How To Edit In FINAL CUT PRO 2021 - Beginner Tutorial

hey friends dylan bates here with the final cut bro today we are going to be covering getting started in final cut pro the very first step in the editing is going to be organizing your footage before you even get it into your editor so what i've done i've created a folder it has my shots in here from pixabay.com i'll have a link to that in the description it's a free place to get video which is really awesome so i'm going to create a folder that's going to be containing all of my projects my libraries everything so let's go ahead and call this final cut tutorial video thing that sounds good and we're just going to go ahead and drag our footage into there let's also create a folder for our audio and we'll be using that a little bit later okay so let's go ahead and open up final cut pro now when you open up final cut pro if it looks a little crazy like this we can actually just push command 0 and that'll set it back to the default settings now i'm just going to go ahead and close out this default library that it creates and we're going to just start from the very very beginning to get started we are going to go to the open library button and we're going to create a new library go to your desktop in your folder and call it whatever you want to call it final cut tutorial so i've created a library and a library is essentially what holds all of your events and each event is essentially a collection of all of your media so your video your music your photos all of that will be found within your events now you can create multiple events so that you can really organize your footage say you have different cameras that you want to organize it by or different days each event can hold that and you can rename them to whatever you want the default will just be the date that you actually created the event so now that we've created our event let's go ahead and import our media you can push this import media button or you can push command i or you can also go up to file import media whichever is easiest for you now we'll just navigate to our desktop or wherever you have your folder and we will select our final cut tutorial video thing and we will select our footage folder after we've selected that we'll come on over here to these different settings now you do have the option to copy your video files to the library which can be helpful if you plan on moving the project around a lot however you can also leave the files in place which i strongly suggest you do if your video and all your files are all contained in one folder because then it will not be duplicating the video files thus doubling the size of your project so if you can do leave files in place and that might save you some hassle down the road also leave your keywords checked from finder tags and from folders those are actually helpful in organization so i suggest you do that the more folders you make the easier it'll be to get around within final cut because you can use search features or keywords um all sorts of things like that there's this analyze video feature which i suggest right now you just go ahead and leave everything unchecked also analyze audio you can just leave it as it is default and we will just push the import selected button okay so that is now put our footage within our event here now we have this nice skin feature which it automatically gives us a preview of what's underneath our cursor as we move along with that red line you can activate or deactivate the skimming feature by pushing s and that'll get rid of it or you can come down and push this skim feature button down here and it'll no longer skim let's go ahead and create a project go down to new project or you can push command n or you can go up to file new project and we'll just call this final cut tutorial or whatever you are setting your video as now by default it will have automatic settings and it will create the project based on the very first video file you place in the timeline and that's really helpful for beginners however once you get to a place where you start to understand frame rates and video codecs and all sorts of things you can go to use custom settings and you can dial this in exactly how you want for today though we will just use the automatic settings and we'll just push ok this has now created a timeline which is called the magnetic timeline and i'll get into why it's called that in a little bit so let's say we want to get some of our footage down on the timeline well we can scrub through and find the portion we want and once we've found where we want in the video to be imported we'll push i and then scroll forward a bit and push o and that will create in and out points your endpoint being where it starts your out point being where it ends we can then click and drag this down onto our timeline or alternatively if we have other shots i can push i and o find where i want if we push this button here it will drop it down on top of our footage if you push command z you can undo anything and then if you go let's say we want to break apart this clip we can find where we want push i will push o we can scroll to the middle of this and we can push this button that will create a cut and add the footage in between we can push this button that will place the footage at the very end of our timeline or you can push this button and it will overwrite whatever is underneath it so hopefully that gives you a little bit of help you can zoom in on your timeline with command plus or command minus to zoom in and out additionally if you want to make these larger you can come over here to this film reel and you can drag up the size you can set how much of your audio waveforms will be shown or you can zoom in and zoom out we now have our footage on our timeline and let's say that we've decided this shot is just a little bit too long well we can come to the edge here click and drag and we can shorten or lengthen a shot to our hearts desire now if you drag this all the way out it'll turn red and that means that there's no more length in that given clip so let's go ahead and shorten this way down here and then we can slide forward if we push b that will give us the blade tool additionally if you want you can come up to where this arrow is click that and go down to blade or you have all these other tools that we can use in future tutorials so we'll select b and we'll decide oh we want to shorten this we'll click and that will make a cut with this you can drag it out or drag it in you can also create another cut and delete the sequence in between so we'll just go ahead and delete that whole clip off let's go ahead and drag a few more clips onto our timeline so the reason why this is called the magnetic timeline is typically on a nle when you drag your footage down you could place it anywhere on your timeline like this but the way final cut pro works is that when you drag footage it's constantly just pushing it to the left side which can be a little frustrating for people when they're first getting started but i really really strongly suggest that you learn how to use it and it will save you so much time in the future it's really sped up my editing workflow to just embrace it rather than fight against it so i strongly suggest that you watch some tutorials on the magnetic timeline i'll have one down in the description that you can watch um that that will hopefully help you and get you started in that area let's see we'll add another clip here we've got four clips and we've decided that these are this is all the shots that we want let's go ahead and do some color correcting you can do so by selecting your clip go to your effects browser and you can drag your color board on top or you can also double click and that will add the effect to your selected clip now when we did that if you come up here to your inspector you can see that it added the color board effect however it's not doing anything yet because we haven't adjusted any settings let's go ahead and click this colorful icon and it should look like this by default within this color board each one of these affects that the given color so the dark one affects the shadows the mid tones and the highlights and this one affects everything it's the master color control so we could drag this way to yellow or green or whatever you want so typically in movies they like to do the teal and orange so if we drag the shadows up into the teal range and this will do the opposite so um you can drag them directly opposite of each other this is all the negative space is all the positive so you can do that and then you can leave your highlights however you want maybe give them a little bit of yellow dragon the opposite of blue you can go to your saturation you can affect how saturated your shadows are how saturated your mid tones or your highlights and you can also affect all of them at the same time so for the sake of this tutorial we're going to go a little bit on the absurd side and just really drag up that saturation we'll set our exposure maybe give it a little more contrast and you can play with these until you are happy with your image so now we have that color graded shot however we want to color grade all of these shots i guess i have two of the same shot in there but that's okay it's it is what it is so let's say we want to copy this footage well you can select it and you can go up to edit copy or you can push command c you can select the next clip you want and all the other clips go up to edit paste attributes or paste effects so let's do paste attributes and that will affect you know your transform uh your volume everything so we'll go ahead and paste our effects of color grading and that will paste it onto all of these shots you can then individually adjust each shot and get it to your liking okay so let's go ahead and add in a transition now transitions can be all over the place and i recommend you just do them tastefully according to what works with your video rather than just adding transitions to add transitions today we're just going to do the really basic default cross dissolve transition so to get started we're going to come over here to our transitions panel and we will find our cross dissolve transition which is typically near the top drag that onto the cuts between our clips now with each transition you can actually click and drag and make it longer or shorter according to your liking if you take it all the way well i guess i don't have enough footage to work with here let me so if i drag this footage all the way out you'll notice that there's this red line and that indicates that it can't go any longer than that because one of the underneath shots doesn't have any additional footage to work with now let's say we want to quickly add a transition without going into this panel well you can select the conjoining clips and push command t and that will automatically apply the default transition which is the cross dissolve so we can just add that to all of the clips and let's say we want to fade to black here at the end you can just select the end there or you can select the beginning and push command t and maybe this transition is a little too long so we'll just shorten that up a bit so the next part of this tutorial will be adding music and sound effects so let's go ahead and come on up here to our photos and audio panel go down to sound effects and make sure if you're new on final cut pro you go up to final cut download additional content and you get all the free sounds that come with final cut pro they actually have some pretty good ones in there now you can search through the sound effects panel and we have a lot of forest imagery here so let's go ahead and add a forest sound effect so we'll go through the search type in forest you can preview each of these so let's play it that one sounds a little fake to me probably because i hear it on everybody's iphone this one's nice but it might be a little bit too quiet for what we're going for that one seems to do the trick for what i am wanting so let's go ahead and click and drag that and the way final cut pro works is it will add all of your sound effects on the underneath side of the magnetic timeline and all your video will go on the top side of the magnetic timeline okay so now let's go ahead and just shorten this sound effect so what i'm going to do is push b and we'll just come to the end we'll make a cut and we will just click and drag and delete those two segments now we can come in here to these fader handles we can click and drag and that will create a nice fade for us to work with so as i play this it'll fade it out really nicely and we can do the same at the beginning of the audio you can adjust the volume of the audio by clicking on this white line here and if i drag that up and down you'll see how it is affected and anywhere that is red is clipping so you don't want the audio to be clipping um when you're editing so we'll just drag that down a little bit if you want fine tuning adjustments you can push command while you're dragging it and it'll go by one decibel and save you a little bit of the trouble or you can come up here to the audio panel select your audio and you can set your volume up here you can also add keyframes so if you have a portion you want to get quiet we'll just move forward well make sure it's selected drag it down and you'll notice down here how it the audio has faded out and you can do the same to bring it back in and we could actually just type in whoa i deleted everything there we go just type in one and that'll fade it back up so i'm going to delete this keyframe and we'll leave it kind of quiet okay so now let's go ahead and add in some music and we're going to be using a service called soundstrike which has unlimited royalty free music i really really like their service and their customer service is awesome um i have used them for years now and they have saved my bacon a lot and have really really great selection of music so let's go ahead and hop on over to soundstripe real quickly i would like to say i am not sponsored by soundstripe however i am just really happy with their service and actually as of today i just became a partner with them which means you can use my sign up link down in the description and that'll give me a small commission which will help me pay the bills and pay for my own soundstripe subscription but also it should give you 10 off if you use my coupon code that's hopefully down there by now i'm waiting for approval on that um i believe it'll be the final cut bro so use coupon code the final cut bro get 10 off and help a really really small youtuber they have a massive selection of music and you could go through for hours and days and years i'm just selecting music but they've actually made it really nice and streamlined you can come up here to the mood or the characteristics so let's just select atmospheric and beautiful because that kind of goes with how our video is and i actually know that i really like this this corner of the world by caleb etheridge [Music] i feel like it it works well for the video that we are currently editing but they have a massive library of just really good um song selections so let's come on over here and i will go ahead and license it okay so i've downloaded the song i put it in my folder so i'll just go to file import media we'll select our audio folder and import selected and that will just have it here in our browser now what's great is if we wanted to jump around we've got our footage all sorted in our keyword collections and our audio sorted so let's go ahead and find the portion of the song that we like for our video which i happen to know is right around here we'll use ino again and you can either drop this down at the bottom using that or just click and drag and uh do it however best fits your workflow now we can just click and drag these handles add some nice fade-ins and let's go ahead and get rid of the end here and let's play through and see how the volume is [Music] okay so it might be just a tad loud so we'll just drag down the volume just a little bit and let's go ahead and add a title onto our video so come on up to the titles and generator browser and we will add a title now i usually really like to just use the custom one super plain doesn't do anything fancy but for the sake of today's tutorial i will show you how to use one of these fancier ones let's use blur and as we play through you can see it kind of come onto the scene and so if we want to edit this title you can you can click on it double click on it you can type right on the screen or you can also come up here to these lines here let's go ahead and set the font on this to i really like this babish new or however you say it yeah and uh let's go ahead and add in a shadow so we'll scroll on down to the bottom drop shadow and you can move this text anywhere along on the screen and now if we play it through [Music] it works beautifully and if you drag this out the animations will all happen when they need to or if you want to get rid of half the animation you can select your title come up to the t here and deselect build out or build in i'll leave the build in but get rid of the build out now it just cuts off and let's say i wanted a nice fade out transition on that instead we could push command t and that'll fade it out instead and then let's say we wanted this same type of title and didn't want to have to go through all the font changing and everything you could click on it push command c command v to paste it or you could press option click and drag and that'll duplicate it and then maybe we wanted to type in something unique you know like subscribe and put that at the end so we have our finished video and now is the time to export it all we're going to do is come on up here to the top right and there's this share button click that and do export file or once you start to get knowledge of codecs and whatnot you can actually create custom destinations which are essentially like you could set particular settings for something you want so i actually have this export for web setting that i use for all my tutorials i have my prores 422 one that i use for masters and so on and so forth so um but for today we're just gonna use export file and then we are just gonna go into our settings here and make sure our video codec is set to h.264 and then roles you don't need to bother with right now i can go later in depth in detail on how those work and how they can be really handy for certain situations but that's another tutorial waiting to happen so let's go ahead and push next and we'll just call it the epic video that will make your mother cry perfect and then we'll just create a new folder exports and we will push save now in the top left we can see that it is exporting and uh and this wheel shows how much further it's got to go okay so it's all done exporting and we can you'll see in the top right it created this little notification so you can actually click that and it'll show you where it is in the finder and you can preview it and it looks fantastic so that pretty much wraps it up you can just throw that video up on youtube and call it a day hopefully this video was helpful to you if it was i would really really appreciate a like it does tremendously help me also consider subscribing i'm going to be going way more in depth on a lot of these features in final cut pro if there's any questions you have please hit me up in the comments um if there's any season pro editors watching this i would love it if you left suggestions down in the comments for people to get started in editing and yeah let's get a dialogue going so thank you guys so much for watching i hope this video was helpful to you i know it's a long one but i feel like it needed to be this length so have a fantastic day and i will see you next week [Music] you

Channel: The Final Cut Bro

Views: 21,957

Keywords: final cut pro x, tutorial, final cut pro, FCPX, Video Editing, Apple, iMovie, learn final cut pro x, learn final cut pro, 10.4.9 fcpx, complete beginners guide final cut pro, final cut pro 2020, adobe, davinci resolve, color correcting, importing footage final cut pro, make videos, how to make videos, learn how to edit fast, final cut pro 10.5, big sur, mac, fcpx, the final cut bro, final cut pro x tutorial, final cut pro x tutorial beginner

Id: TEw-W2cW75w

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020