Advanced Final Cut Pro Editing

1. Introduction: Hey, what's going on? My name is Steven. I'm a content creator and instructor here on skill share, and I've been editing videos for the past seven years. And along the way I've learned a lot of really cool tips and tricks to take the editing to the next level. And so that's what this course is designed to do is to help share with you some of the cool, I'd say intermediate to advanced editing tricks that I've learned and really help you take your editing from basic to really great. And some of the effects we're going to be talking about is the clone effect. How to use a green screen and watch much more so varied. You have a basic understanding of video editing, but you wanna take it to the next level. This course is for you. So I'm really excited you who decide to stop by and let's go ahead and get started. 2. Ken Burns Effect: The next thing we're gonna take a look at here is something called the Ken Burns effect. And this is a really simple, easy effect to use, but it can make some really average footage look really great. And so for this lesson, we're going to be using this clip of hot air balloons floating through the sky. And what we're gonna do, or what our eventual goal with this is, we're gonna zoom in really quickly into some of them to add kind of an extra effect to this, if you will. And again, I've included this clip in the course description so that way you can download it and actually edit it in real time as I'm walking through these steps. So the first thing we'll do is select our clip. We'll note selected because that yellow box is now around it. Then we'll go up to this Crop button here. Click it. And then notice it gives us a couple of different options, trim, crop or Ken Burns. So for this lesson we're only focusing on the Ken Burns aspect of it. So we'll click that. And then notice how it gives us a couple different boxes, has a start Box and then an inbox. So this means the frame is going to start where the green box is. Then it's going to end where the red boxes, since the green box is smaller in the red boxes larger, you're gonna see a zoom out effect. And what you could do is go ahead and click this button right up here. And that'll actually preview the effect so you can see what it will look like. So we'll go ahead and do that right now. Says you can see it's slowly pulling out or it slowly zooming out. Now one thing before we go any further, I want to short in this clip, I feel like it's too long for what we're trying to do. So I'm gonna kinda go to around five seconds and I'm going to just hit B for blade, split it, and then delete the rest of it so that we were only working with a 5 second clip versus an 18 or 22nd clip that we're working with before. And then we'll go and highlight it. Go back to crop. Another cool thing is if you hit the button just directly to the left of it here, it'll actually switch the boxes around. So let's say you wanted to zoom in, instead of zooming out, you just click that. And then notice how the start boxes bigger and, and boxes smaller. So that's kind of a nice quick way to do it if you want to adjust things. Another thing with this is you're not limited to the box that gives you, you can actually zoom in as far as you want, can move it around. So let's just see what that looks like. There's lots of different stuff that you can do with this. And this is really effective, especially if you're doing like a slideshow or you're doing something where it's just a still picture. Because a still picture can be pretty boring and humans have pretty bad attention spans, right? If we're taking a look at something and it's the exact same for more than a couple of seconds, the human mind is gonna start to get bored and distracted. And so this is an effect that I use quite a bit if I'm talking directly to the camera and there aren't a lot of cuts. Or if I'm showing the picture. By at least having a zoom in or zoom out effect, that adds a little excitement to something that's kind of boring. But what I really want to show you is a more advanced technique that you can use with Ken Burns. And again, let's go ahead and just play this all the way through real quick so we can remember what this is gonna look like. So by default, it's just a gradual zoom in and it looks pretty good. But what I wanna do is, let's say instead of gradually zooming in, let's say we want to gradually zoom in and then going really, really fast and then finish the clip and going in slower. In order for us to do this, we're gonna need to use something that Final Cut Pro offers, which is called using a new compound clip. And the reason for that is the way things are right now. So we have again the Ken Burns effect on this entire clip. But if we were to try to just split it up and then change around the speed of this middle one and speed it up. It'll basically ruin this entire Effect and it's not going to work the way that we designed it to. So what we'll have to do is just right-click it, click new compound clip. And we'll just say balloons. So if you take a look, it doesn't look any different. But what we did with but the reason why we did this was we basically took that Ken Burns effect and sort of trapped it or put all of the edits we did within this new clip. So we can now add new effects or make new changes to this clip. That isn't going to impact the old things that we did. Because Final Cut Pro recognizes this as a brand new clip, if you will. I know that's kind of confusing, but basically by using the new compound clip to Final Cut Pro, it's a brand new type Eclipse, so you can add effects on effects. Whereas if we didn't do that before, we tried to add up another effect on our old effect, then that would basically mess things up. So again, I know that's not the best. So again, I know it's not the best way to explain it, but as you start to work through Final Cut Pro, you'll get a better understanding of that idea and concept I'm gonna do is actually put the cut around here and around here. And a lot of editing really is just playing around with whatever you think looks best, right? There's no universal or the right way to go about it. It's ultimately whatever creative look you're gone for us. So we'll adjust this to 1000 and let's see how this looks. Alright? And then what we're gonna do. And then what I'm also going to do to add just a little bit more effect or more of that zoom effect that we're going for is on the right-hand side. Under effects, just click this button here. And then there was all sorts of effects that come pre-installed with Final Cut Pro. We're gonna go to the blur option, and then we're gonna click prism. And then what are we gonna do is just take that and drag that onto our fast clip to help give the effect that we're zooming in, right? And there's sort of a motion blur, if you will. And then, and then once I clip is highlighted, you can also go to the top right. And then under the effects here, it lists the effect of the drug on the prism effect, which is the same as down here. And then we can either increase or decrease the amount of the effect as it displays. And then, let's say for whatever reason if we decided we didn't want it, we could just uncheck this. And that will remove the effect. And then we'll just go ahead and see what this looks like. So again, as you can see, it's really quick and it's really subtle. But at the same time, this does give the video a little extra element, right? It's a little, something different. Key takeaway I want you to understand with this is how easy and effective the Ken Burns effect is an effect that I use in nearly all my videos, especially on my YouTube videos. And it's a really great way, especially when you're filming videos like this, where talking directly to the camera, it can get pretty boring and stale really quick. Like after five to ten seconds of me just sitting here talking like this, your brain is going to start to get bored. And so by using that Ken Burns effect, it's a really quick, easy way to break up the monotony of what I'm talking about. And a good way to, again, keep the brain engaged into video and keep people watching. 3. Green Screen: Alright, so the next feature that we're going to talk about here is how to use a green screen and how to edit with that. The use of green screens is really common in, in media. You're gonna see that a ton when you're filming. And the reason for that is because by filling in front of a green screen when you're going back and editing and post-production, you can add whatever you want on the background. That's exactly what the news is doing when they're giving you the weather report, right? And they're walking around pointing in different cities. That's not an actual map there, just in front of a green screen. And then the production people are displaying a map on top of the green screen. So having an awareness of how to edit around a green screen can really help give you an advantage when it comes to editing your videos and really taking it to the next level. So for this project, we're going to use this clip down here of this lady that I got from pixels.com. And I made sure to include it in the course description so that way you can use this exact clip. And notice how she's talking forever green screen. This process is actually really simple. So there's two things we're going to want this clip and then the background that we're going to want her to talk in front of. And so you can also download this image as well. This is a stock footage of a office setting. Then the first thing we're gonna wanna do is highlight the clip of where she's talking. Just click this button here to open the effects and then go down to this search. We're gonna type in here, KEY ER. And then we'll take that affect. Try get onto the clip, and then notice immediately that removes the background. The next thing we'll do is we'll take this picture. We're going to drag it underneath. Notice when you play it right now, on the right-hand side, there's still these black bars. So we're just going to want to increase the zoom on this background picture. And the way we'll do that is we'll highlight this background picture. Go up here to the transform button. That gives these little circles around allowing us to change the size. It will just take it, drag it out. And then we could reposition and if we want to. But now the entire background is the office setting. And we'll go back, play it through. And we have effectively use that green screen to put whatever background mode wanted on it. Now one important thing to keep in mind with this is the picture has to be below the video because let's take a look. If we were to drag this above. Now notice the picture is covering her and we can't see here. So that's one thing to be mindful of here is the importance of layering are media in the right order. Another thing to be aware of when it comes to this whole green screen effect is that you don't necessarily need a green screen to do this. You can actually do this with any color background. It's just green screen is the more popular one, and you'll hear that quite a bit. But the main thing is if you are trying to use this effect, you want to make sure that you have the same color background. You don't want to pattern or stripes or different types of colors. You want just a plain background that makes it so much easier for the system to recognize it and then implement that effect. 4. Overlay Feature: The next effect that we're going to talk about is overlaying your face talking wall. You're also showing something on your computer screen. This is something that's pretty common, especially if you're teaching somebody how to do something on the computer. And you want to have both your face talking and explaining something while you're walking through what steps will look like on the screen. So for this project, again, I've included the clips for you to follow along. We're going to use this clip of a Google screen. So we'll drag that down here. And we're also going to use the video of this woman explaining. So the way we want our end product to look is we want the video to play through what's on the screen. So that way we're showing people what to type into Google. But at the same time we want her face to be in the bottom corner of the screen explaining things. So first what we're going to do for her is we're going to click this clip. We're going to go to the far right-hand side, click the Effects button. Then in this search we're going to click mask. And also too, you can see there's different categories of effects. So you could also just type in or click this masks button here. And then we will select the shape mask. We're going to take that, drag it onto our clip. And then here what we're gonna do is we're going to re-size it around just her face. And then I don't want the way that looks, that looks too much like a rectangle. I want to talk a little bit more like a circle. So play around with the curvature a little bit here. So then what we'll do is we'll go ahead and take this and drag it on top of screen. And then now notice it's her face talking on top. I don't like the position of that. Let's go ahead and move that to the bottom right corner of the screen so that way people can see what we're typing. So to do that, make sure club it's highlighted, Go to the transform button. And then this allows us to realign it on the screen. So I'll just take that, drag it down towards the bottom right corner. Click, done. Then now if we go back to the beginning and take a look, we now have her explaining showing her face while still showing what's going on, on the screen. And then what we can do to finalize this clip or to make it look a little bit smoother, cleaner. Since the Google clip, it's a little bit shorter than her talking. Well, we could do is be for blade, split it, take this, we'll drag it down. And then for the last section of this clip, we'll go ahead and remove that mask feature and just make it look regular like when she's talking like this. So to so to do that, highlight over the top right. And then we'll just uncheck the shape Mask button. So now we've moved that effect, go back up to the transform, realign it to the centre. So as you can see, it's pretty simple. But especially if you are doing a lot of these types of videos where you're mostly showing your screen, walking through what's going on on your screen by just adding your phase and the bottom right corner, that can help keep people a little bit more gage throughout the process. Then if you were doing just the screen. 5. Gaussian Blur: Alright, so the next editing trick that I really like, it's really small and subtle, but it can come in handy for certain situations. And so what we're gonna do is use what's called the Gaussian blur effect. And we're gonna go to the right-hand side click effects. Now we'll click the blurs section. Null, take Gausian and Dragon on. So what that does is that makes the entire clip blurry. And then on the top right hand side you can control how blurry you want it to be, just a couple of percent or a 100%. And you may have noticed this earlier in the course actually, but the introduction I have for all of the video lessons, I actually use this effect. So for example sake, let's say we're making an introduction into a video and we want to use this effect with it. So the next thing we'll do is we'll go to the top left here. Click on the titles, will scroll down of basic title. Take that, drag it down. We'll do command c for copy, command v for paste. Because we're going to use two of these, will drag them out for the duration of the clip. And let's say we want this clipped only be of around seven or eight seconds. So we'll split this up. So now I have a shorter clip. I'm actually going to recreate the exact intro card that you saw before watching this video right here. And then edit the text. You just select the text bar, go to the top right. Make sure show tax inspector button selected. So for the rest of the clip right now what I'm doing is adding those two different titles and then editing the text in those. That's a pretty basic feature and I'm sure you already know how to do that, so I'm kind of skipping over that part. But the key takeaway here is that whenever you are using text and you want it to stand out a little bit more, or make it easier for the person to read it using the text on that Gaussian blur effect can be really effective. 6. Clone Effect: So this next effect, it might look really complicated and hard to do, but it's actually really easy. And so the first thing you're gonna wanna do is film yourself being in a couple different positions. So for instance, I'm going to first sit over here and then what I'm gonna do is pretend to have a conversation with myself who's going to be standing over here. And let's say we're going to have a debate about who the best sports team is out there. Okay, so I'll, I'll be sitting here. No, actually, the Lakers are the best team. It's pretty obvious, you know, Lebron James, he does a really great job. Know that that's not the case. The Lakers clearly are the best. I don't know that. You're not right. Okay. So I filled in that part of it. Now, I have to film a part of myself over here on the side of the screen to act like I'm argument with myself. No, dude, you're clearly wrong. Golden State is clearly the best team. I know you like LeBron's and you tend to follow him whatever city he goes to. The facts are that Golden State is where it's at. So that's the first thing you're gonna wanna do with this, is film yourself in two different or multiple. You can do this with four or five different versions of yourself. But the main thing is you wanna make sure that for the most part the frame remains the same. You're not moving the camera around. For this to work. You also wanna make sure that the lighting remains the same. So if you're filming and you're getting like outside by, you wanna get the clip all at the same time. Or if you're using indoor lights, make sure that you won't run into that too much. But that's the first piece of it. Now let's go ahead and jump into the computer to actually put things together. Alright, so the first thing I'm doing with this is cleaning up the footage in removing some of the parts, like where I'd get up and move to the other side. That's the main thing I'm doing right now, is removing a lot of that extra filler stuff. So then that way we're left with only the clips that we want, right? The part where I'm on the right hand side talking and on the left-hand side talking. So after I cleaned everything up, the next thing I did was I took the clip where? On the left-hand side. And I took that clip and derogate on top of the other clip where I'm talking on the right-hand side. So when you're doing this clone feature, that's what you're going to have to do, is stack the different clips on top of each other. So in this instance I only have two versions of myself. But if you had four different versions of yourself in a clip, then there'll be four different clips stack on top of each other. The next thing we're gonna wanna do is we're going to want to put a mask on top of that top clip. So to do that, we're gonna go to the effects tab on the right-hand side, will then select the masks category. And then we'll click the Draw mask. Take that, drag that onto the top clip. And then what we'll do is we're basically going to draw around my body. And how we do that is by simply putting little dots, tracing the outline of myself. Now with this, with this, it's not really ideal because I am sitting right in front of that desk and there's a lot of different colors. You've got my skin, you got my shirt, you got the white desk, you have the black chair. So ideally, it would be much easier to do this if I were standing in front of just a plain wall or they're just not having as much colors involved. So as you can see that draw Mask feature, what it does is everything I select or highlight. It keeps that and then it removes everything else. So all we do is then take that and drag it back on top of the clip before. And then we now have this feature of me talking to myself. Now one really important caveat with this is making sure the lighting in the background is the same as if I were to using this effect for like an actual professional type of process out, actually reshoot it. And the reason for that is if you take a look at me on the left-hand side there, there's this light gray behind me. And the reason for that is all the light that I was receiving for this was natural light, right? So it was light coming from the sun through the window. So throughout the course of 30 to 40 seconds when I film this, the sunlight changed and then that changed the light in the video. So that's why there's this light grey around myself on the left where that's not the case on the right. And that's a pretty obvious notice bold thing. So again, if this were something for like a professional type of project, I would absolutely have to go ahead and refill net. So in all honesty, if you're serious about video and video editing, I would highly encourage you to get your own lights. I've a couple box lights. They work really, really great. And a garden for like 45 bucks a piece off Amazon. I also have one of those ring lights which I got for 70 to 80 bucks. So it's a little bit of an investment. But when it comes to creating high-quality video, there's a couple really important aspects you need. You need good lighting, ELL's need good audio. So it's a little bit of investment, but if you're serious about it, I would definitely encourage you to get that. One other cool thing about this is if we go up to the effects on the top right, we can actually change how transparent our mask is. So for instance, if you were editing a video and you wanted to give off the effect that there was a ghost. Or maybe you're talking to like a memory of yourself. Notice how on the left-hand side really transparent right now. So that's another cool effect you can use. Yeah, but that's basically it for the clone effect. Again, once you know how to do it is actually pretty simple. 7. Class Project and Final Thoughts: For the class project, what I want you to do is take one of the video clips that I've attached to the class project here. And go ahead and download that and then implement one of the different features that we talked about throughout this class. It can be as simple as the Ken Burns or Gaussian blur. But the main thing here is to help get the practice and the repetition of knowing where to go in Final Cut Pro, finding that and then putting it into practice. I don't know about you, but at least for me, a lot of times when I'm watching something and they seem really easy. But then when I go back and actually try to do it, it takes a little bit and I think it's that way with anything, right, we need to get that muscle memory of not only learning the information, but then putting that into practice. And then once you're finished with that, be sure to upload that to the course project. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what you're able to create that just take us to the end of the course here. So I first want to thank you so much for your time and attention. And I hope you got some great information out of this. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what you're able to create. And if you do have any questions, feel free to leave them in the discussion section below, I keep a pretty close eye on all of that. But with that being said, I wish you the best luck and take care.