Learn Final Cut Pro in 20 minutes - Beginner Tutorial 2021

hi guys today we are gonna hit final cut pro x from the top if you're new to final cut pro this is the tutorial for you [Music] okay let's start from the very top the interface on the left of your screen you have your media libraries on the right you have your preview monitor and at the bottom you have your timeline at the very side you've got your inspector or where you would change the preferences to any clips or effects that you put onto your timeline final cut is pretty useless unless we import some media so that's the first thing we're going to do import media okay so the first thing we're going to want to do is open a brand new library and we do that by clicking at the top in the file menu and we're going to say new library and then it pops up with wherever you want to save it on your computer and i've got a final cut pro projects folder saved to my hard drive and we're going to call this fcpx beginner click save and done and then it makes a brand new project here with a new event now final cut pro uses events like folders really and the first thing that final cut pro does for you is it creates a new event with the date so we can click on that and we can rename it to whatever we want so we're going to call that beginner tutorial and then enter the next thing we're going to want to do is import some media into final cut pro so with the event selected here we click here import media so i've already got on my hard drive a folder with all the media that i want to edit i'm going to select them all and i'm going to make sure that over here my tick box for leave files in place is selected if i click that copy to library final cut will duplicate all of the files and make copies within its own final cut pro space on the hard drive so if you do that and you're not managing all the files on your computer you'll end up with double of everything so as long as you've got all good organization with the media that you've got on your desktop or in your documents folder then i would just leave files in place the other thing that you might have heard of is create optimized media and create proxy media now if you've got a slow mac or a slightly older mac and you're editing with 4k or high definition footage you might find that the playback sort of is not very good and it stutters a bit so what you can do is you can create proxy media or optimize media and that speeds up the process whilst you're editing and makes playback a lot smoother and the editing process a lot quicker i keep them off and then if i'm finding that i've got problems with playback or my machine's not responding quick enough i can always make those at a later time but for now i wouldn't worry about them too much i would leave them unchecked so all we're doing is we're selecting our clips we are ticking leave files in place and we are going to click import and there we go in our project now in our beginner tutorial event we've got four clips we're going to be cutting together today a desert scene in our browser here we can view the clips in various different ways you can view them like this which is just the thumbnail and if you hover over the top of the clip you can spool through which is a really great feature again so if you want to quickly see what's in each clip you can just move your mouse over the clip icon and you can see the footage in your viewer the other way of looking at it is you can click that you can have a list with the clip at the top or you can also have the thumbnail and here you can make it bigger and you can also expand the time that you want to see so it stretches it out i find that this view is sometimes helpful but a lot of the time it makes it really difficult to view what's in your event sort of folder here because you can't clearly see the clip where the clips end and start so much so i quite like just leaving it on the icon view like that we're going to want to create a new project and we do that by clicking right in the timeline where it says new project final cut pro is quite good it does guide you on where to click so we're going to call our project beginner tutorial i like to use a system where i number my cuts so that my first cut will always be cut one and then when i want to make an additional edit or trim it down i can change the name to cut two and then i know exactly where my latest cut is so on here i've got beginner tutorial cut one the video format here is set to vertical and that's because my last project i made was a vertical project but i don't want that i want to create a 1080p hd project if you wanted to create a 4k project then 4k is there but today we're doing 1080p hd i'm in the uk so i'm doing a 25p frame rate if you're in the states or in other countries across the world you might want to use the 30p or the 29.97 p again it doesn't really matter too much generally the rule that you should follow is that you use the same as the footage that you're importing so if you've shot all your stuff on an iphone at 30p i would select 30p today though i'm using 25p so now we have created that uh a timeline at the bottom however it's empty so what we want to do is we want to put our media clips from our library onto our timeline and we do this by clicking on the clip now if you notice i've clicked on it once and it's now got a yellow bounding box around the outside of the clip that means that the whole clip has been selected now if i was to click and drag now that down to there and let go i've selected the whole of this clip and i've put it on my timeline so with the second clip of the owl i don't want to put the whole of that clip on my timeline so i'm going to play through it to play a clip in final cut there are two ways you can do it spacebar if i click at the beginning here if i hit spacebar the clip plays from the point of where i am the other three keys that i use all the time and these keys are generally the same on all editing software that you use are the j k and l keys and they're right together just above the space bar on the right k is pause l is forward and j is back so if i want to play forward from this point i press l and that plays the clip forward if i press k it pauses and then if i press j i'll be playing the clip backwards there you go and you can see here that the time codes moving backwards i want to mark up the bit where the owl's head comes up from there i'm going to hit the letter i for in and if you notice on the clip here the yellow line is no longer around the whole clip the yellow line is here the red line is is where my mouse pointer is and if you can see to the right of that you've got the yellow line that is our in point so if i keep playing to select my out i want to have a few more head turns from the owl and i'm going to press o for out and that is the clip that i want so now i've got this clip and i can simply just drag it down to the timeline okay the next clip i'm going to select is the lovely tarantula click the clip play i'm gonna mark an in there i'm gonna keep it playing and i'm gonna mark and out when it's a little bit further on there okay hit stop and then again i'm gonna just drag that down to my timeline and then the last clip i've got is a lovely desert sunset click there and i'm gonna drag the whole of that clip down to my timeline we're working in this tiny section of the timeline but what i haven't showed you is how to zoom in and out of the timeline over here we have this selection tool and this is how you zoom in and out and you can use the track pad or your magic mouse to slide left or right or you can select the hand tool and you can pull it backwards and forwards and shortcuts wise we can also use command plus minus to zoom in and out of the timeline now that we've got the clips on the timeline we're going to make some adjustments and trims i'm going to shorten this top clip now the easiest there's lots of ways to shorten a clip but the easiest way to start off is the blade tool so what we're going to do here is the tools that you've got these letters at the side are the shortcut keys to select the tool if you don't want to use this menu so we're on the select tool at the moment and it is exactly what it says you use this tool to select clips and also to make trims on either side you can see the the tool changes to a little double arrow with a bracket left or right to select the end or the start of the clip the tool we're going to use to trim this clip is the blade tool and we're going to come up to our tool selector here and we're going to click blade you see a nice red picture of a razor blade what that's going to do is splice the clip wherever we click it so i think we should have it so i'm going to hold it there and click the mouse as you can see it's added a dotted white line to tell us that the clip's been cut in half so we're now going to go back to our select tool i'm going to click on the beginning bit of that clip and now you can see we've got two clips there we're going to click on the first one and we're going to hit the backspace key to delete it doesn't delete it from our library it just deletes it from our timeline now we've got a shorter version of that tree into the owl which i really like the beginning and as soon as his head goes back instead of going up to the menu we can just hit the letter b for blade and then we can click and then i'm going to hit a again on the keyboard to select the selection tool and i'm going to click on that second bit of the clip and backspace to delete okay and then our spider now is looking quite long in comparison to the first two clips so again we're going to cut that in half b for blade cut there back to a click on that one and delete again a little bit long on the end so we're going to just chop a little bit off the beginning of that sunset i really want to swap the owl and the spider we select the selection tool a on the keyboard we click on the clip that we want to move and we can literally drag it and it swaps it round so now we've got the tree followed by the spider into the owl next step on the edit checklist add some music what this sequence really needs now is some music but you can't use commercial music if you're going to be using this on youtube or broadcasting or publicizing it in any way because of copyright laws so the best place i've found for music is envato elements it's a great place where you can get stock footage videos sound effects graphics templates photos fonts all that sort of stuff and it's also great for music so for this i think i'm going to just search desert let's see what comes up mystic desert what's that sound like [Music] i mean this definitely got vibes of desert sunsets animals i'm sold all right so we've downloaded our music from envato elements and now we need to import it into our project now in the clip browser here we can right click and import media and we can navigate to where we've downloaded the music select it and import and here it goes we can now see the clip in our browser as you can see the waveforms here for the track and the easy way to just edit this in is to drag it down and it clicks in so as you can see it's made it really long so i'm going to use command minus to zoom out and you can see because we've only put a few clips on the timeline our music is a lot longer so we can use our blade tool again by hitting b and clicking at the end and then go back to our selection tool click our bit that we don't want and click delete and then if we go to the top and hit play nice okay and then at the end where it cuts off i want to add a fade on that music if i go to the end of the audio the music we put in above this line we've got a circle and we can move this in or out and this is how it fades the music out so if i go to here i'm adding a two second fade let's have a listen there that's so much better i also want to add a fade to black at the end so i can click at the end of this clip here and i can hit command t for transition and that adds a transition automatically to the end lovely if we want to make that longer i can right click in it and say change duration now if we see here it says one so it's one second well my audio fade was two so let's as we've clicked right clicked change duration we can use our numbers on our keypad and we just hit 200 and that will be two seconds hit enter and it's made our transition two seconds long to match our audio dissolve great if we did want to put a transition between these shots we could do exactly the same we can click on the cut line and we can hit command t and it the automatic transition is a dissolve through so let's see what that looks like i quite like that what else might we want to do maybe a title let's go to the beginning let's click at the top of the timeline and at the very top here we have here this t that's titles if we click on that there's loads of different presets here that we can use but if we type here basic we get some basic titles and this one here is just a plain title we click on it and we just drag it down and i want it there okay so to change the title we want to go to our inspector which is at the top right of our screen and we want to click the lines it looks like a paragraph and then there's a bit that says text title if we highlight title there and we can type whatever we want so let's call our sequence title desert life just make the text bigger we can move it around so i want it there maybe change the font let's make it um a bigger maybe impact that's quite nice and bold if you scroll down to the bottom there's other options if we wanted to put a little drop shadow on it maybe make it a little bit softer at the back on there maybe something like that i like that that's good maybe a little bit bigger let's make it bold okay so we've got our title now what we want to do at the moment the title is overlapping the spider and the bird the owl so what we're going to do we're going to use our blade tool again hit b and we're going to click there we're on that edit point back to our selection tool by clicking a and then backspace to delete so if we play our title [Music] it cuts on that cut there brilliant the other thing that we do want to be aware of are audio levels now the clips i've imported the the tree and the spider and the owl and the desert they don't have audio on them if they did this blue section under their picture would have a waveform like our music has so we can lower and raise the volume of each of these clips independently if we click on the the music track you can see that we've got a line here we can literally click and drag to make the levels louder or quieter depending on what we want so on zero it was that was pretty spot on for what i would actually want it to be considering that there's no talking in this if the clip of our spider had some other audio we might want to reduce the volume a little bit but that's going a little bit more into depth we're keeping it simple in this tutorial so we're not going to be changing audio levels of different clips but it's good that you know that that is where you can affect the levels of each clip if you want to so now we've got our music we've got our shots we've got our fade out we've got our titles on it i think we're ready to export it so what we do we click back up here into the events we can click on our sequence that we've made at the top from there we go right over to this top button which is the share button and we can share to lots of different things we can do a master file which basically creates a quick time of the file that we want we can go to settings and adjust anything that we want to however these settings are pretty good so all we need to do is give it a name we can rename it here if we want to that's it we just click next tell it where we want to export it and there we go if we look up here in this section we can see that final cut is transcoding and exporting what we need and there we go that is done here is the quicktime file of what we've just made well there you go guys i hope that's been a useful tutorial as an introductory session to final cut pro we've gone through the basics of the software we've imported media we've made an edit we've added music we've added some titles we've affected some levels and fades and transitions and we've exported our finished piece and now we can upload it to youtube or share it with friends on facebook or whatever you you need to do with it so i hope that's been good if you did like it remember to like the video and subscribe to the channel because there is so much more stuff coming this way [Music] soon [Music] bye

Channel: Nick Griffiths Pro Editing

Views: 15,903

Keywords: final cut pro, video editing, final cut pro x, fcpx, fcp, final cut pro beginner tutorial, final cut beginner tutorial, fcpx beginner tutorial, fcpx beginners guide, video editing basics, fcpx beginner, fcpx 101, learn fcpx, learn final cut pro, starting out in fcpx, LEARN FINAL CUT PRO IN 20 MINS, learn fcp, edit like a pro, beginners tutorial in final cut pro, final cut pro for beginners

Id: WsrhqHEKr78

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021