Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi guys, welcome to
my Skillshare class. My name is Mark Ellis. During my first year on YouTube, I gained over
22,000 subscribers, 1.7 million views, and a master more than a 158,000 watch hours. This isn't normal,
but a huge part of the early success is because I know how to tell a great story. When it comes to video editing, you'll often hear people
say that the magic happens in the edit,
and they're right. In fact, just like
every other YouTuber, I shoot far more footage than what ends up
on the channel. Since starting my
YouTube channel, I've worked out how to edit
videos to hook viewers in right at the start and keep their attention
right to the end. In this course, we're
going to go through everything from importing your audio and video
footage into Final Cut Pro, editing it, getting fancy
with onscreen graphics, and the all-important
final polish. We'll also look at how to
bring your videos alive with B-roll and how to get into
some basic color grading. I've poured everything I've
learned since starting my own YouTube channel
into this class, I'll share with you my secrets, my tips, and tricks, and reveal some of
the mistakes I've made so you don't have
to make them yourself. Most importantly, I'd
like you to share the same early success
that I experienced. Let's get into it. I'll
see you in lesson one.
2. How to record your video and audio: During this class,
you'll learn how to edit your first ever YouTube video. But of course, to
do that, you need some audio and video footage
and more importantly, the gear to film
and record it on. Now in this class, I'm not
going to go through how to record your video and audio, that's for another class. But I thought I'd give
you a few tips on how best to use the gear that
you might have available. Firstly, there's no
need to spend thousands on camera and audio
gear, you don't need to. If you've got one of these, a smartphone, that
is all you need. The only thing I would recommend spending some money
on if you have some budget is a smartphone compatible Lav mic
like this one. This just clips onto your
top like so and gives you slightly better audio
than what you would get from the smartphone itself. But even that isn't a necessity. To be honest, a smartphone
will do the job perfectly. There's no need to buy
an expensive camera like this one or an expensive mic that's sitting above my head. You just don't need it. Remember, that kind
of stuff can come further down the line once your channel is
making some revenue. Some of the best YouTube or
most successful YouTubers on the planet use their smartphones
or very cheap cameras. What's far more important
is that you can tell a great story through
the editing process, which is what this
class is all about. Some key takeaways from
this first lesson. Use your smartphone
if you've got one, if you have any
budget to spend on your YouTube channel
during these early days, get yourself a Lav mic. Always pick a nice brightly
lit room so you don't have to worry too much about lighting
and just start filming. In the next lesson,
we're going to jump straight into Final Cut Pro and I'm going to
demystify libraries, events, and projects.
Let's get started.
3. Libraries, events, and projects - explained: In this lesson, I'm going
to reveal what libraries, events and projects
are in Final Cut Pro. Now if you're confused
by libraries, events, and projects
in Final Cut Pro, you're not alone, don't worry, I was to begin with two, but the good news
is it's actually quite straightforward to
get your head around. I think part of
the issue is that there's lots of
different ways that you could potentially
use libraries, events, and projects
in Final Cut Pro, so everyone has
their own method. This is mine and I think
it works pretty well. If we start at the
top of the hierarchy, we have the library
and that contains absolutely everything from
your events to your projects, and to your audio and video. Now when it comes to
your audio and video, the library can technically contain all of those
individual files. However, I don't recommend that, and I'll explain why
in the next lesson. The way that I use libraries is actually really
straightforward. I just have one and that
one library is called MER, which stands for
marketers reviews. I don't create separate
libraries for each video. Some people do, I think that
gets a little bit messy, so for me, I just have this
one library called MER, and within that, I have
my multiple events. Now an event as far as I'm concerned is an
individual video. For instance, I might call
this one the iPhone 13 review. That event then becomes
that single video. For every video that I make, I create a separate event for that video within
the MER library. An event is quite simply a
container for your project, which I'll come
onto in a moment. But also all of the individual
shots that you'll be using and all of your
audio. What are projects? Well, projects sit
within your events and a project for me is just a version of the
video that I'm working on. This might be, for
example, Version 1. Typically, I only ever
have one project per event because I normally only create one version of my video. But for instance, you
might want to create separate versions
for social media or there might just be a longer
version that you want to create for a different platform. That's why it's so
useful to create multiple projects
within an event. Now the other thing to bear
in mind when you create a new project is that
you'll need to set the correct audio and video
settings for your gear. If I go into File, New, Project, Final Cut Pro gives me a
whole bunch of settings here that we can choose to match the audio and video
that we've shot. You can choose a
video format here, we can choose the
resolution, the frame rate. Now to get these settings right, it's important
that you look into the camera that you're using, whether it be your smartphone or a camera like this one I'm
using here and just make sure that you set the
right video format and the right frame rate to match whatever your camera
is shooting up. Some key takeaways, the library is your
one single location for absolutely everything
to do with your videos. Within that library,
you'll have events. I would recommend creating a separate event for every
video that you make. Within the events, you have
projects and a project is basically a version of the video that
you're working on. You can have multiple
versions if you want to or have different projects for different types of video for different platforms
like social media. Also within that project, you'll have all of your
separate video footage and audio recordings that
you add to the video. In the next lesson, we're
going to go through creating a library event and project from scratch and importing
your video and audio.
4. Importing your footage and audio: In this lesson, I'm going
to show you how to arrange your video and
audio files so that they're ready to put
straight into Final Cut Pro but also how to create
your first library, your first event, and your first project. Now, before I add anything
into Final Cut Pro, I copy all of the individual
audio and video files onto my computer. What I'll do first is create
a folder for my video. I created one here
called My First Video. Then into this folder, I'm going to create three
additional folders. The first one is going
to be for a-roll. An a-roll is basically when
you're talking to the camera. I then create a
folder called b-roll. B-roll is the footage that you record that isn't
you talking to a camera, but it's perhaps via
product footage or just incidental footage
that you want to place on top of your a-roll. Lastly, because I record
my audio separately, I create a third
folder called Audio. Now, you might not
need to do this. If for example, you're using your smartphone to
record your videos, then the video footage
will contain the audio, so you won't need to do this. But if you are
recording your audio separately like I
am with a mic here, then it's best to create a separate folder
for that audio. Now that I have these folders, I can start copying the
raw footage into them. To do that, you might be
copying, for example, from your phone or
from a memory card. Just to save time
for this lesson, I've just copied everything
onto the computer already. Let's get started. If I head into my first
video folder here, I've got those three folders
that I created earlier. Into those, I can
basically copy or drag the individual footage. For instance, this is my a-roll, I'm going to pop that
into the a-roll folder. I've got a bunch of
b-roll here as well, which I can just drag
into the b-roll folder. Then I've got a few audio files that I want to use in
this video as well, so I'll just very quickly pop them into my audio
folder. That's it. I now have three folders
complete with all of the individual files that
I want to use in this video. The next step is to head into Final Cut Pro and create
our first library. If I open Final Cut Pro, now, depending on whether or not
you've used Final Cut Pro before and you've had a
previous library open, it might open the previous
library that you had opened, or if you didn't do that or you closed the
previous library, you might see this
dialog box here. It's asking me if I want to open a previous library
or create a new one, I'm going to select "New" here. The other way to do that
is to click "File", " New", and "Library"
at the top. From here, I'm going
to create a library called My Channel. Click "Save". That's
quite a library for us on the left-hand side. Now, in here, I'm
going to create my first videos event. Remember, an event is for me, it's just the video itself, and I create a
separate event for every single video that I make. For simplicity, I'm just
going to call this one My First Video. That's it. Now the next step is to
create a project which you do very simply by
clicking on "File", "New", and "Project". Now, remember at this point
it's really important that you select the right
settings for your camera. For my camera, it shoots in 4K, but also at a frame rate of 24P. They are the two things that
I change at this stage. Then for the project name, you
can call it what you like, but generally, you might just
want to call it Version 1. So it's Version 1 of
this particular video. Click "Okay" and there we go. That's our library, event, and project created
for this video. Next, we need to get
all of that video and audio into this event. Now there's two ways to
do this in Final Cut Pro, you can either copy all of those video and audio files
into the library itself, or you can leave them in
place on your computer or on your external hard drive and
just add them to the event. Now, I always do the latter,
and that's for two reasons. The first reason is that if
you add all of those files, all those individual
video and audio files into the library itself, that library is going
to get very, very big. The second reason for
leaving those files in place is because
it just creates a much easier way to find all that video and audio footage in the future if you need to. They don't get lost and swallowed up in the
library itself. To make sure this happens for every video that you create, there's one setting
that you need to change in Final Cut Pro. If we head into the
Final Cut Pro menu at the top of the screen, go into Preferences then
into the Import Tab, for files at the top,
there's two options, either copy to library
storage location or leave files in place. You'll probably find
that by default, the top one will be chosen. With that chosen, all of your individual files and audio will end up
in the library. That's not desirable. Instead, we're going to choose, Leave Files In Place. Once you've done that, close
the window and we can now start adding the video
and audio to this event. Doing this is really
straightforward. If we leave Final Cut Pro
open, bring up finder, find the files that you
covered across a moment ago, so these are all in here for me. I can choose my a-roll, drag that into the event. What that does, it
places the video in the event but it doesn't copy the actual file to the library, it leaves it in place
on my hard drive. Basically I can keep doing
that with everything. I can add all of my audio and finally all of my b-roll into the event just by dragging, letting go, and we
have it all there now. By default, Final Cut Pro will
show all of your video and audio in what it calls
the Film Strip View. Now I find that a little bit confusing sometimes
to sort through. If you just want to
double-check that all of your files have been
added to the event, just click on that little button there and that will give you a list view of all
the individual files. We can see here that
my a-roll is here, all of my b-roll and
all of my audio. Everything is now in Final Cut Pro and ready
to start editing. Some key takeaways
from this lesson. I think it is better to create a separate folder
for your video, whether that'd be on your
computer's hard drive or an external drive. Then within those folders, create a a-roll, b-roll, and audio folder to add all of your individual files
into those folders. Once you've copied
across everything into your video folder, you can then go
into Final Cut Pro and start creating your library, your event, and
then your project. Make sure you head
into the preferences and import section of Final Cut Pro and choose, "Leave files in place" as
the main option at the top. Remember, we do that
because that keeps all of the original files where you
originally copied them to. In the next lesson,
we're going to add your a-roll footage to the project and give it a really simple but really
good-looking color grade.
5. Super-fast colour grading: In this lesson, we'll discover
how to add your a-roll to the timeline of your project and do a very simple but
effective color grade. Now I have made a couple
of assumptions here. The first one is that
you are recording on a camera that doesn't need
any looked adding to it. If you're not sure what that is, then I can guarantee you
probably don't, thankfully. Let's presume that you're
recording on your smartphone, or a pretty simple DSLR camera. I'm also assuming that you're recording your audio directly into your camera rather than using a separate
recording device. Now if you are recording
it separately, all you need to
do is synchronize the video and audio
in Final Cut Pro, which I'll show you very
briefly in a second. But let's just assume that
everything at the moment is going into your
camera directly. If we head into Final Cut Pro, this is where we've got
all of our audio and video that we added a moment
ago in the last lesson. Now if you have recorded your
audio and video separately, you do need to
synchronize them quickly. That's very straightforward. All you do is select
the video footage, hold down the command
key on your keyboard, click the audio footage, and then right-click and
choose Synchronize Clips. Don't worry about the
settings in here. Just click Okay and
that will create a synchronized clip for you which you can drag
into the timeline. Now if you haven't done that and you've recorded everything directly into your
smartphone or camera, you'll end up with
a single video file that has the audio built into already which
is great news. To get this into the timeline, we simply drag that down to
the bottom and there we go. We now have our a-roll on
the timeline of the project. Now, depending on what camera
you've used you might find that the actual footage
itself looks fantastic. However, I always
recommend doing a very light color grade, just to add some contrast and bring out the colors
a little bit more. Now it's really
straightforward to do this at the bottom right-hand
corner of the screen, there is the effects
browser button here. If we click that, go into color and then drag color wheels onto
our a-roll footage, and then at the top, head
into the color section. The first thing we can do is bring the colors
out a little bit more just by tweaking
the saturation level. To do that on the Global section at
the top of the screen, just grab this little triangle here and push it
up a little bit. Don't go too far, if you go
too far, it looks terrible. Start very, very gently, slowly bring it up
until you can see the colors coming out
a little bit more. I can see, for example, in the background where
we've got this blue light. As I move that
little triangle up, it gets a little
bit more intense. It just makes it a
little bit more, pops off the screen a bit more. I think I'm happy with
that. The next thing is to add some contrast. Again, really straightforward
and to do that, we grab the little triangle
on the shadows here. This is the brightness
level of the shadows. If we grab that and again, just very tiny adjustments, then keep your eye on this
section here of the screen. You'll see that as I
move the shadows down, it just darkens that
area a little bit. There we go. Not
much, I just want a little bit of darkness there. Then to add to that contrast, I might want to boost the
highlights just a little bit. On the right-hand side
we've got the highlights. A little triangle thing here is probably got a
better name than that, but we'll call it the triangle. We can grab that and push
up just a little bit, and you can see as
I'm doing that, the image itself is getting slightly brighter and just
a bit more contrasty. Lastly, because
this is me talking to camera and you
can see my skin, is a good idea just to
drop the mid-tones a little bit which always tends to work nicely on the screen, just gets rid of some of the harshness that
you might have there. Again, we grab the
little triangle and drag it down just slightly. We can see that if you look at my face on the screen there, it just adds a bit more detail. Doesn't make it quite
as harsh. There we go. That is a really
simple color grade. Now you can see the effect
of what you've done with that color grade by unchecking the color wheel at the top. If I uncheck that box there, you can see that
the image itself then goes a little bit flat. Whereas if I put
the tick back in, it just looks a bit
more contrasty. The cursor popping out the
screen little bit more, if we keep going between them, is quite a significant
difference. My advice with this is to
be very gentle with it. Be very careful with those little tweaks
that you make and just do it until
you're happy with the image and then leave it. Some actions from this lesson. If you have recorded your
video and audio separately, make sure you synchronize them. Once you've done that, or if you didn't need to do
that because you've already recorded everything
into your camera as it is, drag your a-roll footage
onto your project timeline, head into the effects
browser section, grab a color wheel, drop that onto your a-roll, and then make those very simple gentle tweaks
to the color. In the next lesson,
this is where things get really exciting
because we start editing this a-roll
and start creating your first ever
brilliant YouTube video.
6. Editing your a-roll: This is where
things get exciting because in this lesson
we're going to learn how to edit your A-roll to keep your audience's attention
for as long as possible. But before we do that, there are two things that you need to do. The first thing is to
turn off snapping. Snapping is a feature
in Final Cut Pro, which takes the red cursor, this vertical line
that you can see here, and automatically attaches it
to the nearest edit point. If I move the cursor around
on the timeline like this, we can see that as soon as
I get in the edit point, Final Cut Pro automatically attaches the cursor
to the edit point. Now when you're
adding your B-roll, that is actually a
very useful feature, but when you're working on
your A-roll and you need to make very precise
cuts to the footage, snapping can get quite annoying. It's best to turn it off
while we're doing this. To do that really
straightforward, at the bottom right-hand
corner of the screen, there's a little
option for snapping. If it's blue, it's turned on. If we click it once
and it turns white, snapping is turned off. The next thing you
need to do is remember two very important
keyboard shortcuts. The first one is the spacebar. If you hit the spacebar once, [NOISE] it starts
playing your footage, press it again and it stops. You'll be doing that all
the time in Final Cut Pro. The other keyboard shortcut, which is absolutely
vital is Command B. Command B is basically a keyboard shortcut
for the blade tool, which is what you use to
make cuts in your footage. As I move the cursor
along my footage here, if I hold down command
and be at that point, it will create an edit point exactly where the
cursor is placed. It makes it very easy to make very quick cuts as you go along. Now we can start the process
of editing our A-roll. The whole point of this part of the process is to create
the basis of the video, which is you talking to camera. The idea is to make it as short, sharp, and interesting
as possible. If you're anything like
me, you'll end up with one long recording of yourself talk to camera like
we can see here. Mine is about 11 minutes
30 seconds long, and there's a lot of
stuff in here that I don't want in the
eventual video. For instance, it might be
where I've made an error. I've had to reread something. I've perhaps had a drink
of water, I've coughed, anything where basically I don't want that to end
up in the video. To get started with this,
we need to zoom into the timeline so we can make
much more precise cuts. Two ways of doing that. If you're using a MacBook
or any Mac with a trackpad, you can use two fingers as a pinch gesture to zoom in
and zoom out like that. Or you can hold down the
command key here and press the plus and minus buttons on the keyboard to zoom in and out. The other thing you'll
need to get used to is reading the audio waveform. The audio waveform is this thing here which is just
beneath the footage. The peaks are where I'm talking, so we can see that
I'm talking here and the troughs where
it goes very quiet, is obviously where
I'm not talking. Learning how to read that
audio waveform will make a huge difference as you're
editing your A-roll. If we start at the very
beginning of the video, we can see here
there's a section where I'm not talking at all. It's where I'm
getting ready to make the video and we want
to get rid of that. We can basically place our cursor right
at the start here. Again, looking for that
peak in the audio waveform, that's roughly where
I'm starting talking. We place the cursor
there and then use the keyboard shortcut
command B to make the cut. We then select the bit
that we don't want, press the backspace key on the keyboard, and
that gets rid of it. From this point
forward, we watched the A-roll and make the cuts and delete the
footage we don't need. There's two things
you're looking for. The first thing is
obvious errors or sections where you're getting
your thoughts together. Bits that are clearly
shouldn't be in the video. The second thing to look for
is instances where you're waffling a bit or you're taking a long time to get to the point. Basically, if you're losing interest yourself as
you're watching this, your audience is going to
lose interest as well. The only way to spot those instances is to
put your audience hat on and watch this A-roll
through with their mindset. Now that I have my
new starting point, I can press the spacebar to
start watching the video. Hello and welcome back
to marketers review. I can see that I've made
a mistake I've coughed, I need to start again. Thankfully, because
we now know how to read the audio waveform, I can see that I need to start the video possibly from here. Again, place the
red cursor there, hit Command B on the keyboard, select the bit I
don't want anymore, press Backspace, that's gone. We now start the video
from here instead. Hello and welcome back
to marketer's reviews and thank you for
subscribing if you have. If you haven't subscribed, the button is just down there. That's looking pretty good. Now I can now carry
on watching the video and look for instances
where I've made mistakes. Or again, if I start to
lose interest while I'm watching it and
make those edits, delete the footage I don't want and keep going until
I get to the end of the A-roll and it's completely edited to a way
that I'm liking it. It's important not to be
too brutal with your edits. I do like to let my footage
breathe as much as possible, so I don't want to cut it
where it becomes unnatural. It seems to me that
I'm cutting off words before I
finish saying them. Make sure as you go through your editing process that
you're happy with the flow, make sure you're not speeding things up too much
or like I say, cutting off words entirely. Thankfully with
snapping turned off, we can make very
fine adjustments. For instance here, it might be that I've cut this too early. I can very gently grab
the end of the block here and move it to the right just to give it a little
bit more breathing space, a bit more of a tail
off of the audio there. Again, it comes across
a bit more naturally. Don't be afraid to leave
a few gaps in there, a few moments of silence. Even the art um or er, because it becomes
across more natural. Now once you've
finished this process, you'll end up with
something that looks a little bit like this. This is my edited A-roll video where I've made all those cuts, cut out the stuff I
don't want in there. Got rid of the waffle, got rid of the errors that points where I'm picking
up a glass of water to have a drink and it is now pretty much
ready for B-roll. Few takeaways from this lesson. Make sure you turn off the
snapping in Final Cut Pro but also, get used to the
command B shortcut for using the blade tool. That's an absolute lifesaver. Remember to watch through
the video as though you are a viewer and cut anything out where you're starting
to lose interest. Lastly, don't be too
brutal with those cuts. Make sure you leave
in a few ums and ers, and also periods where there's
a bit of silence just to make the whole thing come
across nice and naturally. In the next lesson, when we
get to the exciting part of adding B-roll to your video.
7. Adding your b-roll: In this lesson, we're
going to learn how to add B-roll to your video, and also the importance
of not overdoing B-roll, and how to use B-roll to
retain audience attention. I love using B-roll
in my videos, it's a great way
to tell the story, but also it makes it
look more professional. Now there are a couple of things that we need
to do before we start adding B-roll
to our video. The first thing is to
turn snapping back on. You might remember we
turned it off when we were editing the A-roll. Now that's done. We
can turn it back on. Once again, bottom right-hand
corner of the screen. The little snapping icon here is probably white
view at the moment. Click it once, it turns blue, that means snapping
is now turned on. The other thing we
need to do is turn off the audio for our
B-roll footage because, generally speaking, you won't
want the audio that might have been picked up while you
were filming those shots. Doing that is really
straightforward. Over here on the left-hand side, I've got all of my B-roll shots. If I click the first
one to highlight it, and then scroll to the bottom, hold down my Shift
key on the keyboard, click the last one,
that will select all of the B-roll
that we've got here. Then on the right-hand side, there's a little audio section. If we click the little audio
inspector button there. We can see here
we've got 26 clips selected and there's a tick
at the moment in the audio. If I take the tick out of that, that removes the audio base or silences it for
those B-roll clips. That just means that as I
add the B-roll to my video, any audio that was picked up
during the recording process of the B-roll won't end
up in the eventual video. Now, adding B-roll to
your video is a little bit like the process we went
through for editing A-roll. You basically need to watch
the video as a viewer. Now because we've gone through the editing process
for the A-roll, and we have all our
nice cuts here, and all the waffle
and error is removed, we have pretty much the video as it will be when
you publish it. But at the moment, it's
just you talking to camera. So we want to add some
different visual flair to make it a bit
more interesting. Adding B-roll to your video
is really straightforward. On the left-hand side, if we
choose one of these shots. This one here, for example. Just above, we can see a
preview of the footage, which I can scrub
through just by moving my mouse cursor across
the footage like that. What you can do,
once you've found a section that you
perhaps want to use, rather than dragging
the entire clip onto the timeline because you
might not want all of it, we can basically hold
down the Option key, which gives us this
little arrow selector, and then hold down
the mouse and drag across the part we want or
roughly the part we want. Once we've done that,
we can grab it. Basically, put your mouse cursor in here until it turns
into a little hand, hold down the mouse key, and drag it down onto
your timeline like this. That will place the
piece of footage that we selected above straight
into your video. Now, obviously, it will need some
adjustments and we can lengthen it if we need to or shorten it if we
want to as well. Because we've got
snapping turned on, we can make a very
good use of B-roll, which is to hide jump cuts. Sometimes you might actually
want these jump cuts. For instance, if I add
one in this video here, that jump cut there
might be fine. But if you come
across a jump cut, which is just a
little bit jarring or just doesn't sit
quite right with you, you can use B-roll to
hide that jump cut. For instance, if I want this
little edit point here, this little jump cut
here to be hidden, I can take my B-roll
footage here. With snapping
turned on, move it, so it basically snaps to that edit point so that when
I start playing from here, [NOISE] it cuts to the B-roll. It's a great way to hide
those little edit points that you don't want
the audience to see. Now, as I've watched
through my A-roll, I can keep adding
these bits of B-roll. We can keep dragging
them into the timeline, adjusting them as necessary. Basically, making the whole
thing look a little bit more interesting by having more than just me talking to camera. Now, it's really important
with B-roll not to overdo it. It's very tempting
to keep putting this footage into your timeline. The problem with
that is if you have too much stuff going on, the audience will very
quickly lose interest. This is why it's best
to apply the 80, 20 roll to your
A-roll and B-roll, where 80 percent of
this video will be your A-roll and the 20
percent will be that B-roll. It just needs to
be enough of it in there to keep the
audience interested, but not detract from
what you're saying. B-roll is also a great way to hide mistakes in your A-roll. For instance, while you're
watching through the video, if you spot yourself looking at the monitor or looking
at way or something, and you want to hide
that from the audience, just place a bit of
B-roll over top of it, and that completely
hides that mistake. Also, if you have
long stretches of A-roll where you seem to
be talking quite a lot, you can break that up quite nicely by putting
a bit of B-roll, maybe at the start
or at the end. Once you've finished adding
B-roll to your video, you'll probably have a timeline that looks a little
bit like this. We still have our
A-roll here in place. But above that, we now
have these B-roll clips, which are basically
breaking up the story, giving a bit more visual
interest for the audience, and crucially hiding jump
cuts where you want to, and hiding those mistakes. A few key takeaways
from this lesson. Make sure you turn snapping back on before we
start adding B-roll, just to make it easy to
add it to the timeline. Turn off the audio for
your B-roll as well, and then watch through
the video again like a viewer and add B-roll
where it makes sense to, but don't overdo it. In the next video, we'll get
fancy with lower thirds and transitions and learn how to add music and sound
effects to your video.
8. Adding transitions, lower thirds, music and sound effects: In this lesson, we're going
to learn how to finish off your video by adding
lower thirds, transitions, music,
and sound effects. It's important to know
that all of these things are very much a
personal preference. You may not want to add
some of these things to your video and
equally you may not want to add any of this
stuff to your video, but I'm going to show you how
to do each one very quickly and then you can make
the decision whether or not that will fit
in with your style. We'll start with transitions, and a transition is a
way to make a jump cut like this one here
far more smooth. Final Cut Pro has a whole
bunch of transitions built-in, and to get to them it's
really straightforward. In the bottom right-hand
corner of the screen, there's a little button
here for transitions. If you click that,
that will open the Transitions browser. Final Cut Pro categorizes
the transitions for you just so it's easy to
find the one that you want. For instance if I want to use a blur transition I can click
on the Blurs option here, and that will give me
all the different types of blur transition. To use the one I want, for instance if I want to
use a directional blur, I simply click on it, hold down the mouse button, and drag it over the cut point that I want
to put the transition onto. Let go and our
transition is there. If I play the video, [NOISE] we have a nice
blurred transition. You can make transitions
longer or shorter by grabbing the left or right-hand
side of them and moving them either
way that you want. If I do it like
that for example, [NOISE] that goes a very slow blurred
transition like this. You can get really fancy
with them if you want to. Next up we have lower thirds. A lower third is something they use very commonly in things like the news channels
where if someone's speaking and we want to
know who that person is, a lower third will pop up at
the bottom-left, or right, or somewhere on the screen with their name and
perhaps their position. You can use them for
the exact same purpose on your YouTube
video, is what I do. When my videos start
at some stage there will be a lower third which I place at the top
of the screen, but it's still
technically a lower third which announces my
name and then I have a little bit of fun
with a text beneath it but you can use
them however you wish. Once again a bit
like transitions, Final Cut Pro
includes a number of pre-built lower thirds that
you can use to your liking. To use lower thirds in Final Cut Pro, really
straightforward. At the top left of the screen, there's a little button here for the Titles and
Generators sidebar. If we click that, that will give us Titles and Generators. In mind I have a bunch of titles that are aftermarket
which you may not have. If we scroll down, what you will definitely
have is lower thirds. If we click there,
this is all of the lower thirds that Final
Cut Pro includes by default. To add a lower third to your video a little bit
like the transitions, you simply choose the
one that you want, hold down your mouse button, drag it onto the timeline
roughly to where you want it, let go and we now have that
lower third on the video. We can make it longer or shorter if we need to
by grabbing it and dragging like that
and we can also move it to wherever we
want it to appear, but the most important thing
is to obviously customize what is on that
lower third itself. To do that, we make sure we've got the lower
third selected. At the top right if you
click the Text button here, we can then change Name [NOISE]
to for instance my name. Then if we click "Description", we can change [NOISE] that
to be whatever we want. Depending on the lower
third that you've chosen, you might be able to change
all the colors as well. Over here on the
right-hand side if I go into the Title Inspector, we can see here I can change the line color
which is this here. I can change that to any
color that I want to, so if I want that to
be blue for instance. Line 2 Color, if want that to be green or red. Whatever I want it to
be, we can change that. Basically, you can
play around with these parameters to make
it look like your own. For instance, we can change
the size of it as well. If we head into the
Video Inspector, we can change the scale
here with this slider. We can change the position. The X or Y position, we can move wherever we
want to on the video. You can really get
pretty fancy with it and make it look
like your own. Lastly, you might want to
add some additional audio to your video. Again, it's a creative choice, but I'll show you how
to do it very quickly. To do that if we head back to the library and
just scroll down, I can see some of
the audio files that I added to my
event earlier on. For instance, if I want to
add some music to my video. If I just zoom out a little bit here so I
can see a bit more of it and take this audio
here, this music track. Drag it into the timeline, that adds the music to my video. Just one
thing to bear in mind. If you're adding
music to your video, pay close attention to
the volume of the audio. The best way to do that
obviously is to play it back and listen to how it
sounds with you talking, but very quickly you can change the volume of the audio by choosing the audio
track and up here on the right-hand side
just adjusting it. Again, look out for
that audio wave form. You can see as I move that volume down here;
keep your eye on that, you'll see that the
wave form moves up and down to indicate how
loud or quiet is. Just play around with that
until you're happy with the levels and you can keep adding audio elements
if you want to. For example, if I've got a
whoosh sound effect here, I can drop that to where
I want it to be on here. Let's just zoom in a little bit. We can add that there perhaps just for that transition maybe. You can basically keep adding audio elements as
much as you want. Again, just to reiterate. Additional audio, lower thirds, and transitions are
completely a creative choice. It's entirely up to you how
much of that stuff you use. I can't tell you how much
to add to your video; is entirely up to you, but you at least know how to do it now. Thanks to this lesson. Just as a reminder,
transitions are a way to make those jump cuts far smoother. Lower thirds are a way to
convey additional information without taking the viewer
away from the video itself, and adding music
and sound effects can just add a bit more flair and professionalism if that's the kind of thing that
you're going for. In the next lesson
we'll give you a video that all important, final polish, and check before
we export it for YouTube.
9. Polishing and checking: Now that you've
edited your a-roll, added your b-roll, added some visual flair with transitions and lower thirds, it's time for the all-important
polish and final check. You really can't skip this step. It's really important to
do one last check to make sure you're 100 percent
happy with your video. The first thing to
do is color grade that b-roll if it needs it. Of course, if you did
that with your a-roll, head back to Lesson 4, just as a quick
reminder about how to do a quick color grade. Next, it's time to watch through your entire video
and I'm going to say you need to
watch it as though you are a member of
your own audience. Watch it with your
viewer hat on again and don't be afraid to
keep making cuts. If you encounter sections within the video
that is starting to turn you off or
you're getting a bit bored by, get rid of them. Be brutal. Get rid of the stuff that seems
to be waffle or just the things that
are starting to make you less interested
in the video. Cut them, get rid of
them, and keep watching. Also, you can use
this watching period to make note of a
couple of things. The first thing is to make
note of any chapters, the exact time where
the new chapters start. That's very useful for your
YouTube description but also instances in the
video where you've mentioned that you'll put something in the
video description, just make sure you
make a note of that and put them in the
video description. Once you've done with
that first watch, watch it again, do
the exact same thing. Again, cut anything
that you need to cut. Remember this is your last
chance to get this video right before you upload it to YouTube because once
it's on YouTube, you can't undo those things. Key takeaways from this lesson. Make sure you color grade that b-roll footage if you need to. Lesson 4 is the one
that you need to re-watch for that if you
can't remember how to do it, make sure you watch
through your video at least twice with your viewer hat on and keep cutting the bits out
that you don't like. Finally, note down any
chapter markers and things that you need to add
to the video description. You're getting that
you've nearly finished your first edit of your
first ever YouTube video. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to export it for YouTube.
10. Exporting for YouTube: In this lesson, we will learn how to export your video for YouTube and you'll be glad to hear this is really
straightforward. Before we do any
exporting at all, we just need to make
sure that the video itself has finished
rendering and rendering is what Final Cut Pro does to the video
to make sure all of the effects and
color changes have been applied to
the video itself. The way to discover
if your video has finished
rendering is to look at the top left-hand
corner of the screen where we have the background
tasks button. Now if that shows
a tick, it's done. If the tick isn't there, they'll be a progress
bar in there. If you click on that, you'll see probably in here, it will say rendering
and it will give you a percentage done for
that rendering process. Just make sure that's finished before you export your video. Exporting the video in Final Cut Pro is super
straightforward. To do so, just
head to the button at the top right-hand
corner of the screen, which is the "Share" button. Click that, go to "Export File" and then where you've
got your project name here, just change that to the
name of your video. I'm going to call this my
"iPhone 13 mini review". Then head into the
"Settings" button here. In "Format", choose "Video and Audio" and in "Video Codec", I recommend choosing "H.264", which is a very recognized,
well-used video format. Just keep an eye at the
bottom right-hand corner here where it has the
estimated file size, 3.6 gig file for a 4K video, which is about 10 minutes long, that's not bad,
that's about right. In fact, you'll see if I
change H.264 to Apple ProRes, it will give me 103.5 gigabyte estimated file
size, which is just too big. It'll take forever to
upload to YouTube, it will take forever to
export as well, to be honest. It's just too big. We don't need it to
be that high-quality. Trust me, H.264 is
the one to go for. Once you've done
that, you can leave pretty much everything
else as it is on here. Click on "Next", choose the place where you're
going to save your video. Click on "Save" and that will
start the export process. Again, if we look at the
top left-hand corner of the screen for the background
tasks button here, we can see sharing has
now started and that percentage bar will increase as the video starts to export. Now once your video has
exported, that's it. You're ready to upload that file to YouTube. You've
done the hard work. You've done the filming,
you've done the edit, you've exported the file, this is the exciting bit where hopefully you start
to build an audience. Just a few takeaways from
the exporting process, don't get too hung
up on the quality, go for audio and
video and H.264 as the file settings and remember before we
do any exporting, just make sure the rendering
has finished on the video. That's it, you've
created your first YouTube video in Final Cut Pro. I really hope this lesson
has proved useful. Like I said at the start,
I've pulled all of my knowledge and
my experience with Final Cut Pro and editing videos for
YouTube into this class. The best advice I can give is
just to keep making videos, keep editing them
in Final Cut Pro, get used to the different
tools that you can use, try different transitions, try a different [inaudible]
try different ways of adding music or
not using music. Again, be careful
with the B-roll, don't use too much of it but
just start experimenting. Most importantly, don't
forget to share your works in progress with the brilliant
community on Skillshare. But that really is it for
me. Thank you so much for watching this class
and don't forget to go back to previous lessons
if you want to brush up on certain elements of editing
your first YouTube video. Don't forget to leave a
review and hang around. I've got lots more classes on
the way for Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Median. Basically, I want
to help you become the best content
creator you can be. Until next time,
thank you so much for watching and enjoy
editing that first video.
Mark Ellis, Learn how to create amazing content!
