How to: Letterbox animation on Final Cut (cinema bars)

hello everyone welcome back to the channel so  today i want to do a very short tutorial to   teach you how to add letterbox to your videos  and if you don't know what that is it's those   black bars that you see on top and on the bottom  and they are used to create a more cinematic look   so if you're shooting on your iphone or any camera  the odds are that you're shooting on a 16:9 aspect ratio the more cinematic look which  looks more like the white screen we are used to and our brains connect to film is usually the 2.35:1 and one of the tricks that you can do on editing is that you can actually add a black bar on top and on the bottom because that will reduce the amount that you can actually see of the image recreating this 2.35:1 aspect ratio so today i want to show you how to add those bars and  how to create the opening up and the sliding down effect with it so let's jump into it all right so i already have here my timeline and i have the b-roll that i'm going to use for this example as you can see it's just like a bunch of images randomly put here together there's no letterbox  as mentioned and final cut actually has already a preset for letterbox so if you click here in effect and if you look for letterbox you will find that you already have this preset as you can see already see tiny bars here it's because the default is 1.85 let's change it to 2.35 which i mentioned is the most commonly used aspect ratio in cinema so as you can see the effect is already here if this is all that you need to do or all that you want to do it's already done but there is a point as you can see when the image change from this one to this one you see that it doesn't apply automatically so you would need to repeat this process for all your footage  in this case there's ways that you can copy and paste the presets but to the point that i'm  trying to make here i just want to teach you a different and easier way that you can apply that  to all your footage so let me just go ahead and remove this so we can have our original image back without any of the letterbox and what i want to show you is that you actually have a way  of doing that with the adjustment layer and if you don't know what that is it's just a layer that i'm  putting on top of my image where i can make all the changes and corrections i would like and that will apply to anything that is below that image in this case i'm adding an adjustment layer let's  say i'll add it until the end and i'm just going to apply the letterbox to this adjustment layer  rather than my image now as you will see if i just come here and change back to the 2.35 you see that that applies to all the image that i have together but if you're coming from another shot that it's  not meant to be cinematic so as an example in my previous video when i came from talking to you like this to just showing my b-roll it's usually quite nice to add some sort of transition or to add an effect with these letter boxes opening up or sliding down and there's a very easy way that you can achieve that as well so now that we have this adjustment layer one of  the things that i could do is actually just add another adjustment layer that i'm calling here crop layer and i'm gonna decide for how long i want the image to be opening up so in my case i think about this is fine so it's more than enough time for the image to open so one of the things that we need to do now is just crop our image from the center to the point where it completely disappeared until the point that is gonna start showing up and opening up and the way to achieve this is quite simple so one of the things that you need to do first is just come here to the info button so you need to know what's the size of the image that you actually shot on so in my case it's this one which is a 4k of my camera and what you will need to do is to just divide this number by two in my case is 1080 because this is what will be the point that you need to cut from the top and from the bottom so if we come back here to the video inspector all that we need to do now is add two keyframes and add the 1080 in my case which as you can see cuts half from the top to half of my image and 1080 to cut from the bottom half of my image to finalize this all we need to do is to go to the last  frame of our cut as you can see is the point from where i still have everything in  black and in my case i'm gonna add two new keyframes push this back to zero and final cut should do this transition for you as you could see the transition stops in the point where you  actually have the letterbox because i have this adjustment layer available so if i just put that invisible for now just to show you the full effect you should have something like this but obviously because this was enabled from the point that the bars are higher then you stop seeing the effect which you achieve the goal that you would like if you want to do the opposite so instead of having  them opening up you want them to be sliding down what you're gonna need to do in addition is that similar to when you came here to the information about the footage you just need to understand what is the biggest size of your picture the vertical axis needs to be 2.35 times smaller than this one so in my case it would be 1634 and as you can see it's 2160 so if i take the difference I am 525 pixels larger than i need to be and if i just wanna actually split that from bars on top and on the bottom you're gonna get to 263 pixels that i need to cut from each side if i come back here and i'll just make this disappear to show you what i'm doing i'll just add another crop layer here on top and what i'm gonna do now i'll do the  the opposite so we'll start from top   and bottom now adding a keyframe to zero because  i wanted the beginning everything to be zeroed  out but then at the end i would like this to  cut to this 263 up and 263 bottom so now you will see the bars sliding up similar to before all that you need to do is you can add this adjustment layer but now starting at the  end of your video and you should have the effect that you're looking for so that's it i hope it was helpful to you it's very easy to do as you could see hopefully you're gonna get better and funkier b-rolls now more cinematic footage and let me know if you'd like this tutorial if you'd like more tutorials like this one and if you didn't subscribe already do it  now and i hope to see you in the next video bye

Channel: Random Corner

Views: 743

Keywords: tutorial, final cut, letterbox, black bars

Id: gMKDbHBgYdY

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020