Final Cut Pro X Tutorial 2021 // THE ULTIMATE 30 MINUTE GUIDE!!

this right here is the ultimate final cut pro tutorial let's get into it [Music] hey guys my name is anthony and in today's video i'm going to be showing you guys how to create awesome videos in final cut pro if you're here you're probably a beginner and i know it might seem a little intimidating but i'm gonna teach you how to become an expert with this software so that hopefully by the end of this video you will feel a lot better about using final cut pro alright so let's jump into final cut pro and here we are on the screen if it's your first time opening it it may look similar to this if not i'll explain so let's get a few things straight before we start actually creating a library and editing a video so first things first is you're going to want to get familiar with the windows so as you can see on the left side here where it says open library this is where your libraries and events are going to be next to that is going to be the clips and since there are no clips you don't see anything in there yet this right here in the center is your viewer so any video clips that you are looking at we're editing you're going to see in this screen over here is the inspector so this is where you can make all kinds of edits to your video like color correction or audio edits anything of that nature will be done over here right over here this big empty blank space this is your timeline this is where all the editing happens so this is going to be one of the crucial parts of final cut pro that i'm going to teach you and next to the timeline you're going to see the effects and transition panel this is where you obviously make all those edits so that's like a basic rundown of the different windows now you can open and close these windows up here so as you can see i can close out the inspector or i can close out the libraries and so if you have two closed you can't close the other so in this situation i can't close out the timeline but if i open up the libraries i can then close up the timeline so basically you're probably wondering why would you want to do this this is going to simplify editing for you so that you don't have all of these windows in your face while you're making your edits because sometimes that can be a little much especially if you're working on a smaller computer all right so now let's move on to step number one of any final cut pro editing process is creating the library so unless you already have library you can work within one that you've already created but in this case we don't have one because you're new to final cut pro so we're going to go up to edit down to new and down to library so now that the window is opened up i'm going to create the library as you can see you can name it here and you want to choose the location where you're going to save it in my case i'm going to save it to the movies folder on my mac and we're going to call it final cut pro tutorial and i accidentally made the eye uppercase there we go now it's looking good final cut pro tutorial we're going to save that to our movies folder and there we go now we have loaded our final cut pro library so as you can see it creates an event here for you within that library events are ways to basically categorize different uh sets of video clips some people just create one library and then they just work out of that one library i wouldn't recommend doing that i like to create several different libraries if you have a library that's like a thousand gigabytes i mean that's really crazy so i would just create a series of libraries for your different needs like for my youtube channel i have like 11 different libraries that i've worked from and i usually once the library gets to like 400 500 gigabytes i then move on to the next library so that's like how i do it um but you can do it however you want so this event right here we're going to name test so i just did a hard click on it by default it's just the date but i like to actually give it a name so we're going to call it test and by clicking this arrow right here you can actually start importing media into the library and into the event that's within the library and we're going to do that in a second here but i want to show you the different ways that you can import video so obviously by clicking this arrow or you can go up to file down to import and then over to media and that is another way that you can import media into your library now for the sake of this video we're going to hit the arrow here and it's going to open up the media import window so in this window is where you can import pretty much any media you want not even just video you can import photos you can import audio you can import all types of things into this window um one of the things i like to do on the side here is down at the bottom now this is just me but i'm just sharing it in case you want to know is you can click close this window after starting import i like to leave that unchecked and the reason why is is because if i'm importing multiple different video clips from different areas on my computer every time i import them if i don't have if i have this checked it's going to close the media import window um and i find that to be annoying so i just uncheck it but it's totally up to you on what you want to do with that also another thing here is you want to create proxy media proxy media is going to take your large 4k files that most cameras capture nowadays and it's going to shrink those files down so that you can edit them easier within final cut without having a lot of lag so this is great if you have a mac that is kind of old maybe a few years old like my mac is a 2017 um it's still great it's very fast but i just find that working with proxy media makes the whole entire experience much smoother so i would recommend turning that on i have it on pro res proxy um h.264 will work too i believe if you use h.264 it'll make your files smaller so that way the proxy files are even smaller than the prores proxy okay so another thing too is up here in the files area you can either copy the files to the library so you can have them on your mac in like another folder and then you can have those same files in final cut pro i like to do that personally because then i have like two copies of the files one in the editing software one outside of the editing software so that's up to you um or you can leave the files in place and final cut pro will work from that folder in which your video files are in now keep in mind if you do that and you have like the files on an external drive and then you try to open up that library none of the files are going to show up if they're on the external drive it'll just show like a question mark and it it'll be like where are my files it's because the files are not on the computer so just keep that in mind that's why i like to copy to library that is pretty much the basics of this media import window and the settings that you might want to have i just wanted to go over that because that's very important but now we're going to find the video clips and to be honest with you i don't know what i'm going to edit yet so let me find some cool video clips and get those imported in here so that i can show you how this works okay guys so i'm back and i found the video clips that i want to import into final cut pro they're actually these clips right here one two and three and honestly i'm gonna do this fourth one too so we're gonna do these four clips and if you're new to mac there are really awesome keyboard shortcuts on this computer that you must know in order to be an expert at using any of the software on these computers you could import each of these one at a time or you could select the four clips that you want the way that i do it is i hold down the command key and then i select the four clips that i want another way to do this is select the very bottom clip in the row and then select shift and then select the last clip that you want in the row and it'll select those four clips so that's just a little keyboard shortcut for you guys um and in here we can scrub through and watch the video clips you can even hit the play button here and just to make sure that you're importing the right stuff so now that we've selected those four clips whoops i just unselected them we're gonna select them again there and then i'm gonna hit import selected and now if i x out of the media import window if i go up to this circle here this circle is going to show you what tasks are being done in final cut pro so if you're importing media this is where you're gonna go to see if that media has been imported or not another thing that this window is going to show you is the rendering how far the rendering has came along um the exporting so this window is really everything like any task that's being done you're gonna see here you can actually start editing in final cut pro before the clips are fully imported into the software um it's super cool uh just keep in mind that the software may not have had time to create the proxy media so if i select proxy here you can see this clip is going to show missing proxy um because it just hasn't created the media yet so if i go back to optimize slash original i'm going to see my clip now speaking of that this view area here is going to give you a lot of good editing information so speaking of what we just did i want to show you that tab this is the view tab this is where you're obviously going to switch between proxy and original media in here you can also view different video angles so final cut pro is a tool where you can import multiple different video angles sync them up and then there is where you'd be able to see all those different angles that is super cool um and i've used that before but we're not going to go over that in today's video i actually have a video on that if you're interested definitely check out my channel i just want to show you that so now we're going to go back to the clips here and we're going to start to edit them so we want to create a project right here you can create a project from the timeline if you don't have one created or you can go up to file and down to new and over to project so there's also a keyboard shortcut you can do command n that will also allow you to create a new project so we're going to select that and then we're going to call this test project select ok and now we've got our project created so i'm going to double click on that and now as you can see the timeline is open and you can start editing so i'm going to actually close out my effects window here and my inspector and i'm just going to focus on dragging in the clips that i want to edit so one thing that you can do is you can either select what portion of the clip you want to edit inside of the events and libraries window and then you can drag that into the timeline or you can drag the entire clip into the timeline as a whole and edit it within the timeline and cut bits and pieces of it out i'm the type of person that likes to do it this way if you're if you like to do it the other way you can do it whichever way works best for you but this is how i like to do it and i just find it to be a little bit easier i don't know that's just me but we're gonna go through and cut this clip down so i'm just gonna quickly scrub through it and as you can see i'm not doing anything with the drone i'm just hovering there so honestly we can the part where i'm just hovering and then right where we start to move forward toward the home i'm going to cut that whole beginning piece out by hitting command b command b that'll cut the clip in half as you just saw and then i can delete the first section of the clip now that's gone and if i start here and i hit the space bar it'll start playing the clip and as you can see it starts really nicely it comes right into the house but eventually this ends so i want to scrub through to where it ends there it is back up here a little bit and there is the ending of that clip so i'm going to press command b and now that clip this right here that i've highlighted that is a edited clip now that clip is now cut down so that's good now we can go through the rest of this long clip and cut it up even further so as you can see when i come out of the house here i'm gonna hit command b so you're getting the the flow of it here i'm just going through finding where the clip ends so right there's where it ends hit command b and i just keep going through and and cutting up different parts of this long clip so that is the very first thing that i would do with final cut pro is i would get in here start cutting up your clips and start putting things together in the timeline before you color cracked or do anything else and as you can see it's as easy as clicking and dragging into the timeline and then cutting up exactly the way that you need to cut it up now if you do need to do more precise cuts you can zoom in to the timeline with your trackpad you can zoom in just like you would on a website or you can go up to the little film tool here in the corner and if you select that you can actually now zoom in and out of the timeline as well as making the thumbnails within the timeline much larger or much smaller so you can really set it to however you want and these right here in the middle these are clip display options so how they'll look in the timeline like if you have audio under the clip so like this is drone video so you're not recording with a microphone when you take drone video so there was audio under these clips i could actually make that audio appear bigger than the actual thumbnail of the video so if i was doing like really crazy like fine tune adjustments with the audio um and it needed to be perfect then i could adjust that here but since there is no audio in these clips i really don't need to see an audio part in the clip there so i actually just turned that off so i'm gonna go out of there i'm gonna zoom into this a little bit and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna throw more clips in the timeline and when i come back from doing that we're going to start color correcting and adding some transitions and effects i'm also going to show you guys how to do text and how to add your own audio tracks below the video tracks okay guys so we're back and before we get into the rest of the video i want to tell you guys real quick about tubebuddy tubebuddy is a youtube seo tool that helps you grow your youtube channel i've actually used it here on this channel and i have seen amazing results from it it helps you find the right titles the right tags it helps you with thumbnails it helps you with all of that and you even get access to 25 000 free royalty free songs through the member perks i definitely would recommend you guys check it out i have a link in the description below that takes you directly to their website where you can see all types of information including the pricing you also get access to a free version of tubebuddy so definitely go down there and check it out and as you guys can see here we've got the clips in the timeline i've cut them up so now what i want to do is i want to start color correcting so i'm kind of showing you guys how i do things in like the order i do them and you know everybody edits different but at the end of the day this is kind of like showing you guys a little bit of everything that the software has to offer so if you're a beginner you are definitely in the right place so let's get into here and start color correcting so what we want to do is we want to open up the inspector and i'm going to close out this section of the screen over here with the libraries and the clips because we're done with that and now we can get really focused on just color correcting and i'm going to show you guys how you can color correct one clip and apply that same correction to the rest of the clips in the timeline this will make your life so much easier if you're trying to keep your video consistent so let's do this let's color correct so as you can see in here there's three different options there's this film strip there's this color area this is your color correction and then there's this little eye right here this just gives you information about the clip so in here is where we're really going to want to pay attention to for this part of the video but before we get into that i want to show you the video inspector a little bit this kind of just gives you um information about the clip itself and you can adjust the transform the crop all that stuff from here there's actually a much easier way to do it i never really use these up here um if you want to adjust the opacity you can adjust that here as well um you can also go down here to stabilize your video clips stabilization with final cut pro works insanely well and if you're interested in learning all about that i have a whole entire video on that on the channel um rolling shutter 2 it also has tools for that so if you have some rolling shutter going on you can correct that with final cut pro for the most part their correction tools are really amazing especially the stabilization i use this a lot if we go up to color correction here we can adjust the saturation and we can also adjust the colors like really precisely with this tool really the only thing that i do here is adjust the warmth so i bring this over to the orange here and then i bring it up just a little bit like literally the tiniest amount because if you brought it up a lot oh it makes your clip look really weird so we don't want a lot of that uh just a little bit and then if we go over to saturation we can now play with these toggles here this is kind of like gonna adjust everything whereas these are more fine-tuned adjustments i'm not gonna lie i usually raise this one like all the way up um now for a lot of cameras this would look really bad so i don't recommend doing this the only reason why i do this is because i shoot in d log so my video footage almost looks black and white without it like here it is off it almost looks black and white so literally bringing this all the way up for me it looks good but for you it probably will look really bad if you're not shooting in d log so don't do that adjust it to exactly what looks good not too much saturation you don't want to overdo it this would be overdoing it that looks bad so you really want to watch how much saturation you're using exposure can actually help you too like i shoot in d log so i like to play with this i like to bring the blacks up a little bit so less blacks and then lower the mid tones here and it kind of creates like deeper shadows um and i i just like the look of it it looks really like deep and i just like how it feels and then this one here is for exposure highlights i usually just raise that a little bit to add some brightness to this but there we go i've basically color corrected this clip and it looks really good um so from here i'm going to copy this and i'm going to apply this to every single other clip so what you want to do on your keyboard is press command c or go up to file down i'm sorry not file go up to edit down to copy and you can do it that way as well now what you want to do is click and drag to select every single clip in the timeline except for the one you just color corrected make sure that this isn't selected too because then you'll apply that edit over the original edit and then your it'll just look really bad so we want to just apply this to every other clip in the timeline so what we want to do is we want to go up to edit and you do not want to hit paste if you hit paste it will not do what you want it to do you want to go down to paste attributes paste attributes don't hit paste so hit paste attributes and in here you can now select what you want to paste so i want to paste the color corrections which is called color board now you can also paste things like position rotation scale crop distort you can paste all those things from other clips but that doesn't apply here we just want the color corrections so i'm going to hit paste and now if we go through each clip is color corrected now as you can see sometimes it doesn't look good so you might want to go through and like adjust the different color corrections because the lighting for this clip was different than the lighting for this clip and i feel like this looks a little too dark so i'm gonna raise the the middle tone here of the exposure and that actually fixes a lot of our problems i'm gonna go through and do that here as well so it's really you know editing is all about going through that actually looks pretty good so i'm not gonna mess with it but editing is about going through and just like you know editing making those fine tune adjustments so now we've done color correcting now we can move on to transitions so like i said this video is just a basic run down so we're not going to go through and like apply all these complex transitions i won't bore you to death with that but i do want to show you how to access the transitions so over here there is a little butterfly looking thing you press that that is going to open up your transition window so you can select all to see all of the transitions in that you have including the ones that you've downloaded from like third parties so like plug-ins um but for the sake of this video we're just gonna use the most generic transition that there is and it's called cross dissolve so i can scrub over it and see what it looks like it's just really a basic fade but all these transitions work the same so what i'm about to show you with cross dissolve is literally the same throughout the entire transitions in the software like the same so don't worry we're going to drag this in to the very first clip here so as you can see you can go in and drag it wherever you want in between any clips that you want i'm just going to drop it there and now you can leave it as it is and watch it to see if it looks how you want it to look or you can adjust it so that if you want it to be shorter you can make it shorter if you want it longer you can make it longer so literally it this is like exactly how it works with all the other transitions now say you have one transition that you want to apply to every single clip in your timeline you can do that very easily what you want to do is select every single clip in the timeline like we did with the color correction and copying and pasting that what we want to do is we want to go to the transition that we want to apply so literally any of these transitions but for the sake of this video we're going to do cross dissolve again and we're going to double click and that will apply that transition to every clip that was selected within the timeline you can see it's done it to every single clip and it just makes your life easier if you're just trying to do a bunch of generic edits now i know my drone footage looks horribly distorted so i actually downloaded a third party plug-in to final cut pro to deal with this and if i go right next to this butterfly if i click these two screens here that's going to open up the effects panel these are all your video effects in here i actually can search for different effects so i'm going to search the one that's called mavic 2 that's for my distortion here so to apply any of these effects to any of your clips in the timeline you simply just click and drag the effect in just like i'm doing here i'm just going to go through and drag this effect into every single video clip because every single video clip is horribly distorted so now that i've done that i've fixed the distortion in all my clips if you're interested in figuring out how to do that yourself i have a whole video on that on my channel but yeah guys things are looking really good with this project we've got transitions we've got color corrections we've even got an effect to deal with my distortion um so now what we're going to do is we're going to add some text to this and after that add some music and then we've got a project that we built from scratch here so what i'm going to do now that i'm done with the video effects and transitions is i'm just going to close that out i'm also going to close out the inspector since we're done with that and i'm going to reopen our libraries panel here because this isn't the only area for clips this is also where you're gonna find your text and generators so in here if i go over to this box with the t this is where the text is gonna be located so in here i can go down to um or i can go up to here where it says titles and in titles is where all your text is going to be including the third party plugins that you may have downloaded to final cut generators same thing generators are like solid backgrounds or you know different elements for your clips i also have a bunch of third-party generators that i downloaded let's add some text here so this is the most basic text that you can get with final cut pro this is just like what comes with it but it it's kind of nice especially for beginners you know it's not too complex and you can just drag it in just like i did you can drag in multiple text boxes throughout the video if you wanted to for the sake of this video i'm just going to use one just for the title here and i'm going to edit this so that it doesn't say custom 3d now i can double click it and i can just start typing in here or i can open up the inspector and go over to the t inside of the inspector or i'm sorry not the t the lines and i can go in here and type what i want it to say so there's multiple ways that you can do this i'm going to type in greyhawk scottsdale because that's where this video clip is from and in here i can adjust the font and i'm going to go down to something cool like futura and adjust the size by dragging this thing down and if i select this plus in the center here i can actually drag this anywhere i want inside of the video so that's really cool so i'm going to drag it down toward the bottom and if i want to even change the color that is something i can do too by going down to here where it says substance and select in here and now i can change the color if i don't like the 3d effect that it's giving me i can also turn that off by going right here and turning it off now it looks good so i'm going to leave it on um and there we go i have the text now i'm going to show you something really cool to make the text pop even more so you can actually add transitions to text just like you would with a video clip so if i go here to the transitions tab and i'm going to go down to this one called movements and down to this one called slide there we go slide i'm going to drag slide into this text box and look it applies the transition in there now i want to configure it properly properly properly i almost said that really weird so if i select the transition here this first transition it's sliding in as you can see here it's sliding in from the right so that's okay if i go to the last transition though we want it to slide out so i'm going to select slide out and slide out from the right and check this out it slides in slides out so you can apply transitions to your text and make it look super cool it's kind of a way to animate your text um awesome so i really like how that looks and now what i'm gonna do i'm gonna close some of these windows and i'm gonna go down to my downloads folder because i already downloaded a music track and what i'm gonna do as you can see right here i can select that music track and drag it right into final cut pro right from my downloads folder like i said another way to do this would be to go to file and then go to import media and do it that way or you can just click and drag it in and as you can see i can't see the audio waves for the soundtrack so i'm going to go over to here where we were at earlier and select this one right here so that we can see those audio waves and as you can see right here my my video ends and the audio would just like keep playing so i want to select the audio at the end here and i want to hit command b just like we did with the video clip earlier that cuts the audio in half i can now select these two the blanks gray space video and the audio clip that we're not going to use and just delete it and just to make sure that this video doesn't abruptly end and the audio just doesn't stop that would sound horrible is we can go here and we'll get these two little arrows and we can actually drag this out and that'll make it fade out so at the end of this tutorial i'm actually going to play this video for you guys so that you guys can see the finished product and you'll see what i mean the audio will just fade out in the end really cool in in the beginning here since we started the music track from its true beginning i'm not going to do the fade because it'll just fade in on its own since that's the true beginning of the track so guys that is like a basic video in a basic rundown of how to edit a video real quick looks really awesome and i edited that super fast at this point i've been recording for 41 minutes so i was able to give you guys pretty good rundown in 41 minutes and hopefully you'll feel really confident when you're editing your videos in final cut pro if you liked what you watched in today's video definitely hit the subscribe button and notification bell and also make sure to give this video a thumbs up so that way it'll rank higher for me in the algorithm thanks so much for watching guys and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Ants Drone

Views: 9,212

Keywords: final cut pro, final cut pro x, fcpx, final cut pro x tutorial, tutorial, video editing, fcp, learn final cut pro, final cut pro x tutorial beginner, fcpx tutorial, final cut, fcp x, learn final cut pro x, how to use final cut pro, apple, imovie, editing, video, filmmaking, how to edit videos for youtube, beginners, mac, final cut pro beginner tutorial, learn fcpx, final cut pro for beginners, final cut tutorial, transitions, final cut pro x effects, final cut pro x plugins, how to edit

Id: Hs2bg3UsPL0

Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021