Mastering Final Cut Pro: Tips and Tricks for Beginners 2024

hey there welcome to the video I'm Mark Brown from editorskeys.com and if you're new here consider subscribing if you're into Final Cut Pro in this video I'm going to show you everything you need to know to Master Final Cut Pro if you're a beginner especially if you're coming from a program like iMovie so let's just jump straight into the MacBook Pro and Final Cut Pro and I'll show you how all this works okay so when you first open Final Cut Pro the most important thing you want to do is become super organized so what I do is I save all my footage on an external SSD not only is it a great place to store your footage it's going to be faster than an old spinning disc so what I next do is I create folders for all the types of footage I have so you can see here I'm going to create one for GoPro I'm going to create one for the iPhone footage we're going to create one for the Sony DSLR or A7 a7s3 and one for sound effects now the reason for this is fairly obvious but this will keep all of your footage and audio organized and then I'm going to show you what you can do and how you can import this into Final Cut Pro so let's do that tip two shortcuts shortcuts shortcuts Final Cut Pro is packed with shortcuts that can save you a ton of time so take time to learn them and use them all trust me it will be worth it when you start to know all of the shortcuts it saves you so much time compared to looking through menus or clicking icons with your mouse this right here is the editor's keys keyboard cover from Final Cut Pro I'll put links to both the keyboard covers and the dedicated keyboards in the description below tip three presets these are your new best friend don't be afraid to use these presets that you can see here on the right hand side they're super super useful but I'm going to show you an even more powerful way of using them so first of all let me just show you if you wanted to make this clip look like an old TV you can simply grab grab this and drag and drop it on top and it's going to give you that effect so super super handy but this is another way that I use presets so let's just say I want to do some color correction here I'm just going to do this very fast for you let's just say you're always using the same camera and you find that you want to bring the Shadows down you want to bring the mid tones down a little bit to Crunch it the highlight's a bit bright so we're going to bring those down and then we're going to globally we're gonna make the saturation a bit higher so if we look at the before and after can see the difference there now let's say we want to do some other basic things and we want to do this on almost every shot that we do let's just say I wanted to you know add an aged film look on there so you can see we've got a color correction and we've got this aged film effect now you can go through and add multiple effects maybe you want to add some stabilization Etc you can do that but what a lot of people don't realize is that they do this and then they'll either copy and paste this to the next clip and what you can actually do to speed things up a lot here in Final Cut Pro is save effects preset click this here so you can tick all of these boxes here that you want it to apply to if you don't want it to rotate and things like that and then give it a name so this is going to be color graded TV I'm going to save that boom and now that will be in all of our video effects so if I type in color graded TV we can see it comes up there so you can see I've got this effect here I'm just going to Simply drag and drop this onto the first clip and it's giving it the exact same look we can even do it on this footage here boom and we can apply this to multiple shots so this is super handy I do this when I film with my iPhone because I know the iPhone footage comes out almost the same every time and I can simply add some effects that make the iPhone really pop tip four is color grading don't be afraid I'm going to give you a very very quick tutorial here on what I do to most of my shots most of the time so let's actually remove the color wheels and the Aged effect and I'll show you what I would generally do as a very quick color correction and see if this helps you so I'm going to click up here and I'm going to make sure I've got the color wheels set up if you haven't got the color wheels you can click this here and just change it to color wheels right here the next thing I'm going to do is let's get rid of that I'm going to click View and then I'll click it I'm going to click view video scopes and then I have um this icon here and I have it set to waveform and Luma and then essentially what I do how I do if I want to do a quick color grade is I use these waveforms here now it looks pretty confusing if you're looking at this for the first time but essentially the zero is your shadows the 98 to 100 is your highlights you don't want any highlights going higher than this and you don't want any Shadows going lower than this but you can also use it to make your footage look a lot better so I start here I start with the Shadows I bring the Shadows down so they're kind of touching that bottom line there like that I'm only going to make style adjustments here mid tones this is really up to you bring it up if you want the uh you know the mid tones of your footage to be brighter or if you want to give it a more crunched look you can bring it down I quite like bringing it down a lot of the time so I'm going to bring that down there the highlights in this shot they can actually go up a little bit so I'm going to bring that up there and then saturation you can either again bring it down you're going to go back to Global and you can either bring the saturation down here like this to desaturate or in my case I want to saturate this I'm going to bring this up a little bit now if we turn this tick box on and off you can see just these subtle adjustments makes quite a big difference to the footage there look at that let's try again on another clip here so I'm just going to quickly delete off the effects that we put on here and actually this is coming straight out of a GoPro so this is actually looking pretty damn good I'm going to do the same thing so let's go to Shadows I think we could really bring these Shadows down here I'm just going to delete this because we've already got the color wheels Okay so let's bring the Shadows down so the touching that bottom line there just below it I think that looks good mid-tones again I'm going to bring these down because you can see the mid tones here are quite high up I'm going to bring them so they're a little bit lower down and it will actually make the blues a little bit more Punchy but if you bring them all down you can see that there look how Punchy look if I bring it up they look too washed out so I'm going to bring it down there so they're sitting right within that sort of 50 Area highlights the highlights aren't too bad but they could actually do being brought up a little bit so I'm just going to bring them up slightly there and then globally I actually think the saturation is okay so I would generally leave that but let's just bring up a little bit so you can see what it would look like and now let's turn it on and off there we go and even though that footage looked really great when I first played it to you didn't it just ticking the arm making those really subtle adjustments there really is making this GoPro footage really start to pop so don't be afraid to use color correction tip five is the magic of three point editing actually I would say there's four point editing I'm going to show you four keys that really help me edit a lot faster so the first one is the queue and this is the connect key on your keyboard shortcuts so let's just say you're editing along and you want this Cathedral shot here to appear above this timeline as a connected clip simply Mark your in and out points and then tap Q on your keyboard and you can see here the clip has been uh connected to the clip below and if we move it around it's gonna stay put that's one of the keyboard shortcuts let's delete that now let's just say we want to insert the clip right here where I put the playhead again I'm going to go up here these are my in and out points and I'm going to hit the W key boom it's inserted this footage right between the clip here split the clip and put this in between super handy edit let's go back next up is the append now append is with the E key so press e and this is going to send it right to the end of your timeline so this one is super handy actually if like me sometimes you've got Clips there actually in order so I'll go through I'll mark an in point there out point there and then I'll just press e and then it's going to go down so it's a very quick way of adding Clips to your timeline once you've made the in and out points so you can do in and out up here drag them down not even drag them down use the E the append this is the magic here using these shortcuts the append key and then we can get editing like that next up is the overwrite key very very similar and essentially to uh what we've been doing we're going to press D here and you can see what it's actually going to do is it's just going to overwrite anything that's in that place there so let's do that again so if we have the playhead there and on here we press the D key boom it's actually going to overwrite whatever is there and place it with the clip you have from your project viewer tip six is to make sure you use audio enhancements these are a real big deal and I've got some major improvements recently in Final Cut and I can't play our audio to you right now but I really want you to play around with these forget some of the audio effects you have down here a lot of people go straight to these but actually if you're doing a piece to camera if you have a small microphone if you're recording and there's noise in the background check out the other videos on our Channel where we've actually tested this out but this is one of my favorites The Voice isolation tool is so so good I'll put a link up in the description above this video to check out that video but this will help you remove any background noise you've also got equalizations as well which you can completely play around with and make your audio sound as good as it coming from a studio we've got loudness we've got noise removable we've got hum removal as well and you can add other effects like panning if you want the audio to go to the left and the right and you can add keyframes as well so if you want to add fading to your audio you can do that here with keyframes if you want to see a video on keyframes let me know and I'll get that one recorded next up is compound Clips let's just say you've got 10 Clips in your timeline and you don't want Final Cut to mess these around and you want to treat those clips As One Clip all you need to is select all of your Clips this could be any number of Clips I'm just going to show you with these two here and then I'm going to hit option and G and this is going to create a new compound clip call it whatever you want I'm going to call it FCP clip we then have this single clip here that now can't be chopped apart moved around or edited super handy if you have a sequence that you want to keep locked in now I can hear you say Mark well what if I actually want to change the edit all you do is double click and you can change and then go back boom this is a compound clip and then finally when you have your edit ready make sure to use the share button up here now there's lots of different settings but actually if you want to quickly export for YouTube or Facebook there is nothing wrong with using this export setting it's as close to perfect as possible in terms of allowing you to export something super fast that works really well for YouTube Tick Tock or YouTube so I'd recommend definitely starting with this option you just want to make sure that you do enter your title here your description any tags because this helps you become found if you're using on platforms like YouTube you can change the resolution and then change the compression for either faster encode or better quality once you get a bit more experience you can change it and start making your own defaults there's loads of great videos on this and we have a video on the channel if you want to see how you can export in the very best settings for YouTube so there we go thanks for watching I hope that helped and make sure to check out our next Final Cut Pro video up here

Channel: Editors Keys

Views: 15,587

Keywords: editors keys, editorskeys, video editing, final cut pro tips, how to use final cut pro, final cut pro beginner tips, final cut pro tips and tricks, final cut pro tutorial, final cut pro, how to use final cut pro x, final cut pro x, final cut pro x tutorial, quick final cut pro tips, beginner final cut pro tips, 5 awesome final cut pro tips to blow your mind, learn final cut pro x, final cut pro for beginners, final cut pro tutorial for beginners, fcpx tutorial

Id: H__OlG1ps9E

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023