Getting Started with Final Cut Pro: Beginners Tutorial

we're gonna go through all the basics of final cut pro i'm gonna make it really easy for you but we're also gonna build habits so you can edit professional videos down the line my name is tyler stallman let's get started so first a tour of the interface here is an existing project that's already underway over here on the left you're going to notice a bunch of beautiful footage by the way as we look through this i can't take credit for these shots these are courtesy of stoxy united sponsor of today's video and more about stocks later over here in your browser you've got everything you might end up using in your project so i've already loaded this in i'll show you how to do that in a sec but just to give you a sense that this is where you preview it this is just like the staging ground of like figuring out what you've got i've also got music later in here everything goes in the browser and that's where you preview stuff and by the way if you can't see enough of what you're looking at you can resize all these areas by grabbing the between lines you can also press the command minus command plus to zoom in and out and make these clips bigger or smaller and there's a couple tabs on the browser that opens up your libraries so in here i've got a few other projects open so this is a completed commercial project for a skincare brand that we did it gives you a better sense of what a completed timeline might look like but we're not there yet so we're going to go back into our final cut for beginners project and close the libraries for now here in the middle this is our viewer that is currently showing us our beautiful stock footage and that's just going to play whatever you have selected so right now it's playing the bottom of the screen if i click over here in the browser again we're going to start seeing stuff from the browser by the way see i'm just like moving my mouse and it's scrubbing around through the clip if you don't like that some people find it confusing to move around that quickly you can press s that turns off scrubbing and now you won't get that effect as your mouse moves around the screen instead uh you'd have to like click and drag but so yeah i'm going to keep it on and press s again and now wherever my mouse is on a clip it'll show me that exact frame here in the viewer moving to the right of the screen we've got the inspector right now it's showing us color adjustments we can make on this but there's all sorts of stuff in here again tabs will show us the way this one gives us different things like opacity if you want to change how much you see through a clip or the zoom amount basically all the properties about a clip are over here in the inspector and you can switch between different things like right now this would transform the clip and this will show me specific details about it i can get more details down here there's a lot to see don't get overwhelmed you don't need to worry about it much yet um the first things we'll like we'll leave it on the video inspector tab to start with and then down here below at the bottom this is our timeline this is what editing is it's putting a bunch of clips in a row so that they play back as a sequence so it's not just one long clip we've got some different layers of them on top of each other we've got music on the bottom and i'll show you how to use it in two seconds but for now i'll just keep scrubbing back and forth because i like seeing this footage but um also worth knowing is that wherever you've clicked last you'll see this very subtle blue border and that's how you know which of these panels is selected so right now you can tell the timeline if i click the viewer there's a little bit of a bluish purple up here at the top if i click the inspector depending which panel is selected different keys and shortcuts will do different things in that area so for example a basic shortcut you could have guessed if i click on the inspector and i press command plus it will zoom in command minus will zoom out if i do that over here in the browser it'll do the same thing it'll zoom in and out of my clips so that's the overall interface structure of final cut pro and i might be moving a little bit quickly but don't worry i will show you how we put this all together and if it's overwhelming just re-watch this video once you're done with it because there's a lot of details in here and i know it's hard to absorb in real time but i want to keep this video short enough that uh you have time to watch it twice okay so uh let's let's put this all together now let's leave final cut for a second go back to the finder and set this all up from scratch so first i'm going to use an external disk if you're using your internal you might fill it up really quickly so an external ssd is always helpful and i'm going to create a new folder call it final cut pro getting started and inside of there i'm going to create a folder called video and another one called audio and sometimes i need one called images too whatever kinds of media that's how i sort things but the sorting you got to kind of do it in the finder before you've set everything else up so now we go when we launch final cut pro and this is what it's going to look like when you haven't done anything yet just a pretty big blank screen we're gonna go file new library i've explained libraries in a previous video and why i use a different library for every single project unless all the videos share footage but usually new library every project that video will help a lot the link is in the description below and i usually name it the same thing as the folder and let's minimize final cut and look at what that did so now there is a library inside of our project folder and this is how i kind of organize things before we customize the library or build anything there's one preference i recommend changing based on the way that i edit and that's in the import section of preferences i'm going to change it to leave files in place so that allows all of those folders we just created to stay organized the way that you made them if you do copy to library it will make duplicate files inside of a library file and apple says it's easier i find it a little harder to let apple manage your media so we're going to leave files in place oh and williman preferences i just want to point out in the playback section this background render option this is kind of significant for how final cut works and how it's so fast whenever you stop working final cut just starts to render your video so that when you export it it's like ready to go this can slow down your machine if your machine is really like overtaxed because it's rendering all the time but if you have a reasonably fast machine then your final export is super speedy so try to keep it on if you can but if you find your machine slowing down you can turn it off it depends i just want to point this out for later okay i'm gonna leave it on back to editing so now let's get some videos in here i'm gonna go back to the finder where i was a moment ago and here are the videos that i downloaded from stoxxy i'm just going to select them all and again file management starts in the finder and i'm going to drag them to the video folder that i created so now i know where they all are doesn't really matter what they're named i don't have to worry about any of that now let's go back into final cut and there's two ways to do this one you can click import which it's good to see this import dialog because it shows you all the options and all the preferences you could use looks a little more complicated i'll show you the easy way in a sec but again same thing that i don't want to copy to library that could create duplicates i'm going to leave files in place i'm just going to navigate to it which is on my external drive here you can see a preview of everything you're about to import lots of preferences over here on the right good to know this in the future we're not going to use it today so instead i'm actually going to close this import dialog go back to the finder and i'm going to click and drag this whole video folder onto this date now we haven't talked about the date yet but the date is just the default name for an event an event is a folder i this is this is a place where people can get confused so an event in final cut pro is effectively just a folder i usually only actually have one event per project i don't even rename it so i'm going to just leave that what it is and inside you'll notice it created a keyword do this little key it's because the keyword is the name of the folder i imported so now when i go back to the finder and click and drag my audio folder to the same place i have all my audio is keyworded now our browser has a bunch of media to work with but our timeline it's still empty down here so you can either click new project or it's good to know where it is file new project and i usually name my projects the same thing as the library unless i have like different versions of edits or something a project is basically a timeline final cut made some of their naming of this stuff a little bit confusing like i think some people think of the library as projects and some people think of projects as timelines the names are a little confusing so just look at the way that i use them this project is the timeline we're about to create so there are some preferences to look at here right now i was about to create a vertical video that's not what this is this is 4k footage and i'm going to be doing it at 24 frames per second rounded down and those the only things you really need to look at here is the actual resolution make sure it matches whatever it is you shot and that the frame rate again is like similar to what you're using the rest of this you don't really have to worry about it most of the time you can also use automatic settings which will do it based on what you import in the timeline but i always like to customize it and we say okay and now we have a timeline at the bottom hopefully you're with me so far so now if i am looking at the library you can see there is a project in our library there's no footage in a project yet and now watch they create the fastest edit ever so i'm just gonna select all and i'm going to drag it all into the timeline and because the stoxy footage looks so good i don't have to do anything else and it kind of looks like a movie already and to make it faster here i'll do this like change duration and make everything half a second okay and now we've got a very cool edit and you know about soxy already because they're awesome not just for sponsoring this video but they're a community of filmmakers and photographers including yours truly that provide really good quality art that's easy for you to license for your next project so that means it's royalty-free very stress-free you can basically use it for anything without getting worried about whether it's covered by the license or not but if you need they do also have extended licenses market freezes and exclusivity so you can just talk to them about whatever your specific needs are but the basic license covers most things the search is easy to use and stoxy has powerful discovery tools so it's easy to find exactly the shots that you're looking for for your project whatever it is the quality of work there is really next level one cool feature is that they shoot in like narrative sequences a lot of the time so you'll be able to find multiple shots to tell a complete story so it's not just one offs like the shots can link together and keep some kind of common style location or characters throughout your footage and stocks these contributors are a community unlike any other it's a cooperative so everybody actually has a say in how the companies run and that means that it's really allowed it to thrive and that's why when i call them artists i mean it and it's not all the cool trendy lifestyle stuff i showed you here you can also check them out to find you know great business office environments for landscapes just head over to stocks click the link in the description below and thanks doxie for sponsoring this video i really like what you do now back to final cut all right now let's set it for real that was a bit of a cheat throwing at all my timeline let's delete all that select all delete now we're going to go back to the browser and select some good moments that we like so uh one way you could do that is just by mousing over things again we have the scrub tool on i could just move and i could just click and drag and that selects the area that i want to use and i could either drag that down to the timeline or i told you i was going to build some good habits for you guys we're going to click on it make sure it's yellow and then press e that is the key that will drop it to the end of the timeline it's usually how i'm adding clips into it if you're not the kind of person that uses shortcuts now's the time to start you should really be using shortcuts so i'll keep telling them to you if navigating and if you haven't figured out how to navigate the browser yet again i've got the scrubber thing on so i just moved through it till i like a moment maybe i want to turn around here so right at the turnaround i could press play and that'll preview it in real time she's just looking around okay cool so maybe that's what i want to use the other way to insert things is as you're playing you can press the i key for in and when you're done press o and that section is now selected so in and out is the range of the clip that's going to be used and now when i press the e key again that'll drop it into the end of the timeline and even if i move my playhead like if i move the playhead forward and i'm going to use the next clip here and i say in and i say out and then i press e it still jumps to the end of the timeline a tip i've mentioned in other videos is that as you're previewing stuff over here can be really helpful to instead of just adding it directly to the timeline press you're in and out and then press the f key and you see there's a little green line here that means it's been favorited so later i could go back and i could sort by all my favorites and then you can just refer back to like all the favorite moments of the whole shoot that you've got but that's a little advanced for now for now we'll just keep dropping them into the timeline as you're playing through your browser when you hit the spacebar it will actually just keep playing from one clip to the other so in our case again this looks sort of edited as it just plays through if it's not playing from one to the other there is something called loop by the way i forget where things are in menus sometimes so you can always click help and i'm going to look for loop oh there it is it's in playback loop or more importantly the shortcut for it is command l so uh that will just keep playing the same clip over and over when it gets to the end you can see it just looped i prefer to keep it on playing from one clip to the next clip now let's skip ahead i'm going to look at the timeline that i already edited and now it looks a little different you can see there are some layers so a very important concept in final cut is that there is something called a primary timeline which is designated by this darker strip here in the overall timeline and that's really where you start like in a basic edit like this you could do everything with just the primary timeline and you don't have to start having stacks of different clips on top of each other by the way if you're coming from a different video editing software this is probably what's going to trip you up more than anything is the magnetic timeline but if you're new to video editing this is the thing that will make you never want to leave final cut pro because the magnetic timeline is the best i do see youtube videos showing people how to disable the magnetic timeline if you're doing that stop using final cut like that it's like the whole point of the the reason that it's so quick to work with like final cut isn't just fast because it's optimized for mac hardware it's fast because the metaphors accelerate your workflow and have you build up momentum as you go it kind of wants you to make the next edit as soon as possible and pushes you towards it and i always appreciate that so i can always finish and edit it faster in final cut than in any other software so thanks final cut now magnetic timeline what am i talking about that's apple's marketing term for the fact that if i pull this out you can see things either snap together or snap open it either makes space for or closes the space of any clip that i add to it now you're probably like why would that be confusing to anybody that seems so simple well here i'm going to add a piece of music underneath it and now here's probably the main thing that trips people up with the magnetic timeline music is now you know it just like plays through the whole clip as things go by it just keeps playing and um if i grab this first clip and move it the music comes with it this is very different from how other editors work and basically as things get stacked on top of each other they create these tiny little lines so you can see this one is going down the music it's going up if you're ever grabbing clips and moving them and they're connected in a way you don't want it's really easy to change it you just have to remember the shortcut which is command option hold those down and then just click on wherever it is you want to move the connection to so i'm going to click on the music and now the connection has moved to this other clip or in the case of this b-roll i could you know these connect a little bit more right this person might be what these aren't the same shoes it's not the same person okay but i want to connect these i can command option click and now the line is connected there so those two are together this makes it so much easier to not make mistakes when you're editing in final cut and it's the hardest thing for me to go back to let's say resolve or premiere is that you can make a change earlier in your edit and it kind of breaks everything later in your edit whereas final cut keeps everything together and you can keep moving quickly and just trust the software to not let things fall apart anyway this is this is like why i keep using final cut forever because the metaphor just makes a lot of sense to my brain so right now the length of the clips that are playing like their duration was set by the in and out points that we originally established but after we've added them all to the timeline we probably want to make some changes now i have a special way of doing that that i didn't learn for a little while and so i'm going to pass it along to you oh wait first one little thing the music doesn't take up the whole length of the video right now so here's one way to do it this is the the first way i learned is you just can click and grab the end of any clip or any piece of music and drag it to the link that you want to use you're probably going to keep using that forever it is always useful but it's definitely not the fastest way to do things usually i've added too much of clips like they're longer than i want them to be and i want to trim them down so let's say that bike shot i want to be a little bit shorter so i click on the clip and i look at where the playhead is and when i press option right square bracket kind of an obscure shortcut but it will trim everything to the right of where the playhead was on that selected clip and then i could also do that at the beginning and i could press option left square bracket and it trims everything to the left this is called the ripple delete because the changes ripple through the rest of the timeline like everything else slips into place as i remove that little section in fact i use it so much that i like to go into the commands and i customize them and like the only customization i do is i make it so that just pressing that square bracket that does the trim instead of needing the option key by the way my philosophy on customizing keys in general is don't do it too much because you're gonna go on somebody else's computer someday and you won't know how to use it so uh i just make a few small changes like removing those modifiers so now we've tightened up our edit and it plays back at a speed that we like we can kind of finish it right let's like tweak the things at the end and make it exactly what we want okay so for example this shot i believe this is actually shot on film and it just doesn't quite match our other stuff so i'm going to use the inspector layer to make a few changes to this so that it is more in line with the others i don't want to remove it so i make sure that it's selected there'll be that yellow border around it and then inside of the inspector i can do a few things uh first you can see that there are black borders on this because this is a four by three ratio that's the super eight i think you can see the camera menu there's the cameraman in here so um it is cropped uh in a different way than the rest of the footage so to make it match i'm gonna click on the zoom slider and drag it until i've lost those edges which is kind of boring i know i'm like cutting out the cool film stuff a bit but uh just for this example i can still see some on the left there so i got to go just a little bit more that is not actually making it any better but it does match now other things we might want to make match uh commonly are the colors so we're going to click on this little color inspector tab right now and i've got a different default here if you want to check this out you can go in your preferences and you can get a variety of defaults depending on what you choose as your color correction default thing i don't like the color board color wheels are standard like that's the industry standard so i changed that so that this is what i see at first and this is looking very blue compared to everything i mean it's quite a blue shot so i'm going to start by grabbing my midtones warm them up a whole bunch then i just look at it like next to the shots beside it it just feels more at home it's a little less out of place also maybe a little darker in the mid-tones and next in the inspector tab we got to know about the audio i've only got music in here none of these clips have their own audio so i'm going to click on the music to show it to you and the most important thing is volume i mean do i need to tell you that you can just move it up and down but you've got to click on the audio thing to know about that um also there are effects that you can add so for example um in addition to just turning it down sometimes you might want to like uniformly raise or lower the whole volume inside of this button here are all of the effects so i know there's a plug-in called gain gain is just like volume and i can drag this over here and i can say okay everything gets turned down by i don't know whatever mostly i'm just trying to show you that all the effects are over here so um you can also apply video effects so for example there's a bunch of color stuff that's very helpful here you can put luts on top so if i click and drag that onto here now in the inspector i can see some lut options and i'm going to apply one of my luts which you can download if you want and it just gives it a bit of a film look to kind of match that other film shot there's tons of effects in here dig around see what you can find but then also right beside it there are transitions try to keep your transitions kind of basic don't go crazy with them that's like an editing tip but we are going to use one here we are going to fade out to black at the end using fade to color i can grab these small edges to make it longer or shorter click on it i've got to set my mid point to the end otherwise it would start to fade halfway through the or finish fading halfway through the clip so i want to finish fading at the end of the clip and now i play it and it fades to black now before you rewind this video and start watching from the beginning i'm going to tell you one more important tip like this is actually quite important and can slow people down a lot if they don't get it with final cut final cut creates these big cache files that's what the rendering was doing remember when we were in the preferences and we disabled or enabled depending on how you work background render that's creating those giant cache files so we click on our library you can see for example that it is in the library there is 1.4 gigs it's not very big yet but this can grow a lot like hundreds of gigs eventually to keep everything organized again this is with the library selected go to storage locations and modify settings for the media i'm just going to choose like the root folder for the whole project and then for cache i'm going to choose that same folder and now when i go back to the finder this is the cache file and you can see how big it is it's not actually that big but now you can just quickly delete it if you ever need to make room for things that cache is just speeding up final cut it's not necessary for the edit but it can be enormous so it's good to know where to find it and how to delete it you can also if you've kept it in your library go to file delete generated library files and there's some options here to delete cache and other stuff now i know that was a lot but i've got a playlist that will walk you through a whole bunch of other editing tips to make this easy for you editing should be fun it shouldn't be too hard it's a lot of the reason i like final cut pro because it keeps it fun thanks for watching guys i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Tyler Stalman

Views: 58,528

Keywords: Tyler Stalman, Final Cut Pro

Id: syfRvfGAscE

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021