How to Cut to the Beat | Tips for Editing to Music in FCPX

in today's video i'm going to show you how to edit to the beat like this i'm going to kick things off by first going through two different ways to edit to the beat then i'll show you a quick and easy way to fine tune your edit and along the way i'll sprinkle in a few additional tips for cutting your footage to music let's roll that intro [Music] the first thing we need to do is to find some cool music the music i'm using in this video is from artbest who i've been using for a few years now and i really love this stuff there's a link in the description if you'd like to check it out or sign up when it comes to editing b-roll you're probably one of two different kinds of editors you're either a browser editor who likes to set in and out points in the browser window and drag those clips onto your timeline or you're a timeline editor like myself who likes to have everything on the timeline to begin with and you'll cut out the parts you want to use or maybe you're a hybrid and you do a bit of both method number one is for the browser editors the first thing you'll want to do is increase the size of your waveform so that you can easily see peaks in the music you can do that by clicking on this little icon over here and choosing one of these display sizes or by dragging this slider to change the track height i've already added a song to my timeline and i cut it down to the section i want to use for this tutorial next you'll want to make cuts on this gap clip on the bead for every beat where you want to cut to take place simply do that by playing the song back holding down command and then pressing b on every beat like this [Music] these gap clips are now essentially placeholders for your shots if you feel like you didn't quite nail the timing you can go in and adjust the cuts by first using the left and right arrow keys to find the beat that's exactly where the beat is then i'll press t to activate my trim tool and i'll click on the cut between the two gap clips and drag it to snap to my playhead if your playhead is not snapping to the cuts then make sure snapping is turned on the shortcut key for that is in and you can tell that it's on when this little icon is blue now it's time to add your shots head over to the browser window scrub over the first clip and hit i to set an end point you don't really need to worry about setting an out point and you'll see why in just a sec drag and drop your clip onto the gap clip here and select replace from start this will set the in point you made to the beginning of this gap clip and it'll set the duration to the duration of the gap clip you could also set an out point using the shortcut o and select replace from end but i find that most of the time you know where you want the clip to start and you can let the duration of that section of the music determine how long the clip should be and where it should end i'll do that again for the second clip i can scrub through here hit i for an end point drag and drop the clip onto the next gap clip and select replace from start again you can repeat this process for the rest of the clips until your edit is done and let's see what it looks like [Music] it looks pretty good and the majority of the work is already done if you want to tweak the in and out points of a clip here without affecting the timing of the edit you can do that really easily by hitting the keyboard shortcut t to activate the trim tool again and you can click and drag on the middle of the clip to adjust where the clip starts and ends the time indicator down here shows you how many seconds and frames you are moving the clip by and in the viewer window you'll see two screens the one on the left is the new in point and the one on the right is the new out point of the clip let's assume that you have a cut in there that is too quick and you'd actually rather just take it out you can select the clip and hit the delete key not the backspace key to delete the clip but still keep the timing exactly the same i'll quickly undo that to show you what happens if you use the backspace key instead the other clips will shift to the left and your timing will be out i'll undo that again and delete the clip using the delete key and i'll activate the trim tool again i can click on the cut between this clip and the gap clip and i'll just drag that to the right until the gap disappears that is method number one if you enjoy these kinds of final cut pro tutorials please like this video and let me know down in the comments below i'd love to hear from you method number two is for the timeline editors i have all the clips that i'm going to use for this edit at the end of my timeline here now you can make cuts on the gap clip using the shortcut command b like we did before or you can make markers as long as you have something to sync your cuts to so let's use markers instead i'll move my playhead to the beginning select the music track and as i playback i'll just use the shortcut m to add markers on each beat [Music] okay that should do it for this edit now if you're a timeline editor like me you will have all the shots you want to use on your timeline the main reason i like to edit like this is because i think it's much easier to organize clips into the order that i want them while they're already on the timeline as opposed to trying to do it one by one from the browser window i've already arranged these clips in the order that i want them so let's select them and lift them from the primary storyline i'm going to keep them in this group to help speed things up if your clips are not grouped together you can group them by using the shortcut command g for the first shot i wanted to start about here so i'll drag this into the clip so that the shot starts there and i'll sync that up to the beginning of the music track now for the rest of the shots i'm going to use two shortcuts to time the cuts to the markers we made on the music track i'll scrub to the first marker hovering above this group of clips and i'll hit alt in the right square bracket to trim the right edge of the clip to my playhead let's move on to the next shot which i want to start right around here i'll hit alt and the left square bracket to trim the left edge of the clip to the playhead i'll move to the next marker and hit alt right square bracket again i can scrub through all of these shots alternating the shortcuts to cut in and out points for each clip this is the way i do it because i prefer to have all my footage on my timeline as opposed to scrubbing through my browser window you can adjust the clips in the same way as before using the trim tool and this is what it looks like i want to finish this video off with two extra tips that i think will help you create better edits and will help you when editing to the beat firstly unless the edit calls for it don't make every single shot the same duration it can be an effective way to edit but it also becomes a little predictable and an easy way to make your edits more interesting is to vary the duration of the cuts you can do this by adding markers to offbeats or other accents within the music let's have a look at this quick example this sequence was cut to the beat and each cut is the exact same in length and here's that same sequence of shots that have been cut to the beats as well but using some off beats and other accents in the music to make it more [Music] interesting [Music] same shots same music but the second edit is more interesting and dynamic okay the last tip i have for you guys is to try time any action or impact within a shot to a beat between the cuts let me show you what i mean take a look at the shot which is time to the music and in the middle of the shot this guy gets hit in the face and it happens at a random spot in the song if you listen to the track and look at the waveform you can see and hear that the snare drum is hit here i'll line my player up to that beat hit t to activate my trim tool and i'll scrub along the clip to find the frame where the impact is and then i'll drag that to line up with my playhead let's play that back now you have a shot that is not only edited to the beat in terms of when it cuts in and out but the action between the cuts is also times in the b to the music and that's how you edit to the beat in final cut pro i hope you enjoyed these tips for cutting to the beats of the music don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you did and i'll catch you guys in the next

Channel: Brad and Donna

Views: 7,486

Keywords: How to edit to the beat, how to cut to the beat, tips for editing to the beat, cut to the beat, edit to the beat, editing music like a pro, edit music on video, video editing, tutorial, final cut pro tutorial, editing techniques, edit to music, how to edit, fcpx editing tips, fcpx editing techniques, video editing tips, video editing techniques, fcpx tips, Final Cut Pro tips, tips, fcpx tutorial, Final Cut Pro, fcpx, how to, Brad and Donna, how to edit in fcpx, fcpx editing

Id: uzGyS0a9Byc

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021