amount there and then I'm going to bring my clip my playhead back to the beginning so importantly I've got my clip selected and then I can add another keyframe and then on that second keyframe so at the moment I haven't changed the blur amount I've just added a couple of keyframes on the second keyframe which I can get to by clicking this little arrow so you can see I get a little forward and backwards arrow and I want to come to the last keyframe and then remove that blur so essentially what we're getting here now is blurred and then pulled into focus and then some transitions we've got some color effects in there some page turns in our transitions and a variety of different video effects in there so we've covered quite a lot in this short tutorial introduction to Final Cut Pro 10 the last thing we're going to do here is just have a look at how we export out our video so we're going to go to the export button I'm up here at the top so make sure you've got this sequence selected so that means having the playhead active or making sure that you have it selected in the project here then you can see if we select the project timeline that we're editing we get some information about that project up here as well so let's go ahead and export so we're going to click on the export button up here although we can go to file and share up here as well so the button on the top right is called the share button and you can see here that when we hit the share button we get some options for sharing to a DVD obviously you need a DVD burner on your computer which most new Macs don't have but you can still buy them and we can export out the master file which is what we're going to do we can also export out to YouTube to Vimeo to other sites I prefer to use the uploader for these sites they seem a bit more reliable than the built in uploader from within Final Cut Pro 10 that's my my preference I'm normally exporting out using the master file option here so we'll click on Master File and we've got some information about our video the duration of it and then also and we can change the settings and actually that's one thing I should mention before we export it out so I'm just going to cancel out of here briefly when we are working on our video in the middle here we see the timecode so the duration of our of our final video so you can see this 2 seconds and 8 frames that we have here in yellow is the selection of the first clip and you'll see that change as you select each clip that number is changing so most of my Clips here around 2 seconds and then that's over the complete duration of this project which is 14 seconds long so a pretty sure edit that we have here if you have something that's a minute long there'll be another number in front of there so the time code that we see here in the middle is in hours minutes seconds and frames so let's go back to the export button and back to the master file so in here we are exporting out this project we'll go into the settings and here we've got some options for exporting out video and audio which will export out a QuickTime movie either in the current Apple ProRes codec or if you're uploading more usefully the h.264 codec plug-in to YouTube or to Instagram then you actually need to change this to computer to export out this mpeg-4 movie format so I tend to export out all my videos in this mpeg-4 movie format and I think at the moment it seems like it's rendering more quickly on YouTube when I do export out the mpeg-4 you can see the the size estimate of my video is going to be thirty five point eight megabytes and the resolution and as I mentioned before we can drop down the resolution here if we want to so we can save out a lower resolution version which is really useful if you need to upload something quickly to share privately with someone online when you want to get a client to review a video or something like that so the full resolution we have here and then these lower resolutions that we can also export out so we'll stick with the full resolution and then we'll press next Final Cut Pro is going to ask us where we want to save it and if you don't see if you don't see this bigger window where we can navigate through our folders on the left hand side then you just need to click this little arrow on the right hand side but we're gonna say that to the desktop we can also access the desktop from this list down here too I'm going to leave this in the expanded view and then we're going to go ahead and click Save so now that's exporting out if we come to the top left we can see the progress that share so I can open up the sharing option here and you can see that it's sharing out and also one thing that did happen while we were working on our edit before was that when we added effects or transitions Final Cut Pro was rendering and if you need to see the progress of the bigger render then you can come up into this background task window as well to see how things are rendering out so once that's disappeared from this list we'll come to our desktop so I'm using the command and the tab key to move between my applications here so holding down command and tapping tab will move me to the finder and I'm going to click go I'm going to go to my desktop and in here you can see we've got the final exported video if we double click on it it's going to open in QuickTime Player and we can play this through so you can see we've got a nice good quality video that we can upload with some crazy effects and transitions some beautiful people and very cute dog so that's the end of this tutorial this video will be perfect to upload I hope that's all been useful information for you for running through from importing to editing and then exporting out your video there's certainly a lot more to cover in Final Cut Pro 10 but I wanted to give you this quick intro if you have any questions just shoot me an email and I'll either have a video that I've already made that I'll send you a link to or I'll create a new video if the questions are a good one that I think will apply to other people as well so thanks for watching I hope to see you on the next tutorial

Channel: Ben Halsall: Final Cut Pro X & Adobe Tutorials

Views: 73,078

Keywords: Final Cut Pro X Beginner Tutorial, full introduction to final cut pro, full intro class, introduction to final cut pro x, learn final cut pro x, final cut pro 10.4, final cut pro 10.3, final cut pro 2018, final cut pro february 2018, Final Cut Tutorials, final cut pro x tutorials

Id: L42qR0dx6vM

Length: 30min 28sec (1828 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2017