INTRO TO TRANSITIONS & FADES TO BLACK for Final Cut Pro X [+fix transitions error]

[Music] hey it's ben hassell here and here in this tutorial we're going to have a look at how we add transitions and fades to black in final cut pro x using the built-in plugins we're going to have a look at a couple different methods of this and then we're also going to have a look at what we can do when we can't add a standard transition so when the clips aren't overlapping how do we deal with that this video is sponsored by fx factory so please do go and check them out but without further ado let's dive in and have a look at how we add transitions and fades to black in final cut pro 10. so the first thing we're going to do here is just come up to window workspaces and we're going to jump to the default workspace just so we're all looking at the same final cut pro 10 layout now i've already added a few different clips onto my timeline here and if i do shift and said it is going to zoom to fit so that's the kind of first shortcut here we can see all the different clips and a couple things to note about transitions when you're working with them the one main thing is that we need to have for most transitions some overlap with those transitions so essentially when we're actually adding transitions from the transitions browser we need to have an overlap between those clips now to create that overlap it's as simple as trimming down your clips as soon as you've added them to the timeline or at any point after you've added them to the timeline so if i grab a couple of clips here down to the timeline then to make that overlap happen as you could see in the image before we're basically trimming down the clips by a second or two or however much kind of works for your edit and now if we double click on this edit point you can see we've got these overlap areas in these clips now if we jump into the transitions browser on the right hand side here you can see we've got a whole range of different transitions in here and i've got some extra ones added in and some different plugins and stuff like that and we're going to have a look first of all at the standard kind of cross dissolve transition and how that works so normally with most edits if you've trimmed down your clips a bit you should be able to grab your cross dissolve and drop it right onto an edit point and basically that will add your first transition and then there's a few different controls within that transition that allows to modify it so we can make the transition longer by hovering over this kind of bottom left and right portions of it and stretching it out and you can see now the new time on the left hand side there and the time i've added to that transition and if i highlight my transition it's going to show me now that my transition here is four seconds long so it's just going to be a much slower transition between those two clips now when i add a transition up in the inspector at the top right which if you don't see it just go to window show in workspace and check the inspector we see a few different options here we've got some different easing options for kind of how our transition fades in and out and we've got some different looks up here as well so if we come to the middle of our transition you can see when we change these looks it's going to add that cross dissolve in some different ways so you can make the transition a bit punchier a bit different by modifying some of these to kind of fit the style of your edit in final cut pro x so we'll stick with the additive one which looks quite good here so you can see that transition is working nicely now as well as the controls up in the inspector here we've got a couple more controls um down here in the timeline so the first one is these two little triangles in the middle here which allows to change where that transition falls so you can see on the left and right here basically i'm able to move that transition as long as i've got overlapping footage and you can see here when i drag too far to the left i get that red bar which indicates that i've reached the media limit of this clip on the right hand side now one other thing i can do is if i click these two little double lines it's actually going to shorten the clip before or lengthen the clip before or shorten or lengthen the clip afterwards and again you can see i'm reaching that media limit which basically means that there's no overlap for those particular clips so a common message that will pop up when you're editing in final cut pro 10 we'll just come to the end of our timeline here and grab a couple of raw clips without any trimming on them i'm just gonna drop the sound these down so we'll grab a couple of shorter clips here so i haven't trimmed these clips down um basically they're the kind of raw footage when you push a record on the camera and you can see now when i add the cross dissolve there it doesn't drop straight onto the timeline we get this message which is basically saying that in order to add the clip which final cut pro can do it's going to shorten the clips so basically when we hit create transition you can see that second clip is kind of being pulled back a little bit so it's not an error message it's just telling us that final cut pro has to nudge our timeline in order to make that transition happen so that's how to add the most basic transition the cross dissolve so if we just leave that there our cross dissolve now that it's made we'll come back to some of our other edit points and we're going to jump to this fade to color transition so you'll see this clip now when it transitions will fade to black in the first instance if we highlight this we get some extra options up in this fade to color transition so you can see if we drop down here we can change the color that that transition is going to drop to so you can see now it's going to flash to magenta and we can also change the time that it's going to kind of hold that magenta as well so if we modify the length of this a little bit you can see now it's going to hold that transition so useful if you want to overlay some text over the middle here maybe you want to hold that color for quite a period of time so you can have a logo flash across or something like that so that's the fade to color transition and then we have some other transitions as well so if we come down to things like the wipes you can see we've got these different wipes so something like a clock wipe now is combining the transitions with an animation so rather than just fading between the clips or fading from the clips to a color back to the second clip we're actually getting a fade with this animation and these animations can be quite fun to use so you can see we've got some other wipes we can use and then when you're in the middle here we get these on-screen controllers which allow us to modify certain functions of these transitions so you can see we can change the direction it's happening so maybe this direction works a bit better so it's now coming down rather than moving up but you get the idea so we can basically so we get these nice kind of level of control over the transition and how it's working you can also see up in the inspector here that we get this option for the edge treatment so at the moment we have the edge type set to feather we can set it to a solid color so it would be a solid border and then we can modify the width of that again we can kind of change the the color of that now our transition rather than being that gradient will be a straight line and that straight line can happen at an angle as well so we can change the angle at which that line is moving across and oftentimes you'll want to match that movement of that line with something that's happening in the clips either side of it now let's move to the end of our sequence here actually we'll delete these last two clips and we're going to add a fade to black at the end here so essentially for a fader black couple of ways of doing it the first and most easy way is to grab a cross dissolve and then we can have that fade to black so you can see that works pretty well we can extend it we can make it longer if we need to so if we want a slower fade to black now i did get the question of what happens if we want our music track to kind of run beyond the end of our clip is so i'm just going to grab a music track here in fact we'll just do shift and z so we can see the whole timeline and then we'll come to our finder and we'll drop a track onto the timeline now when we export out here you can see actually the music track does run beyond the end of that clip so when we're playing this back the export will still actually kind of run beyond that if we want to sort of have a bit more control or kind of see where the edit is ending and kind of control what's happening at the end here or feel like we're a bit more control of what's happening at the end here then we can come to our generators there's probably a couple different ways of doing this but we'll grab a solid color generator and we'll just grab a custom one we can drop it right the end of our clip so this black clip now will mean that we can run that to the duration of our music so if we want our movie to end it's a fade to black for the music to kind of run on then that will work this also means we could pop a color in here as well if we wanted to so let's delete this now and we'll have a look at one other way of making a fader black and that is by controlling the opacity so if i click on my clip here we'll zoom into this a bit so command and plus to zoom in and then i'm going to come to my inspector in my video tab here i'm going to add a keyframe for when my opacity is 100 come to the end here and then drop this down to zero so essentially my clip is going to fade out and actually to make it transparent on the very last frame i just need to come back one frame here and then make this zero here and that will make it black so now you can see this is fading out and it faced black now if i right click here i can go to show my video animation and you can see i'm controlling the opacity with these keyframes so i can make it quicker or shorter and depending on how you like to work doing it this way could be useful in certain scenarios so let's have a look at what happens when we can't add a transition between two clips or a kind of traditional transition so i'm just going to grab a couple of clips right at the end here and we looked at what happens with the media limits which is really to do with the fact that we've selected the whole clip here and there's nothing either side of that that can move so let's grab these two clips so between these two clips we're imagining we're making a music video or something like that and we can't short on these clips let's just move these around the other way so if i add cross dissolve there it's going to ask me to shorten the clips which i don't want to do so this is where a plug-in from fx factory comes in handy so this cineflare smooth plugin basically allows you to add a little bit of animation at the end and the beginning of the next clip so if we grab these two first cineflow screen plug-ins you can see basically what's happening is we're kind of animating between those two clips so we don't need to shorten those clips in order to make that happen and what's also nice in here as well is that sinister smooth has this motion blur attached to it too so we can drop this in here and you can see now when we play this back we get this nice movement it looks pretty seamless and we can use this in a few different ways so we've got some different kind of beginnings so the first one is our beginning and then end of our transition so you can see we get these nice little bounces and movements that work really well and then we can just add the motion blur on top there to smooth it out we'll just add a couple of these just so you can see how they're working a few different ones obviously the built-in transitions are great as well and we can just duplicate this motion blur from here to here by holding down the alt key and then just stretch it out so we can play these few transitions through and you can see all of these have a kind of nice place within your kind of final cut pro 10 toolkit whether you're using the built-in transitions adding a transitions pack like cineflow smooth or even creating your own transitions in apple motion so hopefully this has been a useful introduction to how to use transitions in final cut pro x i think one last thing that i will mention is that if i just delete the transitions i've got here the default transition in final cut pro is the cross dissolve which means that if we hover over any edit points or use the up and down cursors to move to another point we can use command t to add that default transition if you want to change this so for instance if we wanted to change to one of the movement transitions so let's have a look at the push transition if we right click on this we can make it the default transition so now when i hover over here and do command t rather than the default cross dissolve it's going to add that push transition now where that's nice is if you need to add transitions to a lot of clips so in a slideshow presentation or something like that we can select all those clips do command t and it will create a transition on all of those so we can kind of set things up really quickly if we've added transitions to a ton of stuff and we want to remove them we can also come to our index and you can see here we can see the push transition is listed in here if i search for push in my index you can see i can highlight all of those click back once on my timeline and then delete them all so we have a lot of flexibility for adding transitions for how we modify the length of transitions and then also for plug-ins like cineflare smooth which give us lots of very cool transitions options as well as being able to build our own in apple motion if you'd like to see kind of more tutorials on transitions or like to know how to make your own transitions in apple motion then do leave a comment below or if you've seen a transitions pack that you really love then do leave a comment below i'm always interested to kind of find new plugins new ways that people are doing things in final cut pro 10 and i look forward to seeing you on the next tutorial

Channel: Ben Halsall: Final Cut Pro X & Adobe Tutorials

Views: 12,487

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Id: 9AUcEeixaZQ

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020