LEARN FINAL CUT PRO X IN 20 MINUTES // TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS

Stuart Carroll here and I am going to teach you everything you need to know about fcpx in 20 minutes between us Alena and I have edited hundreds of wedding videos music videos corporate videos YouTube videos on Final Cut Pro and we love it as a platform it really is very good but it's expensive and this pro level functionality and they're like multicam editing that you may not need the part might not think is worth paying up for so if that's you do check out the link in our description to our free ebook a purchasing gate for video editing software we run through a whole bunch of features explaining them so you can understand what you need or what you want and you can compare that against a purchasing table so you can see the features of all the different software there's couple of recommendations in there do check it out anyway this video is about Final Cut Pro X Final Cut Pro 10 this is going to be intense is going to be fast you might need to pause you might need to take notes this is professional software so I have assumed a little bit of familiarity at least with the process of opening documents and using your computer and so on and so forth so we're gonna get into this pause if you need to let's do it alright let's get into this file new library let's call this drawn film shall we within our libraries we have events and projects events are groupings of projects we don't really need them unless we are dealing with enormous edits so let's work at the project level we'll rename the event drawn film and let's import some media locate where you've saved your files this will just have the same structure as you've created in finder select those files and on the right hand side I want to bring your attention to two things first up we want to leave the files in place there's no need to create duplicates it just uses up hard drive space second of all we're going to create keywords from the folder structure that we've already created in finder you see the relevance of this in a second if you click the little down arrow next to the drawn film event you'll see audio and video with little Keys next to them those are the keywords that we've created because we opted to say our keywords from our folder structure those keywords correspond with the folders that we've set up in finder when we imported the Midd I know this sounds really boring and you want to get editing straight away but I strongly recommend organizing your media and folders in finder first to give us a fighting chance when we import into Final Cut speaking of organization let's click the drop-down arrow next to smart collections and you'll see we have ways of itemizing our media by all video audio only favorites projects and stills let's create our first project file new project in the dialog box we'll give a project name let's call it part 1 and you'll see it sits within the event drawn film we have some video settings we can adjust for K 25 frames per second adjust as you wish and 99.9% of the time the standard audio settings will be fine excellent you can see that we now have a timeline in the bottom half of final cuts but before we get into that let's take a look at the footage we imported in the browser window select the video keywords and you'll see with the first file there if we just hover the mouse over the image that comes up we can skim through the file and look for the bits that we want it's a very quick and easy and intuitive way of looking through your video files I want you to learn some keyboard shortcuts even at this early stage in the process spacebar stops and starts playback you're going to use that all the time but we can go one better than that press L for forward playback press K to stop the playback and press J for reverse playback coincidentally all three keys are right next to each other on the keyboard so by combining you're skimming with JK and L you can quickly navigate through all your footage and find out what parts you want to keep and use in your edit quick tip if you double press or triple press J or L it will playback at double or triple speed click on this little icon at the top to toggle between filmstrip and list mode we're now in filmstrip mode as a visual depiction of the clips that you have imported it can be a very useful way of doing things I tend to operate in list mode but it is entirely up to you we can also resize our windows so if you're doing editing up here in the browser window you give yourself a little bit more space to skim through your footage and I don't want to only show you what buttons to press and Final Cut Pro I want to make you a better editor so let's take a look at what a lot of people would do at this stage in the process you found a clip you like up in the browser window why don't you select that pull it down into the timeline with the mouse select a few more pull them all down and just have a good skim through it's very intuitive at the end of the day just to look through your creation you can change the length of the clips just by pulling the clips in a note from the sides is very easy to do rearrange them as well just drag them from A to B and before you know it you're starting to create your edit now this approach works great if you're working with a small number of curated Clips like I'm demonstrating here by all means go for it but if you're editing a wedding conference a music video something with loads of angles loads of clips this approach is going to get out of hand very very quickly so let's look at a smarter way here we have a six-minute clip of a Lena walking around the Scottish Highlands we're skimming through the clip using the trackpad because we can it's super fast super efficient and we can see there are lots of little pieces in here that we might want to use but they're all within the six-minute clip one option would be to select the individual pieces drag them down onto the timeline and then we have a bunch of Clips that we can play around with in our IDI but that's still not the best way of doing things let's skim forward to the first piece that we think might be interesting this looks good okay I think we'll go with this so let's press I for in point and look at the little yellow bracket that appeared up there in the filmstrip press alpha forward playback will continue to the end of our select care to stop and let's press or for our out point and look at the closed bracket there up on the filmstrip this is where the magic happens so if this is the only thing you take away from this video I am happy our chosen clip trapped between our in and out points as depicted on our filmstrip by those yellow brackets is our select press F to favorite it you'll see a little green marker appear between those brackets we can now refer back to that little clip at a later date plucking it out of that broader six minute clip let's favorite some more clips and then you have to find all those favorites getting rid of the bits that we've just discarded as you can see here we continue to work our way through the six-minute clip looking for little bits that we like pressing I for endpoint or for out point and f2 favorites go up to that drop-down where it currently says how you'd reject it click on that and scroll down to favorites check this out it's amazing that a big six-minute clip has now been broken down into the favorite component parts this is the selection of Clips from which you will edit in future not the previous six minute clip you can no tap into those clips as and when you wish the work has all been done though we've not cluttered up our browser with loads of bits of unwanted Clips we have a lovely directory of selects that we can use to build our edits this is editing in Final Cut Pro X please don't think that you're wasting your time because you've not pulled everything down onto your timeline this will save you so much time especially if you're getting into bigger creative edits where you need a little bit of time just to ponder your next move being able to see all those selects up there ready for use is there's just no comparison between this approach and the previous approach the one time I would use the old approach for editing and drag the whole clip down into the timeline as if I was editing a YouTube video in this instance I'm relying on looking at the waveform for identifying where I want to make my cuts finding where I've captured audio I'm looking for the best that I just want to chuck away because obviously there's a lot of repetition a lot of mistakes skimming through using the waveform as a guide it's easier to do that down on the timeline then it is up in the browser window when you find a piece that you want to chop out press command B that cuts the clip and just press backspace to delete the selected element that you no longer want you can of course still drag in from the size of the clips as well to shorten eclipses is it's not always as precise I think command B can work a little bit better and so it continues you just skim through the key feature here is that we're dealing with a linear edit we're not anticipating shuffling all these chunks of the clips we've just got 30 minute recording we want to cut out all the nonsense and everything else stays in place we've got a lot more to talk about obviously but I do get excited about matters of workflow and productivity yes I'm a little bit sad like that but I hope you can embrace some of that and apply it to your own projects okay let's crack on a function that you're going to use all the time is command plus or command minus to zoom in and zoom out of your timeline obviously if you want to make accurate cuts you need to zoom in but if you want to see your whole project for an overview you want to zoom out the up and down arrow keys help us navigate to the starting point of each clip and if we want to make fine tune adjustments pressing left and right on the arrow keys moves to playhead forwards and backwards by one frame that's it same let's build out our edit now so let's select our favorites and we're going to use some of these nice Clips that we've chosen already as b-roll for our YouTube film let's click on the first clip then after skimming through it we decide that we want to drag it down onto our timeline so we'll click on it and pull it down and position it as you wish if you position on top of the primary storyline then it functions as b-roll playing over the top of the talking head shot of me when we play through the timeline we see what is uppermost at any point in time the shortcut for this particular kind of edit is cure moving on to the next clip let's say we wanted to place it between two clips on the primary storyline we press W and as you can see inserts it in between those two clips after you've done that you can reposition as you wish the mouse or trackpad is useful in this respect and in this instance you can see we're dragging out of the primary storyline back up to the b-roll sequence that we've created you can move those Clips around and trim them but you'll notice that they're not stuck together the primary storyline down below is magnetic but the b-roll second drew storyline is not if you want those clips to be stuck together because you're creating a nice sequence then select them and press alt G and you can see that we now have a little magnetic storyline above the primary storyline let's build our edit node by dropping some clips damn we've put the playhead at the start we select a clip and press W to drop it down we just drag the sades in we'll pull another one down or we'll press W in this instance and you can see how quickly and efficiently you can start to build your edit and say it FCPX we'll do the same at the end of the sequence so rather than drag down to the end let's select our clip and press e that's the shortcut to append a clip to the end of the primary storyline something that you will use quite often I should imagine I know I'm throwing a lot of shortcuts at you so please don't be put off I just want to open your eyes to the efficiency gains that can be had by learning these keystrokes let's get a couple more workflow issues dealt with and then we can get on with the fun stuff like calibrating effects transitions and all those kind of things when you're stacking layers sometimes you want to see what's underneath your b-roll without necessarily deleting that clip if we press V it Gray's it out and switches it off and you can see the talking head that lies underneath of course press V to switch it back on as you've seen Final Cut works around a magnetic timeline system so when you pull a clip down onto the timely and everything else gets shoved to the side to mix space for it now that may not be what you're used to or you might not want that approach so there are ways around that and I'll show you that now let's say we want to break up this clip with a little segment of another clip in the middle well we could press Q to drop the clip down on top that can a b-roll approach but it may not be what you want so instead press D and it will drop the clip right down as you can see the clip gets split in two it doesn't get pushed to the side personally I'm one claim to use Q and build the timeline upwards we can always at the end of the project consolidate it all the way back down but I find it easier to see the component parts moving upwards just a personal preference finally when we drag clips to crop them the rest of the timeline moves with us now if we're doing a music video where timings are very very important we don't want that to happen we want the rest of the clips to be left in place press P and we'll see the arrow change to a different kind of arrow now when we drag the end of a clip to crop it rather than pulling the whole timeline with us it creates a spacer if you're more used to organizing your timeline in this way you can see it's very easy to do on Final Cut press a to switch back to the standard arrow for use on your magnetic timeline normally it's nice to feed into our videos so let's head over to the transition browser click on that and you can see all the transitions type feed into the search box up comes feed to color drag that on to the clip at the start and as you can see when we press play the clip fades in from black we don't always want these harsh hard cuts in between our Clips so let's drag on a cross dissolve and when we press play you can see that we dissolve between the two shots like most editing software Final Cut has a whole bunch of exciting colorful transitions but I would suggest initially at least you can find yourself to these two transitions if you want to change the length of a transition grab the side of it and stretch it out watch this now big dreamy cross dissolve taking place over a few seconds what if you want to change the length of the underlying clip but you can't get at it because there's no transition in the way well do you see the two little bars at the top corners of the transition instead of clicking the side of the transition click on the bars and pull the clip to the left or the right and that adjusts the length of the underlying clip leaving the transition as is next to the transitions browser we have the effects browser and here you can scroll through all manner of effects that we can apply to our video footage here in Final Cut take camcorder as an example click on that and this is where Final Cut is really cool we don't actually have to apply the effect to see what it looks like on the clip just scrub over the effects in the effects browser and we can see the effect that it has makes it very easy to browse through and see the impact of different effects on your clips to apply an effect to a clip simply drag it onto the clip or with the clip selected double click on the effect and it will add it you can then view the effect and change its parameters up in the video inspector speaking of which let's head on up there right now to the video inspector and see what other manipulations we can make to our clips with the clip selected as defined by the yellow box around the perimeter of the clip we can control a whole bunch of parameters up in the video inspector opacity controls the transparency of the clip and if you slide it down you start to see what's underneath the clip normally it will be at 100% in the transform section we have scale so we can zoom in and zoom out reset each individual parameter by clicking that little curvy arrow we can rotate the clip again reset that normally it'll be zero what that's good for adjusting squinty horizons on drone footage for example transform we can move the clip to the left or right up or down on the X and y axis if we scroll down to crop then we can cut the frame for some split screens for example distort this allows us to twist the frame and manipulate it I have to say I don't really use that very often stabilization is great for post-production stabilization on shaky footage it can work very effectively Ruling shutter allows us to remove some rolling shutter effects that's quite an advanced function a special conformal owes us to stretch the clip to fit the timeline click on the triangle next to the filmstrip and you will see the color inspector exposure a saturation and color we can adjust the highlights mid-tones and shadows in each of those as a big topic but let's just give a quick demonstration on this YouTube talking head shot press control/command 1 to get rid of the events browser and command 7 to bring up the waveform with reference to that waveform let's raise the highlights a little bit bring the shadows down add some contrast to that image we can add a little bit of saturation make those colors a little bit more vivid in the color panel we can remove blue or we can add blue it depends on your taste as I say it's a very advanced subject but it's a great demonstration of how behind the surface of final cut it really is professional level software here we've selected the color of the backdrop on the hue versus hue curve and if we stretch that out we can make color adjustments just to that background behind this user-friendly interface in Final Cut we have some real power at our disposal here to do it any of those effects go back to the video inspector select the effect in question and press backspace ok that was intense we have more in depth color grading tuition here on the channel but for now let's take a deep breath and let's go deeper copying and pasting clips as a simple case of selecting the clip pressing command C moving the playhead to where you want it to go and pressing command V now what if you only wanted to copy and paste the effects from one clip across other clips in your project with the source clip selected press command shift C select the target clip press command shift V and up comes a menu of effects that you can then paste across onto the target clip assuming your selected clip has an audio track if you click on the little speaker it opens up the audio inspector here you can adjust the volume of the audio track as you would expect we also have audio enhancements like the graphic equaliser so if we click on that little logo there up it comes we've got some presets that we can play with flat voice enhance so on and so forth if you've recorded the track too quietly then we have an enhancement called loudness where you can increase the volume of the track without necessarily increasing the noise and hiss within it if you do have background noise in your track then we also have noise removal you can try home removal as well we can also pan the audio from left to right in the effects browser we also have lords of audio effects that we can play around with it's a real strength of Final Cut here to have so much power on the audio side of things as well you'll recall at the time of import that we imported an audio folder well in that audio folder we have this song that we want to add to our edit so let's drag it down onto the timeline and again up in the Audio inspector we can adjust the volume of the track now if we look on the timeline look at that line running through the audio track we can grab on that and pull it up and down to adjust the volume audio tracks don't always have a smooth fade in so look at that little teardrop at the start of the track and grab on that and pull it in to the right and that gives us a nice fade in we can even right-click on that teardrop and it gives us a selection of fade in profiles that you can play around with if we only want to turn down a portion of the track then hold down alt and click on the volume line in that track it will add a keyframe add another one a little bit further along and then grab the volume and pull it down and you see we have a nice smooth decline in volume between those two keyframes final cut comes with some of its own tracks and sound effects if we click on that little icon I'm showing you up there then we can sort all of that by jingles for example and we have some short songs and some long songs that we can play with depending on your needs we can go back and look for sound effects as well and this is just a great way of adding texture to your edits often you'll want to add a title to your work so if we click on that little icon it brings up the title saved by now a bit like your transitions less is more Final Cut gives us a whole bunch of options here so for the sake of demonstration let's pick one of these fairly glossy three-dimensional ones simply drag it down on top of your timeline and much like any other clip just pull in the sides of it to adjust the length of it if you click on it then we can control all manner of parameters we can change what it says of course you can adjust the font the size of it add a drop shadow so on and so forth if we play it you see that it comes in at root it's actually looks quite good and then the film continues if and though I would suggest just picking a standard custom title pick a nice font resize it drag it in to the center looks quite good now if you want that title to fade in and fade out just select the title and add some cross dissolves again the same way you would with a standard video clip if we play with fade n the title fades in fades out cross dissolve into the next clip I think the whole thing starting to look quite smart when you've finished exporting a simple go to file share Apple devices 4k here you can actually scrub over this little window to see the project that you're exporting which i think is quite fun we can add in some description creator and tag information and if we go to settings we can change the encode speed so h.264 is the standard encode quality but you have faster encode and better quality you can adjust the resolution if you want to I would leave that at 4k here and then when you click Next you can select your export destination and you are done stop the clock how did we do did we get all done in 20 minutes or maybe it's 21 minutes or 22 minutes I didn't just want to show you how to press all the buttons I wanted to give you a little bit of an insight into how to structure your projects if like me editing consumes and a nice amount of your life then anything that you can do to improve your productivity is just massive with that in mind please in the comments below do leave any suggestions for shortcuts or workflow improvements tips techniques you employ it with Final Cut Pro also don't forget to grab yourself a copy of that ebook in the description especially if you've not already committed to an editing platform as I say Final Cut Pro is quite expensive in the grand scheme of things and it may not be the right system for you get an understanding of what editing software can offer you and then see if there's another piece of software that might be a little bit easier or more accessible there's no right or wrong and most importantly most importantly editing is just a means to an end as a way of assembling the content that you've already created the most important thing is to be able to capture your footage correctly no amount of editing is going to save bad filming so do horn your craft before you get too bogged down in the editing it's what you do with it that counts so we could edit beautiful advanced pieces of work on cheap free software to be honest with you having a good piece of software an expensive piece of software does not make you a better editor in the same way that having an expensive camera does not make you a better camera operator anyway it's been a pleasure talking to you as always stay tuned for more editing content and we will see you next time you [Music]

Channel: Stewart and Alina

Views: 721,336

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Id: ygBlgaT78mM

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020