Get started with FINAL CUT PRO X - A crash course beginners guide to FCPX

so Apple have just announced that you can get Final Cut Pro X for 90 days for fully owned trial everybody's stuck at home around the world so I thought it was a great time to do a whistle-stop tour a crash course beginner's guide to Final Cut Pro with the aim of the game to get you editing in Final Cut Pro as quickly as possible so that's what we're doing today let's get into it [Music] hi friends will here and as I said in the intro the name of the game with this video is to get you up and running and editing in Final Cut Pro as quickly as I possibly can so we're not going to waste any more time today we're going to jump straight into my screen now I've already opened Final Cut and this is probably what you'll be greeted with the first time that you open the software now the screen is divided into several key places the first one being this top left section this is called the browser this is where you're going to import media keep your media organized you're going to have your music video clip set cetera all here to the right of that we've got the viewer this is where you can see the video that you're editing to review it to the right of that we've got the inspector panel this panel is going to change to display the properties of the clip that you're working on at the time it's where you'll be able to adjust effects scaling audio color correction all of that so really helpful panel below that we've got the timeline section okay so this is where you're actually going to be working a lot of the time when you're creating a video adding Clips adjusting them and creating your actual project and then to the right of that I've got my audio levels on here now I'm not sure that is part of the default view so apologies if it's not so let's just go back to this browser section right so as I say this is where you're going to sort of manage your project and have lots of media and stuff to import so on the left hand side we've got this little tree of stuff going on you can see this icon here that says untitled next to it that is the library now this is quite important by default when you open the software Final Cut is going to create a library for you it's going to put that library if I open finder and go to my user folder and go to movies that's where it's going to put that library by default now nowadays with most people having quite small hard drives on their machines I would strongly advise that you don't use that library that they put there because you're gonna fill your machine up and it's going to make your machine quite slow so my advice would be that you basically close this library right click close library and now we're going to say file new and we're going to create a new library now when you create a new library it's going to give you the option to choose where you want to put it now I've got a external hard drive connected here so I can choose where I want to put it and let's just say yeah I've got this folder here that I've called Final Cut tutorial so create a folder for your project and then in there you can see I've already got a library but let's just create a new library here so I'll call this test library ok and I saved that so now I've got this test library and you can see inside the test library we've got a smart collections folder not even going to touch that today not important as a beginner and then what this does is it creates an event and the event has got today's date on it the event is where you can put footage and you can have multiple events it's just a way of organizing your footage I'm not going to dive into it deeply today I have done an entire video on how to organize your footage folders and events for Final Cut Pro so I will link that for you up here and we can move on for today so that's just a little bit of information so the next thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to import some media there's two ways you can do this you can either click this import media button and it's going to open the media importer you can then navigate on your computer to where your footage is and then on the right hand side you can choose if you want to add it to an existing event that is fine whether you want to copy the files or leave them in place I tend to copy the files into the library but that is a personal preference you've got keywords you can leave that as is audio rose leave that as is transcoding you definitely want to create the optimized media perhaps as a beginner don't worry too much proxy media and then analyze and fix you can leave that as is as well and then you would just say import and it's going to process and import the footage for you I'm going to cancel that now okay because the other way that you can import footage is on your finder you can navigate to where the footage is so on mine I'm going to go to my library here I've already set up a folder and in here you can see we've got two libraries one of the ones is just a test that I just created so ignore that and then we've got a footage folder where you can imagine I've put the clips for the project okay so maybe I've done an interview I've thrown all my footage into there I've also got a music folder where I've selected a track that I want to use so I've got that there so what I can do is I can literally select these two folders that I want and I can just drag them into the library and that's going to import everything okay now it can take a few minutes to process so for ease of the tutorial I'm just going to jump to a premade library where I've already imported the footage okay so here you can see I've got my library which I've called Final Cut Pro tutorial and I've got my event which was called the day's date but I have just renamed it by clicking enter and I've called it footage for just ease of organization okay and in here you can now see that the browser window looks a lot more interesting and as I hover over these clips I can scan through them and the viewer window is now showing me what's going on on the actual clip I can hover over these or I can click on the clip and press play and you can see that it is playing there are a couple of different views in this browser window so I can click up here and change my view this is list view which just only shows you one clip and you can see all of your footage a bit more or the default view is this one which shows you all of your footage in much longer kind of preview windows you can also change the view by clicking this little icon up here little film strip icon so you can change the size of the clips and the length of the so now we've got some footage in the library if I click this if I select one of the clips that I might want to use you can see that the inspector window over here has now woken up and in here we've got video settings audio settings information and keyword and sort of general information so the next thing we've got our media now imported and we now want to create a project so down in the timeline window I can create a new project I can give this a name I can choose which event I want to put it in so it's only giving me the one option because I've only got one that's fine and this is where we want to select what style of video we want to create so I can use automatic settings and it will base the settings for the project on the first clip I import or I can use manual settings so for in this instance this video is shot in 4k but I want to deliver a 1080p project so in this instance I can say I want my video to be 1080p 1920 by 1080 P and I want it to be 25 frames for me just because it was shot in 25 P that is all Viner can leave everything else and I can say okay you can now see in the viewer we've got a project up here and it's opened my project so I've now got a timeline so now I can start to create my project so there's a few different ways which I can get footage from my browser onto my timeline I can either scan through it like this and choose my in and out points based on my keyboard so I can say I four in and oh four out and select that bit and once I've got that I can drag it onto my timeline and there we go I've got now my video showing on the timeline I can also just drag an entire clip like this or I can drag click and drag to select like this using like the range finder so there's a few different ways to get my footage onto the timeline I can overlap clips and stuff like that once you've got footage on the timeline and you're starting to build your project there's a few different ways you can adjust your footage and see this little icon here this arrow this is me currently in arrow mode but if I click this down arrow I can change to range selection for example which is a handy tool for selecting the range of a clip and deleting a section as an example or what I tend to use a lot is the blade tool if I just want to cut a clip like so and then I can go back to my arrow tool and move Clips around I can also adjust the length of a clip by hovering over the end of it and you see my cursor changes and I can then change Clips like so what I would say is keyboard shortcuts are your best friend when using Final Cut Pro so you can use this little drop down as I've suggested but it's worth learning a few keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow again I made an entire video about keyboard shortcuts so I will link that up here for your convenience moving on them so we've now got a bit of a project and maybe I want to put some background music onto this so I can select this track that's up here and I can move that onto my timeline and place it underneath you see I can adjust the volume by dragging up and down here or that can be a little bit twitchy so you can also come over to your inspector panel and adjust the volume like so when the clip is selected so that is pretty handy as well and again just like with video clips I can shorten or extend the length of Clips move them around on the timeline so that is really helpful so so far we've only talked about the clips in the browser up here we've only talked about our kind of library there's also a few other options up here so moving along you can see we're in the little video tab at the top we can click along and then we've got this media tab now this connects to your GarageBand iTunes and internal sound effects that come with Final Cut so if you're making audio in GarageBand and you want to import it in and that's where that would appear if you're using music out of iTunes then that would be where that would appear again I'd be really careful with that though because if like me most of the music in my iTunes library is copyrighted material so if I did use it in a project I'd probably get in trouble or my video would be removed so I don't tend to use that but the sound effects is pretty cool so within Final Cut Pro you do get a load of built-in sound effects which are free to use in your projects for commercial use so if you're looking for a few sound effects you can come into the sound effects tab and search there so that is the media tab up here moving on we've then got text titles and generators sorry so if we click on titles and generators you can see that within Final Cut there are built in titles and generators that come with the program now looking at this here on my screen I've also got loads of different assets which I've purchased over time which is where they appear yours will not look like this but you will still have a load of titles and look as you browse through them you can hover over them and skim through them and they will appear in the viewer so that you can preview them far far away there a bit of a star trek one Star Wars one even so that's cool and yet once you find one on here that you like so for example I might just want some let's do this fade fade 3-d that looks cool so it will maybe pop that on our time lines he literally just dragged it put it on top of either clip where you want it to appear and there you go there's some text so I can make that longer if I want it to appear for longer just like I could with a video clip and if I want to edit it I can come up and I can double click on the text here and change the text beautiful when I click on it here again the inspector window is going to show me all of the properties for that text layer and I can come in here I can change the parameters of the title clip I can change the text here I can change the typography change the font to something different if I want change the color of the text there's the color there so I could change it to bright pink go into tea and we've also got the properties for it like the movie property so this is like position rotation scale crop spatial conform blend mode and opacity so if I wanted to I could change the opacity of the text like so so what else might be good to get you started you might want to use some effects or transitions as well so I'll show you how to use those so I'm moving over to the right-hand side that you screen within the timeline you've got these two little icons here these are transitions and if you click it it's going to open up your transitions here and you're going to have loads of built-in transitions but equally again I have purchased some which appear in here as well so you won't necessarily have all the ones I've got but you should have a good selection to get you started so for example the staple of a Video Editor the cross dissolve you can find what you want by navigating through the options here and then you can literally drag that on to a clip and it will create a cross dissolve for you if that's was an interesting effect made me look like I faded away and I fade it back in but obviously there are loads of different effects in here from fade to color swipes rolls star wipes if that's what you're into and that's how you add them once you've added a transition to a clip let me just have one I tell you what I'll do is I'm gonna per cut in there and I'm just going to add this here there we go so if i zoom in on this once you've added a transition you can drag it to extend the time it takes to transition or you can select the top here to change how where it sits where the actual cut is okay and that does that and then finally I'm just going to talk about effects very shortly so if we click on the effects little icon here to the right of the screen very similar to the transitions but these are all different effects that you've got this is a combination of video and audio effects so for example if I wanted a clip say I want this clip here to be black and white I could drag this effect onto that clip and hey presto that's now black and white there are loads of different effects I can do a whole different thing about this so I just want you to know where they live and how to put them on a clip generally once you've put an effect on a clip like I've just done with this black and white one when you then look in the inspector while that clip is selected it's going to show you the properties for the effect now the black and white one is a pretty simple one it's just got the amount that the effect is applied but some of them have lots of different settings that you can play with and have a lot of fun with so that is effects there so I know that super quick that I've taken you through this but hopefully this has been helpful to kind of familiarize yourself with the layout of the program and then finally when you've finished editing your project you're happy with it okay you're going to want to export it and share it so to do that you would come up to file and you would say share and you can either use one of these presets that comes with the program so the master file is always going to be the highest quality one if you're you know want to put it on Facebook for example you can do prepare for Facebook if it's for YouTube then you can upload it straight to YouTube and that's no problem whatsoever and yeah so if we just said export here it's going to bring us up a few settings nothing needs changing we can just give the title a proper name and then we would say next and choose a location that we want to save out to and we would say save so that would be all we would do I'm not going to export that there because obviously I haven't really added to them a thing so that is it super quick Worcester stopped or show and tell of Final Cut Pro hopefully that has given you a bit of knowledge and a bit more confidence dive in have a go and start creating some videos with your new Final Cut Pro software thanks for watching if you've got any questions whatsoever drop me a comment down below check out all the other videos on my channel I've got lots of Final Cut Pro tutorials so if you are just starting out hopefully there's lots of interesting and helpful knowledge for you there on the channel and if you like this sort of thing then consider subscribing to the channel because I talked about cameras photography filmmaking my general journey as I'm learning lots of tutorials and stuff like that so consider subscribing to the channel if you're not already and other than that thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Will Chidlow

Views: 44,076

Keywords: will chidlow, filmmaking, photography, Get started with FINAL CUT PRO, beginners guide to FCPX, learn final cut, A crash course beginners guide to FCPX, starting to learn final cut, crash course, FCPX, Final cut tutorial, learn final cut pro x free, learn final cut pro x, final cut pro, final cut pro x tutorial, fcpx tutorial, fcpx for beginners, final cut pro x for beginners, final cut pro x tutorial beginner, final cut pro x free download mac, final cut pro free

Id: FfmWVoFyjg4

Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020

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