The BEST Final Cut Pro Beginner tutorial

hey guys how's it going so if you are brand new to Final Cut Pro and you're just wondering how to use this software what it's all about you're a little bit intimidated by editing software's well you have come to the right place this is ground zero tutorial for getting started in Final Cut Pro we're going to walk through the very very basics and get you all set up ready to go so I have previously made a Final Cut Pro beginner tutorial and while many people found it very helpful there were definitely a selection of people who found it way too fast and it wasn't helpful for them so as a former high school teacher this is not acceptable I definitely want to be catering to all levels of learners here so it's time to create a new one so this is truly from the beginning breaking down only the most important sections of Final Cut Pro clearly and in detail I'm not going to take 20 to 30 minutes explaining all the tools that you won't need right away I'm only going to be focused on the absolute most important parts in this tutorial alright first things first if you don't yet have the software go to apple.com and download the free 90 trial that's a good length of time see if you'd like this program so this is what it looks like when we open Final Cut Pro there is nothing there it's all empty empty spaces here are the sections that you'll eventually see information in first thing we'll do is go to file new library and you just label this anything you want once we have that we'll go down to that event with the date on it and right here this is where we'll import our media so we'll find the clips that we want to use for this video I found these three and just drag them into our player all right so here's our event and this is our media now we can change the look of that I have a list or we can have our previews I personally like the previews better so that way you can kind of scrub through each clip and see what's in them alright now we want to make a new project click new project name it whatever you want we'll call it New York since these are New York clips and you can leave them there and here you can select the quality u4k if you have 4k footage but 1080p ends up being a smaller file and it's great alright now we want to bring our files into our timeline so you can drag one of them and drop it into the timeline or you can actually just get a select all of them and drop them down into the timeline so if we want to watch our footage in the timeline we just hit spacebar and that stops and starts our clips and we can preview it that way now to zoom in and make our timeline bigger we can just expand it with our mouse or trackpad by spreading our fingers apart or by hitting command + or command - to pop in and out so here are tools to drop down menu of the tools we'll be using blade the majority of the time so that's B if you want to switch the blade tool but it's easier just to hit command B command-b and that'll split the clips and then you can just discard by hitting delete the other clips so I'm gonna use that little section hit command B again discard that clip and now I'll do the same thing here but there's another way we can do it we can just say if we like that section or don't like that section we can drag that over and keep the amount we want that's the same idea as blade as cutting so I like that much of that clip couldn't command B discard that and here we go we've got three clips I'm gonna pinch in zoom in so I can see them more clearly I've got the three clips I'd like to work with now in the middle we can put a transition so right here you'll see that's the transition toolbar so here under here we have lots of different transitions we can select from however let's keep it basic today we'll go to dissolve and use a cross dissolve you just click and drag drop it and there you have one clip dissolving to the next clip super easy to use and it's one of the more frequently used transitions alright next we're just gonna try different ones a blur directional blur let's take a take a look and there you go it's another transition style now as a beginner I would refrain from using too many transitions as it can really make your project look quite tacky and distract the viewers from what you're trying to get across but if you feel like you like it as tasteful then go ahead alright so here we have the effects toolbar and if you just click onto the search menu I'm just gonna click a random one called photo recall and you'll see the effect it has on the clip and there's a wide variety of effects we can use however this is just an example you can play through those effects have a look at them and see which ones you like under the inspection sidebar you can see how you can adjust the settings we're gonna hide that and we're gonna go into colors and adjust the color of our Clips here's the basic default setting of colors and we won't go in depth but here's the basics exposure to hold the whole clip this is the shadow exposure up and down that's how you do a basic contrast raise the highlights and drop the shadows double click on each to reset it and same thing with saturation here saturating the shadows double click the reset you're saturating the highlights so it's just that easy and also we have some of new in color where we can adjust the colors of the shadows mid-tones and highlights but for now we'll just ignore that as they it's more technical so we'll stick to exposure and saturation for now that's it for colors alright we'll do one more transition and we'll just include a fade out that's a nice way to end your video so we can actually extend that fade by just dragging on that transition and now we want to add some music obviously audio is a huge part of editing and I'm gonna show you where I get all of my non-copyright sounds for my videos they will never get a copyright strike you can use them on Instagram on YouTube and you'll never have the sounds disappear or get taken down because they're all fully licensed let me show you so I use a service called epidemic sound so I'm just gonna log in here and show you just how easy it is to use so if you click search and you want to use my personal songs my puss just type in Mark Harrison and here's the playlist that I've curated and I have some of my favorite songs I used to edit on there however if you just want to browse the normal features you can search through on resorbs I'm just gonna select dreamy for an example and then I can even narrow my search in by selecting epic and that will show the number of songs that have those types of vibes for your edit so I'm gonna sample a few now so if you like the song then you can download it by clicking this button right here download the full mix and that will show up in your downloads folder if you want a 7-day free trial of epidemics sound you can download as many song as you want completely copyright free check the link in my description once you've located your song drag it into your editor same thing once it's in your media files you just drag it onto your timeline or below your timeline cut it at the end by hitting command B once your song is selected delete the remainder and now we have a song attached to our video [Music] alright so next up we want to add sound effects now if we click this middle section here you just in the search bar you can search any sort of sound effects so let's go city sound effect and here are some samples of different sounds from the city alright so I'm going to use city 5 I like that sound the best and I'm going to just use a portion of it same thing just drag it under your clip where the sound effects go now we have sound and you'll notice that the sound effect is very loud so the way do we just have volume is up here in our inspector or just drag the volume down where you see the waveforms on the clip both work alright next we want to add a title by clicking on the T there then you go to the search bar again type in basic and that is the easiest title for us to use just click and drag drop it on top of the clip this time and drag it to fit the size and now we'll go to our inspector by clicking on the the paragraph looking lines type in the text we want to use I'll type in New York and then select the font I'm actually happy with that font you can change the style as well if you want and the size now you can just drag the text to the middle or to wherever you want now we have text on our video as well let's take a look at the sample looks great ok let's cut our text in half by clicking command B which splits the title and just rename the second half and we can type in something like summer for example and that kind of gives more description above our video New York summer great those are the basic tools now that's all that's left is to export so let's go up to file share master file and we can kind of scrub through our video there by looking thumbnail then just hit next or you can name it and now we're finished all right I thought was easy for you to follow and you understand the basic structure of Final Cut Pro and you want to learn more and more in depth then check out my next tutorial which is still a level 1 beginner tutorial but it's a follow along tutorial where I provide the video clips for you and together we edit a vertical Instagram story in that tutorial we go in much more detail I show you how to properly structure your folders speed up and slow down clips create different aspect ratios transform footage and much more so if you did find this video helpful don't forget to Like and subscribe and see you in the next tutorial [Music]

Channel: Mark Harrison

Views: 147,900

Keywords: Final cut pro, Editing, video, tutorial, FCPX, filmmaking, camera

Id: -VgAmHEEQGg

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020