Creating Green Screen Instructional Videos with Final Cut Pro

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Terry Martin and I'm a software developer, creative content maker, and course creator. Lately, it seems as though everyone in their mother, including my own mother, is interested in creating online video content or courses, but many have no idea where to start. In fact, I'm almost embarrassed to think about how much time I wasted when I got started trying to figure out exactly what equipment I should use and then trying to figure out how to use it. It's not that there aren't already videos and lessons that teach these things. There certainly are. However, I had a terribly difficult time finding courses and videos that focused on what I wanted to create. What I'm offering is this. If You liked the style of instructional video I'm showing here, I will teach you my own workflow in its entirety so that you don't have to waste the time I wasted in figuring it all out. I only answer all the questions I had about Final Cut Pro, which nearly every video I watched seemed to gloss over or assume I already knew. I will show you all the behind the scenes software, tips and tricks I use to pull everything together. If that interests you, then let's get started. 2. Computer Equipment: Alright, so the first thing we're going to take a look at is what type of computer and computer related equipment do you need. Final Cut Pro only runs on Mac OS and so therefore you can only use a Mac to do this kind of work with Final Cut Pro that filters out a whole bunch of computer choices right there. Now the next thing I would say is this. If you already own a Mac and you are able to install the latest versions of macOS on it, I would recommend that you start off by just trying out the existing Mac that you already have. So you've upgraded the MacOS version to the latest version. The next thing you'll want to do though, is to go out to the Mac App Store and see if you are allowed to purchase and install the latest version of Final Cut Pro. If you are allowed to do that, then that's a good sign right there. Generally speaking, apples pretty good about limiting what versions of software, both the MacOS version and then other software from them you are allowed to install if your computer can't handle that. So I would go ahead and install that. And then thirdly, go ahead and just start using the existing computer you have with this course. And the main thing you're going to want to look out for as far as determining whether or not your computer is adequate for this course. Is that while you're going through this course in your editing things and stuff, you're going to look out for. Are you getting lag and stutters and the multicolored spinning beach ball effect and things like that, then that could be a very strong sign that it may be time to get a new computer. The other thing that you can look out for, but this I would say is less important, is when you're done editing and you finally go to export your videos. How long does that take? This usually matters a lot less because even if it takes your computer three hours or six hours to export one video, if your workflow is such that you only really work on maybe one video per day and you work on it throughout the day. And then you go to bed and that right before you go to bed, you just tell your computer to go ahead and start exporting that file. And so when you wake up in the morning, it's all done, then it doesn't really matter that much. If that's your workflow. On the other hand, if you have a workflow where you're planning to get through a 100 videos and you need to get through them relatively quickly. And when you go to bed, you start exporting and when you wake up, it's not done yet and you need to get back to work on editing more videos. Well now that's a strong indication also that your computer may not be appropriate for what you do. So those are a couple of things to look out for. Let's talk about the RAM in your computer. You could probably get away with eight gigs of RAM in a Mac. I wouldn't probably try much less than that. It's hard for me to imagine you'd be able to do much with less than eight gigs of RAM for some light to moderate editing work. So really the main thing that the amount of RAM your computer has is likely to affect is again, your overall speed of editing. How often do you encounter stutters and slowdowns and things of that sort. So 16 gigs would be better. If you can get more than 16 gigs, That might be better for some people who start to become more like power users and things. 16 gigs though is pretty good though. I did a whole heck of a lot of editing on an M1 MacBook Air for a good nine months with only 16 gigs of RAM. And it was quite adequate for what I was doing. So I think you should be okay there. Then let's talk about storage of the computer now, your hard drive, although it's not technically a hard drive anymore. So all modern Macs as far as I'm aware, now use a solid-state drive. But anyway, let's talk about the size. I would recommend at least a one terabyte solid-state drive in your computer that should allow you to at least get started with editing. And that might last you many, many months or many, many years, depending on how many videos you plan to make and how long they are and things of that sort. One terabyte is a good starting minimum, in my opinion. Now if you have a computer that works well for everything that I've said so far, but it doesn't have one terabyte of storage internally. That's okay. What you can do in that case, keep your computer just by an external solid-state drive that is at least one terabyte or more in size. And that's a good way to go. Lots of professional video editors do exactly the same thing anyway. And I would also recommend in addition to the one terabyte of solid state drive that you would be doing your primary video editing work on. I would recommend that you additionally get another external hard disk drive. So not a solid state, but the older technology of just a regular old hard disk drive, they are much cheaper than solid-state drives and you don't need the speed of the solid-state drive. What you're gonna do with this additional external drive is just use it for backup. So you can set up your computer to backup your Final Cut Pro Library directly onto that external drive. And now you've got a nice safe copy of it in case your main computer has to go into the shop. It gets stolen or whatever the case may be, you'll have a nice backup and those external hard drives don't cost a lot. I additionally, I also happen to use a device called a doc, and that is just a device that plugs into the USB ports or the thunderbolt ports on your computer. And then it allows you to plug a whole bunch more devices into it. So it's kinda like a power strip for your computer, although it's not so much about power, it's more about just extending the amount of peripherals you can plug into your computer. The doc that I happen to use currently with my MacBook Pro is called a hyper drive Gen2, and it has 16 ports on it. It also can provide power to my laptop. So the nice thing there is that I only have to plug one cable into my laptop to connect it to my monitor and everything else that I have. And I have a lot of peripherals that I think that's quite nice, that's optional. You don't have to have that. I'm just letting you know that that's another option that you may want to look at. Let me also cover now if you do need or want to buy a whole new computer, what should you be looking at? So I will say right now that if you're not looking to spend a million dollars on a computer, but you want to computer for doing this type of work that will be really reliable and solid and great. I would start off by simply looking at the Mac Mini, that is actually the cheapest Mac that they make. But it's actually very, very powerful and you need to look at this kind of, relatively speaking, the newest Mac mini has the M1 processor in it. And that M1 processor is way more powerful in terms of video editing, then most of the fastest Intel processors that Apple was previously putting into their computers. So the cheapest Mac that you can buy today is orders of magnitude faster in many regards, than many of the fastest, most expensive Macs that you could buy just two years ago. So do not think that just because the Mac mini may be the cheapest new Mac you can buy, that it's not worthy of what you need to do. I would strongly look at getting an M1 Mac mini with 16 gigs of RAM and at least one terabyte of SSD storage. And that would be a fantastic configuration for you. Like I said, I actually spent a good nine months using an M1 MacBook Air to do a ton of editing. And it was a fantastic computer for me. Now if you want the portability, then you could also look at getting the M1 MacBook Air. That's also a great computer. And then from there you can just go up if you want a bigger screen and you don't mind spending the money, then you can look at the MacBook Pros or any other Macs that are made. But I'm just letting you know now that the cheapest Macs that are made brand new right now would be more than adequate for almost everything, virtually every one of you would want to do, especially in terms of making instructional videos. You're not making blockbuster feature films here. I think that pretty well covers what hardware you need to be looking at for doing this type of editing. In the upcoming lessons, we'll take a look at various other types of hardware such as the lighting and microphones for audio and things of that sort. So I will see you in the next one. 3. Lighting: Alright, next up, let's talk about lighting, and this should be a shorter lesson. I primarily use three flat panel LED lights from accompany called dad's honey. I got these lights on Amazon. They're relatively affordable and they're very convenient for how I record. I have these lights mounted to a desk, which is what I'm actually standing in front of right now. And they mount onto the edges of the desk so they stay completely out of my way in terms of my desk space. And additionally, the cause these lights are LED lights, the panels are very flat and so they take up virtually no space in that regard as well. Additional features that I like about these lights. And by the way, I'm not trying to tell you to go by dazzling LED flat panel lights. What you can do those go out on Amazon and you can just search for flat LED lights or desk mount lights, something like that photography lights. And you should see lots of flat panel lights similar to what I have including mine. Other features that I like about these lights are the fact that they can all be controlled by a remote control. And I can buy additional lights that can be configured to also work with that same remote control. So that's really convenient, adjusting the brightness, color, temperature, and being able to turn them on or off individually. Now, one of the common ways of using lighting in video or photography is doing something called a three-point setup. And that's basically where you will have a triangular setup of whites. I actually, I'm not using that setup right now. I've zeroed in on a little bit more of a two-point light setup for my desk situation here. I have two lights on one side of my face and then one light a little farther away on the other side of my face. This gives me the effect of having more brightness on one side and a little bit darker on the other side, which I find to be a relatively pleasant look for me. Additionally, because I have brown skin, I find that I need to use more light than say, my wife who has much, much fairer skin than I do. And in fact, if I had my wife stand right here right now with the same lighting setup, this would be too much light for her to the point that the image would not look good at all. She'd be washed out with too much light. So I'd have to adjust the light level and bring it down for her. But because of my dark skin, I need more light, so that's something to keep in mind. If you have darker skin, you're going to need more light. Now if you don't buy Disney LED flat panel lights, that's fine. Just make sure that you get as bright a light setup as you can afford basically, which can be variably adjusted though it needs to be variably adjustable. And I think as long as you do that you should be pretty good. Now another alternative that you can also consider, which is extremely popular for a lot of social media videographers and people on YouTube is just using a single ring light. Ring lights can get pretty bright, especially because they're usually used fairly close up. And you can place the camera right in the middle of the ring. So that's quite convenient as well. So that's another alternative that you could consider. Maybe some of you may already own a ring light. And if you do, I would definitely recommend that you try that out before you go out and buy a bunch of LED panels, that might be all you need. I think the final thing I'll say about lighting is that it took me many years to understand just how important lighting is. I would take photos and record videos and things and I would wonder how come my photos and videos don't look anywhere near as good as professionals. And the natural inclination for people who don't know what they're doing is to assume that they need a better camera. And in many cases, when you're just starting out, there's a good chance that the lighting is actually going to be more important than the camera. So you definitely want to pay great attention to your lighting. And I think that's pretty much all I need to say about lighting at this time. So I'll see you in the next one. 4. Cameras: Alright, so our next topic is going to cover cameras. What cameras can you use that you may already have? What should you buy, etc. So let me start off by telling you what I'm currently using right now that you're seeing me through, I'm using a Nikon D 7500 digital SLR camera or DSLR camera. Now this camera produces a reasonably decent picture. I hope you will agree with me that it's reasonably decent. But I definitely do not recommend that you get this camera. They're much better cameras for a better price that you can get today. Let me quickly tell you some of the pros and some of the cons of this camera, not so that I can tell you why you should or shouldn't buy this camera. But some of the pros and cons that I'm going to mention are actually things that you should be looking out for with any camera that you're going to buy. By the way, the reason I'm using this camera, even though I don't recommend it, is because I already owned it before I started making these types of courses. And I didn't want to spend more money than I absolutely had to all at once. All right, so some of the pros of this DSLR camera, or the fact that it can shoot in 4k video, which is good in this day and age. In my opinion, probably every camera that you're going to consider using should support for TE, for higher resolution. That's a good one. Then in general, I think that the overall picture quality is sharp enough for my purposes. So that's another pro, now onto some of the negatives of which I have a few. The first one that I found terribly annoying is the fact that this camera and most entry to mid-level DSLR cameras actually have an artificially imposed 30 minute recording limit. What that means is that when you hit record and you're recording your videos, when you hit 29 minutes and 59 seconds or something like that, the camera will just stop recording. This is due to some European Union legislation about competition between photo equipment and real video cameras or something like that. So it's an artificially imposed limit, but it is one that you need to be aware of. If you are planning to buy a new camera, I would recommend that you look for ones that don't have this 30-minute record limit, It's really annoying. And what I end up having to do is turn off my camera and then turn it back on again and then I can record another 30 minutes. Another annoyance with this particular camera is the fact that it doesn't have an automatic continuous autofocus. If I move forward and backward in the frame, for example, the camera is not automatically adjusting the focus. With me. I have to either be at the camera and hold down on the shutter button to force it to autofocus or I have to manually focus on my own, neither of which I can do while I'm standing right here being recorded. So what I typically do to get around that is I will take a printed sheet of paper with some focusing marks and things of that sort on it. And I will tape it onto a tripod stand or some type of a stand, and then I will place that sheet of paper and the stand approximately where my face would be. Then I have to go back to the camera and then manually focus myself because I have to go through that. I try not to alter my camera too often. I mostly wanted to just leave it in place. But there are plenty of good cameras, especially from Sony, that have a really quality continuous autofocus capability. And I definitely recommend if you plan to record videos along these lines where you're doing all of the recording on your own, you should definitely seek out a camera with a good continuous autofocus. And then the final issue that I will mention on this camera that you should look out for on any camera, in my opinion, is does it have a good flip out screen that allows you to monitor yourself while you are recording yourself. This Nikon D 7500 has a great screen, great quality, great resolution. It's even touchscreen, but it does not flip out 180 degrees and swivel so that I can see myself while I'm recording. That's obviously an issue because you can't easily monitor yourself while you're recording yourself to make sure that everything's looking good. Now I do have ways that have gotten around these issues and I'm going to go ahead and mention those now. Okay. So now in terms of getting around these issues, let me tell you what I've done. For the 30-minute record limit. I've come up with two different solutions. The first solution that I initially was using was that and I bought a USB for k HDMI Capture Device from accompany called Elgato. And the device is called the CAM link for k that plugs into a USB port on your computer, or in my case, in my usb dock or hub. And my Nikon camera has an HDMI output on it. So I can connect the cable between my HDMI output of my camera and into this fork HDMI capture device and record not in the camera, but actually on my computer. I actually did this for a number of months and it was okay. Now I did have two issues with it that I wasn't crazy about. One of those issues was the fact that when recording at four K, the frame rate of this for k capture device wasn't great. And so my video was just a little choppy. Now some people who are not very picky about video and things might not really notice unless you gave them an AB comparison right upfront. But I definitely noticed and I wasn't crazy about it. It wasn't terrible, but I really desire to have a nice smooth image. So that was one issue that I didn't really care for. The other issue though was that when I was recording on the computer using this approach, after I was done recording, I then preferred to save that video file in a more highly compressed format and MP4 format when recording in real-time with this for k capture device, My computer was not immediately converting everything that it was recording into a higher compression like MP4. I had to tell it to do that after the fact and that time that it took to convert into MP4 is time that I couldn't do a whole lot of other things with my computer because I didn't want to slow my computer down even further. I might record for 30 minutes and then I might have to take I don't remember exactly how long, somewhere between ten to 20 more minutes to re-encode or translate and save my file into a more compressed file format. Now, I didn't have to save in that more compressed file format, but I was working on a video course that was going to be about 90 hours long. And so I wanted to be a little more conservative with how much total space I was using. So in summary, I had to take a little extra time every time I recorded a video after I was done to then re-encode that video in a smaller, more compressed format so that I can save more space on my solid-state drive in my computer. I found that to be a little bit annoying. And then the slightly choppy frame rate issues that I was also getting caused me to eventually look for a better solution. So then the next solution that I came up with was to buy an external for k hardware recording device. Now I bought a device from accompany called atomos and the devices called the ninja five. It's really just a small little computer with a built-in LCD touchscreen, and it has HDMI input and an output on it. And so again, I can just connect my camera's HDMI output to the input of this Atomos Ninja five device. And then on the back of this device it can take cartridges of solid-state drives that plug right into it and record in real-time directly to that solid-state drive. Additionally, this device can encode in real-time to a number of different codecs. And a codec is just the mechanism that actually does the encoding or translating into a particular format. Then when I'm done recording on the Atomos, I can just take out the SSD cartridge and then plug that into a USB device that's connected to my computer and then copy the files off of the cartridge and onto my internal solid-state drive of the computer, import them into Final Cut Pro and do all of my editing. So to summarize this approach, I no longer have the choppy frame rate issues because this device is a dedicated hardware device that can record continuously at full speed, so to speak. And secondly, I no longer have to wait to re-encode my videos after I've recorded them, because it's encoding in real-time as I'm recording, which is fantastic. And actually the Atomos solves a third issue as well, which is that I can monitor myself because the Atomos has like a five inch or so LCD touch display on it. And so I actually have my Atomos Ninja five mounted right below my camera. And I can glance down, which I'm doing right now and see myself and make sure that I'm in frame and all of those kinds of good things. It's actually way more convenient than even a flip screen that might've been connected to my camera. Now you may be wondering, why didn't I just buy a whole new camera? And I strongly did consider that and I still will at some point, however, I was able to purchase the Atomos for around $600 US. Whereas the cameras that I was looking to upgrade from would've cost me around $2 thousand. So I just happened to make the decision that the Atomos was generally the cheaper option for me that would solve almost all of my issues. Now, the only remaining issue that I have is still the one with the auto focusing, but I'm living with it for now. Now. One other thing I want to mention before I close out on this lesson is you can also just consider using a regular smartphone camera. And in fact, I'm going to go ahead and switch over to my smartphone now, which is an iPhone ten. So not even like the latest greatest iPhone with the latest greatest lenses and all of that stuff. Just so you can see what that would look like if you chose to go that route. This is an example of what it looks like when I capture video using my iPhone tin plugged into my Atomos Ninja H5 Recorder. I'm still recording the file the same way that I do with my DSLR. I'm just not using the DSLR camera, I'm now using the iPhone ten. So hopefully this gives you some idea of the difference in quality that you might see, at least with slightly older phones like the iPhone ten. Before we conclude this lesson, I just want to mention a couple other accessories that you may want to consider getting. And you can get these items online at various places such as Amazon. The first one is that you may want to consider getting a camera desk mount. That's basically a single telescoping tripod, although it's not tri mono pod, I suppose you could call it that mounts usually to the edge of a desk and you can mount your camera equipment on that. So it stays out of your way, but allows you to nicely mount the camera. You can get ones that can tell us go up and down so that you can adjust the height as well. Then along those lines, you may also want to consider getting a camera ball head mount. That's just another device that you can attach to your camera mount. And then the camera can attach to the ball head mount. And it just allows you to have more degrees of motion so that you have more options as to how you position the camera. Then the last accessory that I'm going to mention real quick is my use of a green screen. Again, you can go out to Amazon and you can just search for green screen backdrop and you'll find all kinds of green screen options. And I don't think I really have a lot that I need to recommend here, other than maybe consider getting the biggest one that will fit in whatever space you're going to be recording in. The one that I use comes with it's own stand so I can mount it to that stand, which is very convenient for me. But other than that, you can go out online and search for them and I think you won't have any problem there. I think that's going to conclude this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll talk about audio, so I'll see you there. 5. Audio: Alright, next up, let's talk about audio, which is obviously also super important. So let me first tell you my current configuration and I will also walk you down a little bit of the history of various other configurations that I have tried and why I don't use them now. First and foremost, the current microphone that I'm using is known as a condenser instrument microphone. And that is to say that it was primarily intended to pick up sound from instruments. Although obviously I'm using it for voice. It's not really that big of a deal. I mean, I think you'll probably agree that my voice sounds pretty good and that's the real reason why I'm using this after having auditioned a number of other microphones. Now the model of this particular microphone as the EMT 404. I'm just telling you that just to be thorough, but just as with my Nikon camera, I actually don't recommend that you get this. My reason for not recommending this though is not because it has any faults. I think it sounds actually great for what I'm using it for. It's just that this microphone is actually one of a pair of stereo microphones. And as far as I know, that's the only way that you can buy this microphone is as a pair. And so it doesn't make a lot of sense for most of you, two by two microphones when you only actually need one. The reason I have it, It's because I have a hobby of producing and recording music, and I own a few different microphones. And this just happens to be one that I discovered works really well for me for these kinds of videos. Now I use this microphone in more of a boom microphone configuration, which is to say that I have the microphone mounted up overhead on a boom mic stand and then it's pointing down. Now this configuration works really well for me. I find, because it picks up the sound exceptionally well, it stays completely out of my frame unless I choose to add it into the frame. And it allows me to avoid what are called plosives. What are some of the undesirable sounds that can occur when we're talking into a microphone, usually from making the English p and b sounds, these explosive which are called plosive sounds. So by not having a microphone that I have to speak directly into, I can avoid some of those harsh sounds that you might otherwise have heard. Now you definitely will have noticed that there are a lot of YouTubers who use big microphone's also. These are also condenser microphones, but they are usually intended for picking up voice. And they really do a fantastic job. And I do own one of those as well. Now the only reason I don't use that microphone for this purpose is because since I do a lot of green screen recording, I personally just don't like having that kind of microphone in the frame of view. And if you notice on various videos such as on YouTube, where a lot of people do use those kinds of microphones. Those mics are almost always in the frame. And that's because they tend to pick up best if you're speaking directly into that microphone. And I just prefer not to have that kind of microphone in my frame while I'm being recorded, I feel like it slightly breaks a little bit of the illusion of me being embedded in the screen when I use my green screen effect. But if you don't care about that and you want, generally speaking, the absolute best audio sound. I don't think you can really be much larger condenser microphones. You'll also see some people using a lapel mic or a lavalier or a lavalier, I don't know. Most, most Americans pronounce that lavalier. Those are the tiny little microphones that you can pin onto your shirt or whatever. Now I do own one of those as well. And I spent some time recording a lot of videos wearing it. But I will say I probably never really mastered the placement of that microphone as well as I might have liked to. And compared to the sound that I get from other mix that I have used, such as this one. I just didn't like the sound that much. Also, I had to be a little careful with how I move around so that it wouldn't rub up against my clothing and everything. Now again, I think that some of that I could have improved on by simply getting better with my lavalier or lavalier mic placement technique, which I suppose I just didn't use it long enough to get good at that. So that's something to keep in mind though if you do use one of those mix. Again, just as with my camera, I happened to already own mini microphones that I was able to personally audition and decide on one that I liked best. So you're not likely to already own my microphones. And since the one microphone that I'm using that I love the most is one that I can't really recommend because you'd waste your money buying two of it when you only need one. I don't have a real long list of microphone so that I can personally recommend to you. So instead, what I'm going to recommend you do is simply Google for popular microphones for recording videos, essentially. And hopefully you can narrow down what type of general microphone and what type of microphone configuration or setup you're looking for. Based on your criteria. In my case, I prefer to be able to move a little bit more freely and not have to worry about something rubbing around on my shirt. And also not worry about having a microphone in my frame. And also not worry about not having to have my mouth pointed directly into a large diaphragm condenser microphone and not having to worry about plosives and all of that. For me, a boom microphone configuration works really well and it is my preferred approach these days. But again, if you do not care about some or all of those things, I will say that you might want to just Google for large diaphragm condenser microphones and whichever ones are looking like, they're the most popular according to reviews and things, you'll probably be okay with that. As far as price goes, I would probably recommend microphones that cost at least the $100 or more, anything less than that. And I would worry that the sound quality might not be that great. Now one thing that you might try doing is that if you have a decent music store in your town, which has a wide selection of microphones, and you don't mind looking slightly crazy. You may consider taking something like a laptop and a sound interface, which I'm also going to talk about in just a moment. And taking your laptop and your sound interface to a local music store and asking for permission to audition a lot of their microphones right there on the spot. Because really you're not gonna know what a microphone is going to sound like until you actually just try it out. So that would maybe be like the most ideal way to pick a microphone is just to try it out before you actually buy it. And then I guess the final piece of equipment that you're going to need is an audio interface. For our purposes, what an audio interface does is it allows you to connect a microphone to it. And then it converts the analog signals that are coming from that microphone into digital signals that your computer can then record it. Typically, they will connect to a USB port on your computer, and then they will also have ports for plugging microphones into them. Now typically for recording voice, the most popular general style of microphone is what's called a condenser microphone. And that's just referring to the electromechanical approach that that kind of microphone uses. Now one aspect of condenser microphones though, is that they typically require something called phantom power. That's a 48 volt power source that actually powers the microphone list. So you'll want to make sure that you get an audio interface that is capable of providing phantom power, which shouldn't be hard at all. Pretty much any audio interface that is intended to allow you to plug microphones into it is going to be able to supply phantom power. But just make sure that you see that mentioned when you are looking for a good one. Now the one that I use is from a company called focus, right? The model is the Scarlet Solo, and I can very much recommend this audio interface. I've owned a number of audio interfaces over the decades and I really liked this one a lot. And the audio interfaces from focus, right, appear to be among some of the most popular ones. Because again, if you go on YouTube, you'll see lots of YouTubers who have these audio interfaces. They have a distinct red color to them. It's just a very convenient audio interface. In all honesty, for most typical audio interfaces that you might buy on Amazon or somewhere that costs more than 60 or 70 bucks. Most people probably aren't going to notice a big difference from one interface to the other. I just think the focus rights are well-constructed. They feel solid, they feel like they're not going to break. They sound good. They have a reasonably low signal to noise ratio, which is just the amount of undesirable air or static that you'll hear in the signal when nobody is talking at all. You want as little of that as possible when you are recording. And I think that's pretty much gonna do it for audio. So I'll see you in the next one. 6. Preparing to Record: All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is to turn on the lights. And I have my lights connected to a smart plug so I can just do this. Hey, Google turn on the recording lights. There we go. So now I've got some lighting. Next step is I'm going to set up my green screen. I actually use to green screens, by the way. Then I check to see if my green screens are covering all the area that I want. And I see that I don't have quite as much coverage above my head is I'd like someone to bring this one green screen up a little closer to myself. Just a little. Yeah, and I think that's a little bit better. And then I'm gonna take the green screen over there and just bring it over a little more. Now you can't see it, but I've got one more light. You probably seeing just the edge of it right here. So I've got one more light to just help things out over in that corner. And I recently moved that light so it's positioning is a little bit off from where I normally would have it, but I think it's probably gonna be okay. I don't spend a whole lot of time trying to work out the lighting on the green screens, to be honest with you, sometimes that does affect me and post when I'm actually doing applying my green screen effect. But it's okay. I mean, I'm, I'm not making Hollywood feature films here. And now you will also see that the edge of my desk is sticking out a little bit. And I don't like having to work around that. So what I have been doing lately is uncovering that with some more green screen cloth, which I have right here. So you may have seen this in some of the other videos and wondered, what was that all about? Well, now you're finding out what that's all about. I'm just covering up the edge of my desk where the desk was showing. And I'm basically just trying not to have too many really horrible creases, although I've got one right here. But again, I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time working on this. I can, I can mask a lot of it out in post when I'm editing. I just want the big, the big bits covered and I'm trying to get a smooth contour mostly as much as I can, but I'm not gonna do anything about that little edge there. Yeah. And again, I can see that that light this light here is sticking out more than it used to someone to just push that back a bit. Again, this is because yesterday I moved this light from where it normally would be. That got that hidden. Okay, So that's pretty much how I set up the green screen. My next step would be to set up my camera and focus. Alright, so my next step is to start turning on my camera related equipment. So first I'll turn on my Atomos, which I've already put the cartridges that in the back. And you'll notice that fan is actually pretty loud because it is a whole, entire computer that has to run pretty hard to do the real-time video compression and everything that it does, right? So there's the Atomos. Then I come over here to my camera, my Nikon. I turn this on. Then I like to turn on the monitoring screen or the live view so that I can kind of see what's going on from this perspective. Now typically, I already have settings that I use that are locked in for the most part, so I mostly don't mess with. But let me go through the main settings that you may want to pay attention to if you're using a DSLR or if you're even using the camera on your smartphone. But you have software that you can control the settings more. There are probably about three or four settings that I would pay attention to. One of them is ISO. And the ISO level controls the amount of noise that is in the overall picture. And obviously you'll want as little noise as possible. However, unfortunately, the less noise you put into the picture by lowering the ISO, the darker the picture becomes. So right now my ISO is actually set to 200. Let me show you what happens if I adjust this. I'll hold down on my ISO button here. And then I can move that down and you see how the picture is getting lower. Now I can't go any lower than 100, but you see how that got dimmer and dimmer. The brighter I make it, you know, obviously the higher the exposure will be, but the more noise that will end up in the picture now at these low ISO levels below around 1000. I'm not going to get a lot of noise and stuff. That's not something I really need to care about too much, but I just want to show that that ISO level, generally speaking, the lower you can get it while still retaining good exposure levels, the better. So ISO is one, and then I can adjust my f-stops here, which is currently is at F5 0.6. I can adjust that. And that also affects how much light is getting into the camera. So I just let a little bit more light in. Then finally, the shutter speed also can adjust the amount of light. So you really, you're working with how much light you're letting in. And a big part of what these settings should be is going to come down to what you like, what looks good to you. You'll have to experiment with that. And then the main thing that I usually end up having to work with is the focus. I'm a little reluctant to even mess with it right now because it's always a bit of a pain in the butt for me to dial in. Alright, so the next thing I usually like to do is to open up QuickTime on my computer and I will show you why. Alright, so here's QuickTime. And then what I like to do is I'll do an Option Command N to tell it that I want to do a movie recording. So right now I have the movie recording settings of quicktime set to take input from my Cam Link for k capture device, which I will remind you is this little device right here, which I have an HDMI cable connected to it. It's this kind of beige cable. That's actually the same beige cable that I have as the output from my cam links. In other words, I've got the HDMI output of my Nikon going into the HDMI input of my Atomos Ninja. And then the output of my Atomos Ninja, which is also an HDMI going into the input of my Cam Link. And the reason I use this now is not to record on the computer anymore, which I don't do anymore. But just so that I can do a quick little big picture monitor. So basically I'm using this now as a large monitoring screen. So it makes it a lot easier for me to just get a better sense of things like whether or not I'm in focus and actually I can see visually right now that I am not in focus. But let me show you another way that I can tell whether or not I'm in focus without having to necessarily go grab that sheet just yet. My Atomos Ninja has something called focus peaking. And if I turn that on, what happens is the screen starts to show little, a little red edges and things for things that are in focus. And if I move my face around a little bit, I can kind of get an idea of what's going on. Now here's where it gets a little tricky for me. What I can also do because I can still see visually on my screen that I am not perfectly in focus yet. I don't know how well you can see that from there, but I can see it very clearly that I'm not quite in focus right now. Actually let me try to do it with my left hand because I want you to kind of see what these focus peaking does as I adjust my focus here. You see that now I just got a lot more red. I can see on the screen here, on my monitor here, my big monitor that I'm getting more focused, coming into focus better. I'm gonna go a little too far and you see now the red just kinda got less decreased. I'm gonna go back a little bit. There it is, and now I'm pretty red. So that's meaning that according to the Atomos, I'm pretty well in focus there and I can kind of see what's my eyes that yeah, that does look a lot more focused as well. That's telling me when I'm in focus or not. And so as I step back, there's less red on me. So that's another way that I can dial in my focus reasonably well. Then I can turn that off. Alright, so then the next thing I can do is check my audio levels. And one way that I do that is just over here on my audio interface. So you see that as I'm talking, that green light is lighting up and that's just letting me know that it's getting a good strong signal there. Now I can adjust that with, with this knob here, which is for this channel where I got my microphone plugged in. So if I adjust that all the way up and keep talking while now it's turning red. That's too much and you're probably hearing it being too much. So I'm going to turn that back down until I'm not getting the yellow, orange, or red, and I'm just getting the green. And that's about it. And I want to be talking at a fairly normal level though. This is the level that I would typically be talking at. I'm trying to get it right at the edge of where it's starting to turn yellow and red, but not quite doing it while I'm still speaking at a really decent level. And I could turn that down just a little bit more. And testing 123, testing one into three. So you can see there that that's a fairly good level though. I'm still seeing just a little bit fairly good level testing 123, testing 123. There we go. That's how I dial that in. And then you'll also see here that my 48 volt indicator light is on. So that's just saying that I've got 48 volt phantom power being delivered to my microphone, which you can see right there. Alright, so at this point, all my hardware is set up and my screens are set up and I am now ready to record. 7. Recording a Lesson: Alright, so now that we've got all of our hardware setup, our lighting, and the monitoring and all of that are ready to go. We are ready to do a little test recording of a sample lesson. Let's say maybe we'll pretend like I'm going to teach a lesson on how to use Apple numbers, which is Apple's spreadsheet program. When I record this lesson with the green screen, I typically will do is I will use QuickTime to record my screen, specifically to record the application that I'm teaching. And then I'm also recording my audio from the microphone and then I'm also recording myself against the green screen with the camera. I'm going to show you how I set all of these things up. Or at least a couple of different ways that I might typically do so. All right, so I've already got QuickTime up and running for this monitoring window here, but this isn't the window that I would use to record my screen. So I'm going to open up another window of QuickTime to record just my screen. But before I start up QuickTime, let me go ahead and open up apple numbers because I want to make sure I have the dimensions right for what area of my screen I'm going to actually record. This is actually kind of important. So let me start up an instance of numbers. For now I'll just do a new document. Now I have a little utility on my computer called MOM, MOM. And it has an icon right here. And what this utility lets me do is it lets me manage the size and positioning of windows on my computer. I already have a preset for this utility that can re-size any window that I have selected for the same dimensions that are used for high definition, which I never remember what those numbers are. I can come up here, click on this and there it is. It's 1920 by 1080. Okay, so that's where you get the ten ATI or ten ADP in HD. If I select this option here which I pre-created, it will resize this Apple Numbers window to those dimensions. So let me show you here. There we go. Now I know that this window is ready for HD. Now, oftentimes I will also move that window that I'm planning to record over to the top-left. Now you don't have to do that, but as you may know on Macs, they show the menu bar up here at the top. If you're teaching things where you need to show the menu bar, then you'll typically want to make sure that the menu bar ends up in your frame, right in the window frame that you're going to be recording from. Now, this does present one more little issue which I will show you in just a moment here. Let me put the focus back on QuickTime now. And then from here, I can now prepare to record my screen. I will go up to File new screen recording. And now you see that I've got this little indicator window here to show what part of my screen is going to get recorded right? Now, here's the thing. Currently, it's not going to record my menu. If I want the menu to be recorded, then I need to drag this little selection window here up and over. But now that I've done that, I will be cutting off the bottom edge of my Apple Numbers program. So I'm going to actually go ahead and start recording in a minute here, but I will resize this window so that I'm now including the menu bar. So that's something you want to keep in mind. Do you want to record the menu bar as well? If you're going to be showing people options that are in the menu bar, you might want to do that, but you also may want to make sure that when you're recording your video and you're showing your students your screen, that they may have the option of seeing the whole entire window. And not just like a portion of it. I could've recorded my entire screen, but then the text and things in this window would be really, really small because my monitor is quite wide. But this dimension won't fit on typical HD displays. And so everything would get a scaled down to the point that all the text in here would be pretty unreadable. That's why you want to be very mindful of typically recording at HD resolutions or smaller than that, like 640 or 800 by 600 or something like that. You just want to make sure that you're using a dimension that will fill up the whole entire screen. And that your window that you're recording is able to take up that whole entire space unless you intended for it to take up more or less. So now I can come down here to my options for quicktime recording. The other thing that I may want to do now is to decide on what I'm recording for audio. So what I typically want to do here is I do want to record my voice as part of this screen capture. And the reason I typically want to do that is because later on when I'm doing my green screen effect that I'm overlaying my face over the screen that I captured. I want to synchronize the video that I got from my Nikon and the video that I'm capturing of the screen, I want to synchronize those so that when I say I'm clicking here, My voice of me saying I'm clicking here is synchronized with me clicking wherever it is that I was clicking at that moment, everything needs to sync up. Final Cut can synchronize multiple video clips automatically, as long as those video clips all have the same basic audio, it doesn't have to sound great, but all clips do need to have the same audio. And so I've just include the audio track to be reported with this recording here. Now you don't have to do this, but if you don't do it, then you're going to sit there and manually try to sync up multiple clips and that's not much fun. And that's why you'll see a lot of people on YouTube and stuff when they're showing how they're recording things, you'll see them do like a clap. They're trying to establish a loud audio event so that they can manually sync things up. But we don't need to do that because Final Cut can do it for us. Alright, so I need to choose an audio interface that I want to record from. Now. I actually am recording audio already before I've even started recording video here and I'm using another program to do that. And so in order to make sure that I don't have a conflict between QuickTime recording audio from this microphone and my other program that I'm using right now for you guys to record audio, I've created two virtual audio interfaces, one for my other program and then one for QuickTime. And so I'm going to choose the virtual audio interface that I created just for QuickTime. And that's what I'm gonna do. But in your case, you would just choose the audio interface that you actually have on your computer or the microphone input of your laptop if you're just using that. Now I'm ready to record. And so I'm going to hit Record here. And then I'm also going to hit record on my ninja. Now I'm in business. So a couple of things I'm gonna do now, I'm going to resize this window. There we go. All right. Then I'm also going to silence my notifications. Now. I can just come over here and say I want to focus and I don't know, maybe I'll do for like an hour. So basically I'm just turning on the do not disturb. Alright, so I'm recording now. So now I'm going to pretend like I'm recording an actual lesson. I'm going to start now. Hi, I'm Terry. I'm going to be teaching you how to use Apple numbers to do funny stuff that people wouldn't normally. And I'm going to teach you how to do interesting thing. Alright, so at this point I will have finished recording my lesson. And so now I just need to stop recording. So I would have to go up here to the Quick Time icon to stop QuickTime from recording. So I'm going to go ahead and click that now. Alright, and then that immediately presents me with the reporting of my screen, which I can then go save and I'm going to hold off on that for just a second. Then I'd come over here to my Atomos screen and hit Stop here as well to stop that recording. At this point here, here are the steps that I would now take. I would come back over here to the QuickTime recording and just save this file. I'll do a Command S or I could go up to the File Save and then I would name it something. Usually I try to name it something meaningful like I don't know, Numbers. Lesson one, something like that. Now, full disclosure, I actually already finished recording all of this, but my camera that was recording me stopping everything like I'm showing you now actually died. So right now I'm kinda simulating how I stopped everything in case anybody is super astute and notices some discrepancies here. I'm just letting you know now that I'm just going through the motions of stopping and saving, but I actually already did that off camera. Anyway, I would have named this file and then hit Save, which I'm not going to do now because I've already done it. Then I could close this window. And then over here on my ninja, I would turn this off, then take out my cartridge, my SSD cartridge, and then I would plug it into my USB dongle here so that I can read its contents. Then typically I would copy the file, the video file off of my SSD and onto my local drive. That's just what I do. Some people would copy that off of the SSD and onto an external SSD or they leave it on here and then just go right into Final Cut. And import that video directly off of the SSD. So there's a lot of ways that you can choose to do that. Now, I like to copy my Atomos ninjas video files directly onto my laptop's internal solid-state drive because that Dr is going to be infinitely faster than any other drive that I have. And I happen to have a really large SSD for doing massive amounts of video recording and editing work. There are a whole lot of people who tend to edit off of an external SSD or something like that. And that's fine too. This pretty much concludes my general workflow for how I record my videos and capture my screen. Now let me just reiterate a couple of differences that I didn't go into great detail on. If you do not have an Atomos device or some equivalent type of hardware external capture device for video, you've got at least two other options here. I spoke briefly about the fact that I also can capture with my Cam Link for K. But I said in one of my previous videos that I don't do that anymore because I found the frame rate at 4k resolution to be just a little bit choppy for my taste, but a lot of people probably wouldn't notice or even really care. So in that case, instead of having the ninja and extracting the cartridge and taking the SSD cartridge out and plugging it in. In that case, what I would've done instead is that I would've had my camera, my Nikon camera connected directly to the Cam Link. I would have started up QuickTime and I would've just recorded the video window that I currently only use for previewing and not for recording. I just would've hit report on that. Now you can record both your screen, which you saw me do for recording apple numbers and an external video source simultaneously with QuickTime. And I used to do that too. That can work as well. Additionally, you could use other programs to do the same thing. For a little while there I had even been recording both my screen and my video capture with the Cam Link using the program called OBS Studio, which is very popular, particularly for people who do live streaming and things of that sort. But that's a super powerful application that can also report all kinds of video and audio things. But mostly I use QuickTime these days because I mostly find it just easier. Then the other way that you could also capture your video from a DSLR in particular, is you can always just record onto the DSLRs own internal SD card or whatever type of flash memory device it uses. So you can record directly onto the camera the way that it was intended to be used. And then take out your flash memory card, plug it into your computer with either your doc or if your computer has an SD card slot or or whatever type of slot you've got there, then copy your files. So that would be somewhat similar to me using the ninja and just taking out the cartridge. And just a quick reminder again, one of the main reasons why I'm using the ninja is to get past my particular cameras 30-minute record limit. That's one of the biggest reasons that I'm using it. All right, so I think that's going to wrap up this lesson. So in the next lesson, I will show you how I import these files into Final Cut and start up a whole new project. I'm using that term in the more general sense because in Final Cut that word means something a little different. But anyway, in the next lesson, I'll show you how I do all of that. So I'll see you in the next one. 8. Getting Started with Final Cut: Hey, welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to show you my complete process for creating a green screen tutorial lesson. And we're going to start off with just starting up Final Cut Pro. I'm going to assume that you've already obtained Final Cut Pro, but if you haven't, you can go to the Mac App Store and download it from there. Once you've got it, Let's go ahead and start it up and get going. Now I'm going to kind of reset my Final Cut settings so that it'll be as if it were the first time that I've ever opened it up. And for me to do that, I'm going to hold down Option command when I double-click on Final Cut Pro. But for you you don't need to do that. Because again, I'm kind of resetting everything. It's asking me if I'm okay with deleting my preferences, which I am, I just want to make sure that my copy of Final Cut Pro is as close to what a brand new installation would look like for you. Final Cut has opened up and I'm getting presented with this little message telling me about some of the new functionality that's in it. I won't be getting into any of that in this course. I'm going to click Continue to dismiss that. Alright. I usually like to maximize my window. So I'm going to do that now. I can still see my menu by coming up here. Okay, and so as you see when you first start up Final Cut, you'll be presented with a brand new project here. Now, I'm using the term project for just a little while here in the more general sense of the word, but Final Cut actually has a notion of something called a project. And it isn't probably what you may think it is if you are familiar with Final Cut, in Final Cut, this top level thing here, which most people who are generally familiar with computer applications, but not specifically Final Cut might think of as a project. This is actually called a library. This is the main organizational structure that Final Cut gives us to hold our entire master work or whatever you want to call it. If you don't want to use the word Project, which they don't use for this, at least. You get a default library here. You can rename that or you can delete it and create another one, whatever you want to do. If you wanted to create a new one, you could come up here to File New and then choose Library. In fact, I will go ahead and even just do that, then you can decide where you want that to live. Now by default, Final Cut Pro will place libraries under the movies folder of your home directory. So if I just click on this, you may be able to see here. So here's your main hard drive and then users within your home directory, which in my case is Terry. Yours will be whatever your name is. And then the movies folder under that, that's where Final Cut by default wants to store these libraries. You can obviously move them to wherever you like. Some people prefer to keep their libraries on an external drive, especially in external solid-state drive, I prefer to keep mine while I'm working on them actively on my local solid-state drive because I have a very large solid-state drive that's way faster than any external drives could be. But that's how you can create a new library. And I will also say that since I'm focusing this course on mostly showing you how to use Final Cut to create your own green screen based course. I will say this. I would recommend that you do one library per course. If you're going to make three courses, you would likely want to have three different libraries for each of those courses. So I'm going to pretend like I am creating a course for teaching how to do things with Apple numbers. So I will go ahead and rename this library to something more appropriate like Apple Numbers course. Just so it makes more sense. Okay, So that's how you could do that. Alright, now I'm going to skip the scribing this smart collections thing for right now and come down here to this next thing. So this next thing is the next organizational unit of Final Cut Pro, which is called an event. And so they also give us a default event whose name will start off being whatever the date is. And again, you can rename that again in the interest of time and everything else. I'm going to give you a suggestion for how you could use events, and I will save this out. In fact, I'll give you a couple of suggestions. If you were making a relatively large course or a course where you want to break up your lessons into sections or chapters. Let's say you might have a course that's comprised of ten chapters. And then each chapter might have five or ten or a 100 lessons in them. Then in that case, you could use the events to represent the chapters. Now you don't have to. Events can actually be used in a whole lot of different ways. And you'll see a lot of people do a lot of different things with them. But I'm just offering you a suggestion of a couple of ways that you could use them because when I started off with Final Cut, one of the things that I wasted a lot of time with was just trying to understand if Apple had any intended way for me to use these structures. In which I will now say, I don't feel that Apple wanted to tell me very strongly or us very strongly how they think we should use Final Cut Pro. And I think one of the reasons for that is because there are a lot of different types of people using Final Cut for different things. You've got movie makers, documentary and people making TV series, people making YouTube videos, people like me making tutorials and courses and things of that sort. Because there are so many different ways that you could use Final Cut. But there are a relatively limited number of ways that you can structure your libraries and the files within them. I feel like Apple Disk kinda stays away from trying to go really deeply into telling us how to use it. So like I said, one way that you maybe could consider using the events is to let the events represent chapters or sections of a course. The other way you could do it, especially if it's a relatively short course, like, let's say the whole entire course is only going to be like ten lessons long or something like that, where you don't really need to break it down into chapters. In that case, I'd probably just let the events represent their own lessons. So in that case, maybe I would rename this to something like Lesson one, Mellon real life. I'd probably name this something a little more meaningful, like what are you going to learn in lesson one? And that's maybe what I would say. In fact, maybe even number, it's something like one. And then whatever you're going to learn, opening numbers, let's just say OK, and you can rename that later. Then if you want to create more events, you can do that in a couple of different ways. You can come up here to the File new event, menu item. Or you can right-click on the library and choose new event here. Or you can just use the keyboard shortcut, which is my preference. Usually, I will usually just do option in. And let's say that I want to make another event for my second lesson. Closing numbers. Let's say I'll make one more, three calculating column. All right, so you could do that. So to recap that real quick, like I said, you could use events to represent chapters or you could use events for one lesson at a time. Then the next unit underneath the events is called a project. That's where they use the word project. And project may be the easiest thing to understand in Final Cut because a project basically results in the creation of a video, an actual video file. All these other structures here do not represent video files. They are simply collectors of files like media files and things of that sort. But the actual finished videos that we export and upload to various places like YouTube or Vimeo or wherever those are all represented by the project. And so just as we can create libraries and events, we can create projects as well. Again, there are multiple ways to do that. You can select an event and right-click on it and say new project. Or you can do a Command N, or you can come up here to File New Project, okay? So there are lots of ways to do that as well. And again, I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, so I'm going to do a Command N. Now, if I'm doing one lesson per event, then that also means that I'm doing one project per lesson. It might make sense you don't have to do this, but it might make sense to name the project the same thing as the event. In that case, I might do 01 opening numbers again. Now, on the other hand, if I'm doing one event per chapter and then I have that chapter named something like getting started. Then in that case, there's a good chance I'm going to have multiple projects. And each project will be each lesson. I will show you what each of these scenarios actually looks like. Right now I'm going to do the scenario where I've got one lesson and one project per event. So there's my empty project. It's empty in the sense that I haven't brought any media in and placed any media into this project. One other thing to notice now is that as I've just created this project, I now have a timeline down here. And you'll see shortly this is where we actually start pulling in our media to decide what we want that finished video to look like. Now, what I think I'm gonna do, just so you can see a comparison of a couple of different approaches. Let me also create another library. You're welcome to follow along with me if you'd like, but you don't have to. I just want to show you what a chapter based library and course could look like. All right, so maybe I will call this library building electric cars. And this also shows that you can have multiple libraries open at the same time. In Final Cut though, I don't tend to do that very often, but you certainly can. Okay, Alright, so there's that. And then I'm going to rename this first event here, something like, I don't know, obtaining materials. Let me also, I'm gonna go ahead and put a number here just so that I can keep things nice and orderly. Alright, so there's an event, then I will create my first lesson in here. So my lesson might be something like, I don't know, one dot 01. I didn't know striking material deals. Then I might have another lesson, one dot 02. Now the way that I'm naming these projects is just totally something I'm making up here. What I'm doing is I'm prefixing my project names with the number of the chapter. So this chapter is chapter one. I want the project to be one dot and then something you don't have to do that. That's just a nomenclature that I tend to use. All right, so let's see. I don't know, getting funding, I'm literally just making up stuff here. But now you can see what it looks like if you have multiple projects which will become individual videos within an event, you could just keep going that way. And let's have a second chapter as well. I will do a second chapter here. Like, I don't know, building the factory. Then you could have a couple of lessons in there. So this will be two dots, 01, finding land. Then maybe one more or less than in here 2.02, building with bricks. Now you can see a little bit of an idea of what it might look like to do a multi-channel water based course here versus a probably shorter type of course where you don't need chapters. For now I'm going to go ahead and close up the multi-channel thing that was just there to kind of show you what that would look like. And we'll mostly focus for now though, on the individual lesson based approach. Alright, now the next thing we're going to learn is how to actually import our recorded media. So in previous lessons, you saw me record myself doing a little simple lecture on how to do numbers and everything. I have two recordings for that. One is my screen recording and then the other one is of me against a green screen. Now I will show you how you can import those files into the project. Again, there are multiple ways to do this. One way you can do it is by just going through the Finder. And I usually like to keep my recordings temporarily in my downloads folder. It doesn't really matter where you keep them though, but I usually will keep them in here and then you can select them and drag them over. In fact, I guess I will show you what that looks like. This is my typical way for doing this. I will grab them like this. And then while holding down on these, I'm not letting anything go. I will then do a command tab to tab back over to Final Cut where I can then drop them off. Okay, So that's one way you can do it. Now, I didn't actually drop them off yet because I want to do a couple of other things here. But now another way you can do this is to first make sure you're highlighted on the event that you are carrying about. Then you can do a command I for import command I. And then that opens up this Media Import window here. And this may be the most common way that a lot of people will do this. It's fairly straightforward. And then you've got to navigate to wherever you are storing your files. Now I don't usually use this method because it always defaults to somewhere other than where I keep my files, whereas I always have my import files open already in my Finder. And so I usually just find it easier to just grab them and drag them into Final Cut. But you could do this way as well. Downloads. And so there are the files there. Now you can select multiple files. And in my case I have to I've got the recording of me and then I've also got the recording of my screen. And I selected both of those by just holding down on shift. You could also hold down on command if you wanted to select non-contiguous files. You can do that. You've got a few options over here on the side, by the way, you can specify explicitly which event to add these two, which brings me to another point when you are bringing in your media files and things. They do not actually get associated with a specific project. Instead, they are associated with an event which is something that you may or may not find intuitive, but that's how Final Cut does it. You have to decide which event you want these media files to live inside of. One other thing I should say then is that you can also think of libraries and events as basically just folders. And in fact, that's essentially what they are. But projects which become videos, those cannot so much be thought of as folders. Those are more in my mind, I think of those more as files. Just to give you a frame of reference, if it's helpful to you to think in those terms. We're saying put these media files in the 01 opening numbers event folder. If you want to think of it that way, then down here you've got some options. Copied a library or leave files in place. I almost always prefer to copy to library which will literally just copy those files from my current downloads folder into a folder within my library. And the reason I usually prefer to do it that way is so that I can treat my whole entire library as one giant unit that I can then pick up and copy onto other drives and things like that. On the other hand, if I choose to leave these files in place, then Final Cut will let me edit with the files, but it'll point to them wherever they actually live. So in this case, they live in the downloads folder and that's where they will stay. The problem with that is that for me, especially, I will eventually delete everything that's in my Downloads folder. And if I were to do that after I had done a bunch of editing on these videos and things, while then I will have just broken my videos. Now, I know that there are a lot of Final Cut users who prefer not to copy their files into their library and they do leave them in place. And that's mostly because they choose and prefer, I suppose, to manage where the files live themselves, which is another option you could do. You could create your own folder structure that represents your library and you can move your files wherever you want them to be, your media files to wherever you want them to be. And then you can simply tell Final Cut, Hey, leave my files where I already put them because they are where I want them to be. You can totally do that too. I just choose not to do that. It feels like a little bit of extra work to me, but you've got a lot of flexibility there. Let's see. I don't think we'll get into any of these other options right now, other than if you happen to be working on a computer that doesn't handle whatever type of encoding your media files are in very well when you start editing. So let's say that your media files are encoded with the H.265 codec, which is a highly compressed codec. And slower older computers might have a hard time allowing you to edit those files it quickly because they are more processor intensive, let's say. In that case, you may prefer or you may need to work with what are called proxy files. Proxy files are duplicates of your imported media video files, but they are less intense on your processor while you're editing. You may want to use proxy media or even the optimized media. That's what those options are. I've never really needed to use them though, so I don't ever bother with that. Alright, and then there's other useful things here that you can play with. But I always just go with the defaults here. Alright? So I'm going to go ahead and import these two files now. Alright? And so now they're showing up over here. Now because of the nature of the type of editing that I do, which is all about online courses where I'm capturing my screen and recording myself. In other words, I'm not doing a lot of videos where I am out on different locations in different scenes and things because I'm not on different scenes and things. I find that this particular viewer configuration where it's showing me my imported video clips in a film strip format is just wasting a lot of space for me. And I prefer usually to click on this little tab here and display my media as just text-based lists. Because I don't really need to see 30 minutes of me against the green screen and 30 minutes of my screen recording. That all looks like the same thing anyway. However, if I were making a movie or a TV show where a different scenes take place in different settings and stuff. Then in that case, the filmstrip view might be particularly useful for me to quickly be able to browse through and see. Okay, there's that scene where I was at the beach and there's that scene where I was at the office or whatever. And so in my opinion, I think that's one of the most useful things about the film strip view, but I don't use it. So I prefer to just see things in this way. I think it's just quicker and more convenient for me. Alright, so we've imported everything. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and close out this lesson. And in the next lesson, I will show you what I do next to start preparing for the green screen and editing. I'll see you in the next one. 9. Syncing Multi-Clip Audio: All right, So in the last lesson, I showed you how to get started. We created a library and events and some projects, and we imported our files. Now in this lesson, I will show you what I do with these files to prepare them for the green-screen effects. So I think this lesson should be kind of fun. All right, so the first thing I do is that I take my two video files, one of me against the green screen and then the other one of my screen. And I select those two files like so. And I just held down on Shift while I was clicking on those. If you had a million files in here, then you could also just cherry pick them by selecting one and then holding down on Command and then selecting the other one wherever it may be. You could do that too. The next thing that we need to do now is we want to get these two files, these two video clips together. And we want them to be synchronized by audio, because these are two separate recordings of the same period of time. There's one of me talking and then there's one of me doing things on the screen to separate video clips and we want them synchronize them because the end goal is gonna be superimposing me against the green screen on top of the video recording of my screen. Final Cut can actually take those two video clips and synchronize them in time together so that when I say I'm clicking on something, you actually are seeing me clicking on that thing at that time. And so the way to do that is first off, both clips need to have enough similarity in their audio tracks. And I have that obviously because my screen capture was recording my voice through the microphone and then my video green screen capture was recording my voice via the microphone on my DSLR camera. Okay, so they both have roughly the same audio track. Alright, so as long as you've got that, then I can right-click on these selections. And I can come down here to Synchronize Clips. By default, Final Cut should already have this option checked here. Use audio for synchronization, and that is exactly what we want. I just take the defaults here. I will click, Okay? All right, So what has happened is that Final Cut has created a new virtual video file, and it has faced its name off of one of these two files here and then attacked on synchronized clip. Now I call this a virtual video file because you will see in a moment here that this is what final put calls a compound clip. A clip that is comprised of other clips. It's not a real video file. It's just like a virtual video file. You'll see what I mean here in just a second. Alright, so the next thing that I typically do is go ahead and bring this clip down onto my timeline. Your project. It doesn't have anything to display until you bring some video down into this timeline. There are multiple ways to do that. You could drag a video down like that. You could do that. Or my often preferred way is that there are some keyboard shortcuts that can bring various media down onto the timeline as well. Usually at this point, what I will do is I will just have the video that I am interested in, which in this case is my synchronized clip, and then I will hit E. Now notice I just got a little warning here. You are editing clips between libraries. And the reason I got that is because actually right now my current project is an example project from the building electric cars library and not the Apple Numbers course. So that message, they're just actually woke me up and made me realize I was about to put that in the wrong library. I could have still done it, but Final Cut kinda realized that probably wasn't what I meant to do and it wasn't. What I can do here is just double-click on this opening numbers project. Now you notice that this name down here has changed. So now I'm on the right project. And so now I can select this compound clip, the synchronized compound clip, and then hit E. The E, What that does is it brings whatever media you have selected down to the end of the timeline. Since we didn't have anything in the timeline. In this case, it just put it at the beginning of the timeline. But if I were to select another clip, in fact, I'll do it here just as a test real quick. I'll select another clip. And if I hit E again, it's going to put it not at the beginning, but at the end of this timeline here. So I'm at five minutes and 33 seconds. If I hit E. Now I'm at ten minutes and 11 minutes in something. If I zoom out on my timeline so that I can now see these two clips that I've brought into my timeline. You'll see that now I can zoom out in a couple of ways. If I just wanted to see the entire timeline all in one screen, I can do a Shift Z. There's my first clip right there, and there's the second clip there. I also can use pinch and zoom. So I can zoom in just like you would do on your iPhone. I'm using my trackpad to do that and I can pinch to zoom back out like that. But if I just want to. Use up all of the space for the timeline within one view here I can do Shift Z again, and that kind of just renormalize is everything. So I can see the entire timeline in one screen. Now I just did that just to show you what that looks like. Since this second clip is highlighted, I can just hit Delete to get rid of that. We'll learn a little bit more about some of these other ways that you can bring clips down. But the main thing that I do is that I will do a Shift Z again to kind of just resize all of that. So you can see what's in this compound clip right now, partially. Now, the next thing I do is to double-click on this compound clip, because it is a compound clip that is comprised of multiple clips, but we don't see those multiple clips right now. So you can think of a compound clip as a virtual video file slash folder that contains other clips to get inside of that folder to see those other clips, you can double-click on the compound clip, sorry for the confusion between clips and clicks. Alright, so I'm gonna double-click on this now and look at that. Now there are two video clips. The top one is m0 against the green screen and the bottom one is my screen there. Alright, so now we're inside of our compound clip, and as you can see, we've got two clips, one on top of the other that we've got this green-screen clip. And then we've also got the background clip. And you'll notice if I move my cursor left and right while on top of either of these clips, you can actually hear whatever sound is associated with those clips. That's called scrubbing. This is a convenient feature that I do make a lot of use of so that I can audibly hear things like where I am in the clip or sometimes I may even want to listen to a section of the clip or something like that so that I can figure out where I want to do my next editing. I can hit the spacebar to play it back. We can sort all of these records by last name. Now what I'm hearing at the moment is the audio from both of these clips at the same time. And this is also confirming to me that the audio is in sync because I'm not hearing like doubled or delayed or anything like that. So you can see now that when I used the synchronized functionality of Final Cut, it did indeed puts these two video files together. If I zoom in on these, you can actually see that they probably are not starting up at the same place. By the way, I'm zooming in by holding down on command and the equal sign, which is really command and the plus sign. But I don't have to hold down on the shift. So the minus button and the equals button zoom in and out. Or I can also do the pinch and squeeze. That. That works too on the track pad. Alright, now I want to go to the beginning of these two film strips and I can hit the home button on my keyboard. Or if you're on a laptop that doesn't have a home button, you can do function and left arrow key. Here I am at the very beginning and I'm zooming in. And now you can see how Final Cut synchronized these two clips. What I'm seeing here is that I started recording this green screen video before I started recording my background video. And so Final Cut has inserted what's called a gap clip right here to take up some space in order to perfectly synchronize these two clips. My alright, so let me zoom back out here. I'm gonna do a Shift Z to just put it all in here together. Alright, so that's how the synchronization work. Now, the next step that I typically will do is to turn off the audio on my green screen because I don't need both of these audio tracks here. I only really need one to turn off the audio for this entire track. What I can do is come over here to this inspector area. Now if you don't have this open, this little area right here, there are several ways to open it. You can click on this icon here that will open and close it. Or you can do command number four, which is what I usually do. And then underneath that you have more little basically tabs that you can get two. Since what I'm wanting to do is to turn off the audio for this clip. I can make sure that I've selected the clip. You can click on either one of those clips. I want this green-screen clip. Then go up to here to this speaker icon. Click on that. And now I can see various Audio related options. And what I'm going to do right now is simply click on this checkbox for dialogue one and just do that and that turns off the audio for that entire clip. Now I'm left with just the audio down here for my screen capture. Now if I play that back, listen closely that these column letters have shown up. What you might notice is that the audio of my microphone is only coming out of the left speaker. And the reason for that is because I only have one microphone connected to my audio interface. The audio interfaces, a stereo interface though. So there are two input channels, left and a right. My microphone is only plugged into the equivalent of the left input. It. And so by default here, because of the way that I set up my recording and everything with QuickTime, I'm only getting my voice coming out of the left speaker, so we need to fix that. Now, if you record in QuickTime with a setup just like this, there's a good chance you're going to have this same issue. And that's why I'm going to show you how to do this. Now, there are other ways that you could avoid this. Like I could've recorded my microphone in a dedicated audio recording application where I could then tell it that I wanted it to record in mono instead of stereo. And if I had done that, then I likely wouldn't be having this problem now because Final Cut would know that that was a mono recording and that mono recordings, it should by default, be played back on both the left and the right side. But this was recorded as a stereo recording in which there's only one channel of sound, which is on the left side. So we need to fix that. All right, so the way to do that, I will come down here onto this clip now. And I'm still on my audio settings here in the Inspector. And I can see right here that, yes, indeed, Final Cut believes that the audio associated with this clip is recorded in stereo. I'm going to change this now by clicking on this drop-down here. And I'm going to tell it to use dual mono instead of stereo. And now if I come down here and play or even just scrub values in it, now I'm getting the sound out of both the left and the right, okay? Now one other thing that I have discovered over time that I should do is these two tracks here represent the left and the right channels. As you can see here, I have sound data on the left channel. It's not labeled left, but that's what it is. And I don't have any sound data here on the right channels. And so I'm actually going to just turn that off by unchecking that as well. One more thing we'll do in this lesson is I like to modify my voice audio to bring up the levels and makes sure that it sounds strong and clear. And also to reduce some of the background noise and sound of the room and things like that. To do that, I will open up the effects pain and I can do that right here. I'm going to click on this little guy or I can do Command five. Alright, so here are all of my effects that I have, and I have access to both video effects and audio effects. Now what I want right now is Audio Effects. So I can go down here to the Audio section. Down here there's a section called voice. And I click on that, and then I will scroll this way until I find this voice over enhancements. So this is a nice little enhancement for doing voiceover work, which is essentially what I'm doing. What I can do here is simply makes sure that I've got this clip selected. You can see that it's selected with this yellow border. And then I can come over here and I can do a couple of things now. I could drag this on top of my clip. But I actually prefer to just double-click it. If you double-click it, that will enable that particular effect for whatever the selected clip is, I'm going to double-click that. And now if I come up here and scroll, I see that that indeed did add this voiceover enhancement effect to this track. Now the next thing I want to do is use this enhancement to boost my voice level so that they are louder. Now, I don't want to just do that by ear. I actually want to use a meter so that I can actually see what my levels are to enable a meter. In Final Cut, you can come up here to the menu window, show in workspace. And then right here, audio meters, or you could do Shift Command eight. I'm going to enable my audio meters now. And now I get this nice meter here. Now if I scrub over everything, you can see this meter here. But what I will typically do now is just play back and I can even zoom. So as you can see here in the meter, now, this was my levels are hovering between minus 20 and minus 12 decimals, and that's not loud enough 10Ks. Now, oftentimes what you may want to shoot for our levels at least between minus 12 and minus six. Some people will even shoot to go a little louder than that. That's somewhat personal preference, but at the very least you want to get between minus 12 and minus six and maybe kinda averaging closer to the minus six area. So to boost these levels, what I'm going to do is come back up here to my voice-over enhancement. And the way I like to do this, and there are several ways you can do this. By the way, there's, I don't think there's necessarily any one right way, but the way that I liked doing it. Is, I will click on this button right here for the compressor. I'm going to click on that. And that opens up this little plug-in. All right, then I will come down here and start playing. And I will find a section where there's enough continuous talking. Alright, there we go. And I can zoom in a bit. And now you can see, I can come down here to this output document dial. This was a while. I'm watching this neater. I will start to roll this output dial up until I'm in the negative six range of these. We can sort all of these records by last name or by any field really, but I'm going to sort them all by lastname. So if you want to do that first, you can just click on column. Notice here, these two red marbles hears have shown up. And if I click on this little drop-down box, now notice I got those two little red marks there. That's because at 1 I raised the gain so high that my volume was too loud. You don't want that because that'll do what's called clipping, which results in distortion and then your voice doesn't sound good. What you're basically trying to do is to get your levels loudly enough, but without being too loud that they don't sound good. Alright, so I'm pretty satisfied with what I've done there. And so now I typically, oh, the other thing too, you can also play around with some of the presets here though I never do. I generally like this default of punchy male voice. So if you are a female, you might want to try out the punchy female voice. I've never really tried that. You're welcome to try those settings or you can play with these settings yourself. But I generally like the default settings here, other than just the fact that I tend to turn out that the output gain there. All right, so then when you're done over here, you can click the X to close that. And then the last thing I do, I will also come over here back to the audio enhancements section. And I will go down here to audio analysis show. And I like to click on this noise removal, like so. Now if I come back over here to playback or by any field really, but I'm going to sort them all by lastname. Let me uncheck this. You can just click on a column. And now you see up here that these column letters have shown up. And if I click on this little drawing here, the difference right there, that little arrow rather, with the noise removal enabled, it tends to take a little bit of the reverb and the sound of the room out. And sometimes when I'm recording with these LED lights, which even though they are LED, they do get hot. Sometimes I start to get too hot and I want to turn on my ceiling fan in this room. I keep it relatively low, but I still have that ceiling fan on. And the noise removal does a great job of getting rid of that sound as well. Now you can play with these settings, and I have experimented with various settings over time, ranging from thirty-five percent up to 50%. These days, I'm pretty okay with a 50%. I find that it's still leaves my voice sounding relatively natural. If you raise it up to a 100%, you may or may not like the way that sounds. You start to sound, in my opinion, a bit too robotic. But you can experiment with how much noise reduction it implements there. Then if you've got like weird hmm, sounds from electrical devices nearby or something, you can try out like the hum removal until it how many hertz the electricity is running at and things of that sort. So there's some neat things that you can do with all of that. All right, so I think that's going to wrap up what I want to talk about for my initial audio treatments. And so in the next lesson, we will finally deal with the green screen, and I will show you how to enable the green screen effect. Alright, so I'll see you in the next one. 10. Keying Out the Green Screen: All right, so now green screen, so I'm going to select my green screen like so. And the first thing I'm going to do is to come up here to my video effects. Now there are two main things I'm going to want to do here. And I think maybe the first thing I will do is what's called masking. And basically what I wanted to do is I want to exclude items in this scene that shouldn't be here, such as my tripod stand here and the microphone and all the rest of this room. And I can do that by using what's called masking. I'm going to come over here to my masks effects. And I have several types of masks that I can use. The one that I typically use is called a draw mask because it will allow me to draw a boundary of where I want to exclude everything. Okay, so I'm going to double-click or I can drag this out onto this clip here. I'm just going to double-click it to make sure that that got there. Even though I can see that it got there, I will now switch my tab away from this audio tab and back over to the video Inspector. I was on the audio inspector. Now I'm switching back over to the video inspector. And now I can see that this effect that I just added is right here, draw a mask. Alright, so down here now, it's giving me this message to click to add a control point. So basically I can just click dots and those dots will be connected as lines. You'll see what I mean in just a moment here. Now one other thing that I often like to do, let me resize this. I can resize this if I put my cursor right there and then just pull down a bit. And I can also resize this by doing that. That way I just get more room to work with and more room to see what I'm doing. Now, the way that I often like to do this is to actually zoom out a level so that I can see a little bit more like this. The reason I like to do this is so that I can actually start clicking dots outside of my view area. And you'll see exactly why I do that in just a moment. Now I'm going to just start clicking. Kinda like wherever I want a border between me and everything else. So watch this. I'm clicking there and then I'll click here. I want to exclude the tripod and I'm coming up close to that little area there. Now, I can choose to retain a lot of this green-screen and I think I will do so even though I don't need it, it might make my green screen processing a little more complicated, which I want to show you what it looks like when you have to deal with a few little annoyances. All right, so I'm bringing this down and now I need to just close off this loop. Okay, so my last point here needs to join up with the first. I can just click like that and look at that. Now by default it is excluding everything that was outside of my boundary here. Now, I can come up here and choose Fit to make that fit inside of the space that I have right now. Alright, so that can be called step one. And honestly it doesn't really seem to matter too much if you do this step first or the next step, which is the green screen step first, it doesn't really seem to matter a lot. But now the next step is to apply our green screen effect, which is not called the green screen effect by the way, it's under the option for keying. And the effect is called a Kia because it keys out on a particular color, in our case, the green color, which is totally configurable though, you could use a blue screen. You could use any color as long as it's a color that hopefully isn't on the subject that you're wanting to retain. Now, same thing here. I can just double-click this gear. And by the way, before I even double-click that, notice if I just run my cursor over this effect, I get a preview of what it's going to look like. It's looking like it's gonna do a pretty good job already. So I'm just going to double-click that now. And voila, I have keyed myself out. Now I do see a little bit of artifacts here because I don't know if you can see this, but you see these little fringes here. That's a little bit of artifact thing where the computer wasn't completely certain whether or not this was some green maybe there's some green being reflected off of my shirt or something like that. I'm going to show you some things that you may be able to do to kind of clean that up, but more or less it kind of did an okay job. All right. Let's see here. Let me zoom in a little bit. Now. I can zoom in, in a couple of ways. I can come up here and just choose another percentage to jump up to, or as long as my focus is in this area here. And I just clicked right there to make sure that I had a focus here. Then I can do a Command Plus to zoom in as well, or Command Minus to zoom in. Then I get this little hand thing here, right in this little red box where I can scroll around. To kind of move around and see things. The reason I did this was so that I could pay closer attention to what's going on right over here. Alright, so now I'm going to play around a little bit with this green screen effect and see if I can fix some of this weirdness here, this artifact thing. There are a few ways that I can go about doing this. One way that is often quite helpful is to first switch the way that I'm viewing this green screen effect right now and seeing the full composite view like the finished product. But sometimes it's helpful to just look at it in more in terms of a mask. And so if I come over here to my green screen effect properties here, and I put my cursor right here where it says view. I can click on this middle icon here. And now I'm seeing kind of a silhouette. That's giving me a little bit of a different view of what's going on here. I can see a little bit of kind of fringing or whatever there. It's not completely solid. When you have that kind of issue. One thing that you may want to try out because I don't see that it's happening really badly. It's not too bad, is to use this fill holes. So if you imagine that these little, these little fringes here are kinda like little gaps in the mask. Maybe one way that you can try to address that is just to look at that is to dial in this, fill holes here until those disappear. Now you want to be, in my opinion, relatively conservative about this. You don't want to just take it all the way up to the highest setting. You want to see if you can get away with raising that just the enough to fill those holes. Now another thing you'll want to do though, is to check the whole entire clip. Kind of scroll through the entire clip and make sure that you don't see that problem coming back in other frame and the clip, because that can happen. It's looking at KD domain. The most part. Now, I will go back to fit so that I can see the entire thing That's looking better. And then I will go ahead and switch back to the composite view, which is this button here under View. Then I will scroll again over the whole thing. And then I'll just play it back for a minute and just kinda get a better how they do interesting things with Apple numbers like opening, okay, That's looking pretty okay. Now one more thing that I'm noticing that you may not notice if you're not super familiar with Final Cut, I can just see that the quality of my picture here isn't good as I'm used to seeing, and especially while it's playing bang up document, It's not bad, but I know it's capable of looking a little better than that. What I think is happening here is if I come up here to the View option and click on that. I can see here that my quality for the video quality that I see in this viewer here is set for prioritizing better playback performance instead of better playback quality. Now, I happen to be running on the latest greatest MacBook Pro with an M1 Macs chip in it with the most amount of graphic cores and all of that. And I know for a fact that my laptop is more than capable of playing this video back at the highest possible quality. So I'm going to choose that highest quality. Now if you're on a slower or older computer that may not be able to handle that, you'll have to decide what you want to do there. Keep in mind though this doesn't affect the final output quality or anything like that. It's just affecting the quality of what you are seeing when you're scrubbing through your clips and playing back in this viewer, I'm going to choose better quality. And now if I play this back in this lesson, yeah, that looks better. We are in Apple numbers and I'm going to go up too. It's actually looking pretty okay the name. And then I'm gonna do a Shift Z so that I can just fit that whole entire clip. Yeah, that looks pretty good. All right. Now, another thing that I like to do, obviously, I don't want to teach a lesson with myself, right dead smack in the middle of the entire page here. That's probably not good. I want to resize myself and then put myself off to one side or the other. Usually I really liked to be more on the right-hand side because I'm usually obscuring less of the screen by doing that. Let me show you how to do that. So again, I will select my green-screen clip and there are several ways that I can do this now. The first thing I want to do is I want to resize myself, which is called scaling. So I could come over here to the inspector and scroll down here to Transform and click this Show button right here. And then I could scale all by affecting this 100% value here. So I can actually just click and drag this value up and down to change it. And you'll see what happens there. I'm getting smaller or I can make myself bigger. So that's one way or I can use the slider here to do the same thing. Or I can come over here. And this little icon here, which is the same as this icon here. So this is the transform icon, and I can click that little drop-down there. And now I get this little bounding box. And if I drag on this little corner here, that lets me resize as well, same as same as what I was just doing before. Now be careful. If you hold down on these areas that are not on the corner, you will only resize that one dimension of this clip and that's probably not what you want. You'll look like weird. It stretched out or something. You might not want to do that. Alright, so the other nice thing that you can do now is to reposition. Also. To do that, I'm just clicking on this plus right here in the middle and I can move myself. So I think what I want to do is put myself down here in the lower right-hand corner and maybe I'm going to make myself a little bit smaller also. I'm just eyeballing it. Maybe something like that now I know what you're thinking. Oh, where you're looking in the wrong direction, that looks crazy. Yes, it does look crazy, but I can fix that in just a moment also. Let's say that this is where I want to be. Then I'm going to click, I'm done. I'll play that back. Okay, so that looks okay other than the fact that I'm looking in totally the wrong direction, but I can flip myself around. And so what I can do here is come back up here to video and let me show you another way that you can find effects, because there are so many effects here and you may not always remember where they all live. So what you can do is you can click on the All category there and then come down to this search here, click in there. And then if you remember a keyword that you think is associated with the effect that you're interested in, then you can type that in. I know that I want to flip myself, so I'm gonna type flip like that. There's flipped. If I double-click this, in fact, you can see the preview right there. Just flipped knee around. Again. I could have just grabbed this and dragged it out. In fact, I'll do it that way for now, or I could have double-clicked it as well. And then when I come up here to my inspector, I now have the flipped options. Here are parameters and so you can flip the direction. Currently it's set to horizontal, but I also could have told it to flip me vertically. Now I'm upside down, which I don't want that. I want to be flipped horizontally. But now I can play this SMAC. This was a text file. It's also known as a CSV file. All right, so that's the basic just right there and let me make myself larger and just really get a good day. I'm gonna teach you a couple of techniques now. The first one is something I think that looks pretty good to say. We can sort all of these records by last name or by any field really, but I'm going to sort them by the way. I'm sorry, I didn't explicitly say that when I'm playing this back, I'm just hitting the space bar. Now hopefully you saw my little keyboard shortcuts showing up there. But I'm sorry, I've totally forgot to say that I'm actually hitting the spacebar to play back. You could also hit this little, this little play button right there. That does the same thing, but I pretty much never touched that button because it's a small and tiny and I can just hit the spacebar. Let me show you one more thing, by the way, with the KIA. So let's say that your green screen footage is really lousy. And let me see here what I might do is just let me make myself bigger just so we can see what's going on here. Oh, and by the way, so another way that I can reposition this is to make sure that I'm selected on this green-screen clip here. And then I can just hold down on Control and then click. And then I can choose to transform myself. I'm going to move myself over here real quick. Now, very quickly, I just want to in Week 21, other technique that is quite helpful when working with green screens. So sometimes you'll have a green screen that is really, really lousy. Maybe you've got too many wrinkles in the screen and the lighting is not uniform enough. Bits of the green screen are kind of showing through onto your background or something like that. Okay, let me see if I can simulate what that would look like a little bit. I mean, actually, to be honest with you, I have a border right here, but you're not generally seeing it with my colorful background. I mean, if you look really hard, you can see it there. I don't typically really go out of my way to fix that, but it is there. But let's say that I had something worse. Let me show you what that would look like if I had a worse situation. And I think I will do is I'm going to import another video clip. Let's see. Yeah, I've got a video clip that I recorded with my iPhone. So the quality is quite a bit worse than through my DSLR. I'm going to import this just for, just for example purposes here. There's that clip and I'm going to bring this clip into here as a third clip. And I'm just going to drag it randomly someplace. Okay. All right. So there's that clip. So let's say I want to also apply the green screen effect to this clip over everything else that I have. I've got it selected there. And then I will come down here to now currently I have the flipped effect being filtered out, so I need to turn that off for a minute. And then I can go back down here to keying, and then I can apply the Kia. Let's see how well this will do. Actually did a pretty okay job. Normally, I would have expected that it would have done a little bit worse job there. Let me move myself over and see here, take a really good look at what I've got and see if see if there's some noise or something someplace. Well, actually I do see that I am a little overly transparent. Let's, let's see here. So if I switch to this composite view, yeah, I can see here that I'm not quite as solid as I would like to be. Now obviously, I already showed you that one thing you can do though, is just use the fill holes. Let me move myself again because I just wanted to see. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a little bit of something right there. Now typically what I would probably do is just mask that out. But let's say that I didn't mask that out. Just talking about this little bit right here. Let's say that that was right next to me instead of way over here. And I needed to mask that out. Well, in that case, what I could do instead of masking it potentially, is I could use this sample color option here. So I'm gonna click on that. And then what I can do is I can drag a little square right over this area here. And what that's gonna do is it's going to teach Final Cut what additional colors I wanted to key out. Alright, so I'm going to just select that just like that until it disappears. And so that disappeared right there. And let me do that again and show you what happens if I use a bigger square, okay, so I'm gonna select this again, come over here, and I will make a bigger square. You see that that just disappeared. That's because if I switch over to the original view here, so what we're seeing is more green screen in fact. So that's, that's actually a pretty realistic and appropriate thing that I'm doing here. The reason that was showing up before I sampled the color there is because this shade of green was considered to be a little too different from the other shades of green in this image. What I just did was I just taught Final Cut. Here's another shade of green that I want you to also use when you're doing your keying. You can actually keep clicking on this sample color and then sampling other areas if they are not keying out. That's a really powerful way to quickly get better keys. I do sometimes get trouble right here on this crease in fact, and so oftentimes I will find myself wanting to apply this sample color effect right there. In fact. Now, the other thing I will address still is to fill myself in a little bit better. I'm just going to use the fill holes again. Look at that and that just fix that right up. And then you can play around with the value there. So there's a couple of little tricks there. There's a lot more you can do with the Kia, but these are two of the most common types of situations that you are likely to encounter when using a green or a blue screen. Alright, so I think I'm gonna wrap this up in the next lesson. I will show you how I then start to edit everything. So I'll see you in the next one. 11. Editing: Alright, welcome back. In the last lesson, we got into the green-screen effects and applying the Kia and the masking and all of that. I showed you a little bit of how to handle slightly less fun keying issues. In this lesson, we'll get into my general workflow for editing these clips now. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just get rid of this little sample here. I just selected that and hit Delete. All right, Let's say I'm done with my high-level audio edits and my high level green-screen effects and all of that. And now I'm ready to actually start editing this clip because I will have mistakes of what I'm saying, where I'm repeating myself and saying ums and uhs and all of that kind of stuff. And maybe I will have started too early or repeated things, right? I want to edit all that. How do I do that? All right, so let me remind you now that I am inside of a composite clip right now. Now at what I want to do is I want to back out of that composite clip and apply my edits to the entire composite. Now I could edit right here. I absolutely could do that, but that's a little less convenient for me because if I cut out a section of this green-screen clip from here to here, I want that same section down here to be cut out as well. It totally can do that. But the easiest way to do that, typically, if I'm gonna do it here, would be with a Command Shift B using the blade tool. And I would have to apply that blade cut to both of those clips and make sure that I got them lined up, which is easy to do by the way, if I do something like a Command Shift V, Okay, so I just did a Command Shift V or shift Command V, and that just applied that cut across both of those clips. And then I could come over here and then do another shift Command V. Then I could select all of that, and then I could hit the Delete key and get rid of it. In fact, I'll do it. All right, So there I just did a random cut. That wasn't too terrible, but I like to work faster than that. And it's a little hard to do. And now I'm undoing those cuts by the way. Let me show you now, if I back out of this compound clip, I can do my edits on just one clip instead of two clips. But everything will be virtually applied as if I had done it here. Let me back out and show you what I mean. The back out of here, I can just hit this little back arrow key right there. And now I'm looking at the composite and you know what, I forgot to make myself smaller again. So let me jump back in here. I'm going to double-click. Then I'm going to select my green-screen clip. And then I'm going to do a Control transform. And let's see, where am I? I am. Then I'm going to make myself smaller. I don't know, maybe that's good and put myself somewhere around like that. Done. Then I will back out. You see how Final Cut is redrawing everything there, re-rendering actually, now that all looks good. Now notice when I'm scrubbing over here though, I'm not hearing anything. The reason I'm not hearing anything is because I need to select this clip. Then I need to come over here to my audio track. And now sometimes you'll have this issue in, sometimes you won't. But if you do have this issue where you just finished doing your treatment of the green-screen and all of that the way that I did. And then you back out of here to the composite clip and you're not hearing anything, you'll need to come down here to the Audio configuration. And possibly you'll need to choose storyline. Just click that, and that'll just connect the audio from that clip to your overall storyline. Now, I can scrub my audio. And by the way, if you don't like the audio scrubbing or if you want to sometimes turn it off, you can do a Shift S. And now I can move my cursor around without hearing that. And I know there are some editors and people and users of Final Cut who actually don't like that. I find it very helpful though when I'm editing. In fact, I pretty much need it when I'm editing because mostly my edits are not done visually. My edits are done by my words like what I'm saying, so I need to hear what I'm saying. Okay? All right, so now I'm ready to start editing. And on this HD resolution that I'm using here, I would prefer to close down some of the areas of Final Cut that I'm not going to need now. I'm going to close down this area over here, which I can do with this button here, closed down the browser. Or I can do a Control Command one, which is normally how I would do it, but you can click that right there. And then I can close down the inspector as well. And I can come down here and close down my effects too. I usually leave the meter there because I guess I'm just too lazy to mess with it. Alright. Ready to edit now, the next thing I think I would want to do is make this compound clip bigger just so that I can more visually see what's going on. And I want to make it both taller and more stretched out. Make it taller. One way that I can do that easily is Command Shift plus. You see there that it's getting bigger like that. Now you can alternatively come right over here to this icon and click that. And then you can do the same kinds of things. So you can affect the horizontal zoom level. And then you can also affect the height of the clip. You can do that. I'm really big though on using keyboard shortcuts a lot. And so to stretch this out now so that I can zoom in and see my audio waveform more easily. I'm going to do a Command Plus until I'm seeing it about at that level for me, that way I can control where I'm seeing individual words and things like that. Then I'm gonna go to the very beginning of this clip by clicking on the Home button or function left arrow. Here, I'm at the beginning. Now, what I would typically do is just start playing back until I find where I'm ready to come in on my ninja. Alright, so now I'm in business. So a couple of things I'm gonna do now, I'm going to read. I don't want to wait around and listen to all of that. Let me turn back on my scrubbing Shift S. And now what I will do is I will zoom out so that I can see more of the timeline here so that I can quickly just see where was it, at? What point on this timeline is it where I start actually delivering my lesson? Particularly might be about here. Now, when I start to play back and do my editing, I usually do my playback and editing at twice speed so that I can still hear what I'm saying, but I don't have to sit there and listen to it in real-time. And I know I tend to be a little bit of a slow talker. To play back. I can hit the space bar, but when I'm doing this editing stuff, what I typically do there is hit L. Alright, so I'm recording now. So now I'm going, and if you hit L multiple times, each time you hit L, the playback speed will get faster. So watch this, I'll hit it once hour. That's real-time and hit it twice. All right, so I'm recording now. So now I'm gonna pretend like I'm recording an actual lesson and I couldn't start now, go three times. If you got four times. Now I can also go backward with that. So instead of l, I can do J to go back, reverse. At real-time. I can hit it again twice as fast, three times as fast. I can hit K to stop. Pull numbers to do funny stuff. Okay, now what I want to do is find the beginning of where I'm actually starting my lesson enzyme. Now I'm going to pretend like I'm reading actual lesson. Um, I start now. All right, so there's my gap right there. So let me zoom in. I'm going to start now. Hi, I'm Terry. Okay. So that's where I want to start. That's where I want my clip to actually start. Right here. I'm including I'm intentionally including this breath. Hi, I'm Terry, because that seems natural to me. Alright, so from here what I would typically do is I would hit O for out because I want to mark what is called an out point. If I click, oh, if I hit the O key right here, notice what just happened. Well, let me zoom back out and you can see. So I hit O right there. And now I've got this yellow border. Let me turn off the scrubbing. Now I've got this yellow border all around from the beginning of this clip to that point there. Okay? This is one of the keys to editing quickly in Final Cut Pro is the fact that you can mark in and out points. So you'll start to see me do this a lot as I edit this clip here. I've selected everything that I don't want from the beginning to that point. Now I can just hit the delete key, bam, that's all just gone. Then I can zoom back in a little bit. Now, I'm at the beginning, the new beginning of my clip and I will play back, hi Ontario. And I'm going to be teaching you how to use Apple numbers to do funny stuff that people wouldn't normally. I'm going to teach you right there. I made an intentional mistake. I want to say, hi, I'm Terry. Let me I'm going to teach you how to do interesting things. Now I said, Hi, I'm Terry, and I'm going to be teaching you how to use. Okay, so right here where I say, and I'm going to be teaching you how to do. I want to get rid of that. I'm going to mark an end point by hitting the I for N on the keyboard. That's my endpoint. And I might want to just move that over just a little bit. There's my endpoint, I am Terry. And then I want to jump to, and I'm going to write there where I say and blah, blah, blah, right? So now I'm going to hit O on the keyboard, and I'm going to then delete this clip, this area, right, this range In-between the in and out point there by hitting delete. All right, like so. Now, my own personal editing style is such that I often like to put a little bit of a tiny transition when I do these jumps like this, because I tend to make a lot of these kinds of edits. This is totally just my own preference of how I liked to edit myself when I'm talking in these types of lessons. In order to quickly put a transition, a smooth kind of a smoothing transition in here. I can right now since I just made that edit and delete, if I do a command T, that will put the final cut default transition style in here. And so what that's gonna do is it's going to kind of blend those two clips where I cut myself right there. So watch this. If I play back over this, you'll see that. Do you see how that's getting blurry there? That's because it's actually merging those two clips into each other. And I'm going to teach you how to. I find that that just smooths out those cuts a bit. Now one thing though, that's a really long transition for what I'm using it for here. I will typically want that to be a lot shorter, maybe somewhere around in there. And so if I play that back now, I'm Terri and I'm going to teach you. You see how that kind of smoothly transitioned like that. In fact, let me show you what that looks like without the transition. I'm going to select that transition and then delete it. Then if I play this back, it'll be a little more jarring. It may not be super noticeable, but it'll be a little bit more jarring. Hi, I'm Terry, and I'm going to see how it just kind of jumped all of a sudden. That's what I'm wanting to avoid by putting those transitions. And now, since I use transitions for this purpose so frequently when I'm doing my edits and final cut, I don't want to have to constantly go in and resize my transition. I actually read the fine, the default links of my transitions in the preferences. I can do a Command comma to go into the final cut preferences. And then I can come up here to editing. I can redefine the transition length. And I usually go for something maybe like around 0.3. I think that's what I normally do. Let's see, 0.3. Alright, and then I will close that. Now if I come down here to this little gap here, and I just click once. And it doesn't matter if I click on the right-hand side of this left gap or on the left-hand side of the right gap. It doesn't really matter too much. Then I can do a Command T again. And now that transition is narrower than it was before. Now it's 0.3 seconds instead of 1 second long. And then I'll play that back one more time here. And I'm going to teach you how to do interesting things with Apple numbers, like opening up documents and maybe adding up some numbers or something along those lines. Joining me in this lesson. Alright, so here we are in Apple numbers and okay, alright, so this shows you the basics of what I do when I edit. In the next lesson, I'm going to finish editing this entire clip. And then I will show you a few extra little things that you can put in here like titles and things of that sort. Okay. I'll see you in the next one. 12. A Complete Editing Session: All right, welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to edit the lesson that we've been working on here with the green screen effect. And the main goal of this lesson is to take you through a lot of the most common scenarios and techniques that I use on a day-to-day basis. Now, I'm going to try to kind of zip through this. So I would advise you to use this lesson not only to see how I use these techniques, but also as a reference, because I will have a lot of those most common techniques in here. Alright, so let's get going, okay. Proceeding forward. Hi, I'm Terry, and I'm going to be teaching you how to use Apple numbers to do funny stuff that people wouldn't want to leave. And I'm going to teach you how to do interesting things. Here. I intentionally put a little mistake or whatever you want to call it in here where I made a dumb joke and I want to cut out that joke. So again, I will find where that joke begins and where I then repeat myself correctly. So I repeat myself correctly right here. And I'm going to teach you how to do interesting things. Again, I'm going to be okay, so it's on the end and I'm Terri and I'm not a right there. So let me zoom in a little bit more with command equals. I will set an endpoint here because this is the beginning of where I want to cut that out. Then I will find the out point is Apple numbers to do, do funny, that people will. Then here's the end. So I will hit O to set an out point, and then I can hit Delete to get rid of that range. Now here, I now have two clips because I've just split one clip into two parts because of that cut that I just did. Unlike at the beginning where I just cut the whole, entire beginning off. Now, my personal preference is to blend these two clips a little bit with a transition. And Final Cut has a default transition capability. If you hit Command T, that will apply final cuts default transition effect, which is to simply use a dissolve, a cross dissolve. I can apply that transition automatically right now, since that's the last cut that I just did. If I do a command T, There it is. Okay. Now let's say I don't like that cross dissolve effect and I wanted to do a different kind of effect. I could come over here to my Effects right there. And here are all of the effects, okay, so there's the default cross dissolve. Now I could apply other effects instead. I could find one and just select it and drag it right on top of there. So right now theory. And now that one doesn't seem to really do much. Let's see how about another one. By the way, a lot of these transitions aren't going to be very obvious in my case here, because the clip that I'm coming from in the clip that I'm transitioning to look almost identical already. Okay, so maybe I want to apply this black hole effect so I can make sure that my transition is selected. And then I can simply double-click this effect, like so. And then if I come over here, air it is, then if I want that to take longer, I can widen it because remember I redefined the default length of my transitions. Now, obviously I don't really want that effect that looks weird here, but you get the idea so you can play with those transitions. So I'm going to delete that transition entirely by deselecting it and then doing Delete, then I will highlight this break here, and then I will reapply my default transition command T. Also. Now, if you wanted to redefine which of these transitions is the default right now it's cross dissolve. But if you wanted to redefine that, you could find one and then hold down on Control and then click on it and then you get the option to make default. Now I'm going to hit Escape because I don't want that. But that's how you could also redefine what the default transition is proceeding forward. And I'm going to teach you how to do interesting things with Apple numbers, like opening up documents and AD adding up some numbers or something along those lines. So join me in this lesson. Alright, so here we are in Apple numbers and I'm going to go to the File menu here. And I haven't heard a little mistake with an a, and I paused there, so maybe I want to fix that. So let's see File menu here and I haven't see here File menu here. And I haven't. Alright, so right from here I'm going to put an endpoint and then I'm gonna pick up right here, right there, an out point delete command T, union menu here. And I'm going to open a document. Then maybe I don't want that pause. The pause is kind of okay, but maybe I want that pause to be a little shorter. So what I could do here is to put a break right here and a break right there. And there were several several ways I can do that. The most common way that I usually do it as a command B for break right there, or actually it's blade. B is for blade tool. And then another one here. Now, you can create these blade cuts in a lot of ways though. I just did a command B. Another way I could do it is to hold down on the B key and without letting go, see what happens there. Now my cursor turns into scissors and then wherever my cursor is, I can just click once and that will also do a cut. But then when I let go of my B key, the cursor turns back into a regular pointer. Okay, so that's another way that you could do a blade cut. And let me undo that with a Command Z. Now another way is that I could just hit B without holding down on it. And then that permanently, it turns my cursor into the blade tool and then it'll behave the same way. If you hold down on certain keys that change your cursor or your tool, the tool that your cursor is representing, then that will temporarily turn your cursor into that tool. But when you let it go, your cursor will revert back to whatever tool it had before. But if you don't hold down on any, you just hit that key, then your cursor will stay with that new tool. There are several tools and those tools are actually appear. There's a select tool that's usually my default trim, position, range, blade, Zoom, and hand. But anyway, let me switch back to my selection tool. So now if I want to keep all the action that had occurred in this clip, but I want it to happen faster. Like maybe I don't want to cut it out because I'm afraid that students would miss the action, that of what I did there. So in that case, I could actually read time this clip. And the most common way that I do that is to do a Command R for rate time. And now I get this green thing here. And then I can come right up to that little, that little black vertical bar there. And I can just drag this thing and that will actually make that clip faster. Or I could pull it out the other way and make it slower. That's super, super useful if I don't want the students to completely miss what was occurring in that gap or in that clip. But I want it to happen faster because it's just taking too long. That's a technique that I use quite often. Shorten that text. All right, There it is. Let me, alright, so I'll do that one more time. Here's another one here. And really just showing you this for illustrative purposes, these gaps aren't that long, but again, I'll do a Command B there. And another one right here. Select that clip to a command R, and then I will just pull that down a bit. You can read size these after the fact. Also. By the way, this technique of timing, you can actually get to it up here. The Modify menu re-time, okay, so there's all of the options here, but I don't usually like to waste my time coming up here to this. I usually just prefer to do what I just showed you. Alright, so I think you probably get the gist of how to cut and apply transitions and things of that sort. So now let me show you a few other techniques that I use from time to time, going back to the beginning here, Let's say that I want this whole, entire lesson to fade in. One easy way to do that is actually just to select the very beginning of this entire clip, right? When my cursor turns into this little symbol here, I can select that. And then if I do a command T right here to apply a transition, well now what it'll do is it'll just fade in. And then if I want that fade to take longer, I can actually just pull this out. Hi. So that's kinda nice. Hi, I'm Terry. Then you can do the same thing at the end as well. So I went to the end by hitting the End key on my keyboard or you could do a function right arrow. I already have one here. So that's going to fade out, just like so. But if I want that fade to take longer again, I can grab the left edge of this transition and pull that out a bit of time. Here. There we go. That reminds me now this is actually not part of the lesson. And then I would also say, let's find the end of this lesson now, putting this lesson. So now I would typically hit stuff. Alright, so I just wrote for us. Okay, So maybe about here with our computer and I'll see you in the next one. All right, so there's the end of this lesson. So here if I want to cut right there, the easiest way for me to do that and to discard everything to the right of where my cursor currently is, would be to hit I for setting an endpoint. And by doing that, final cut infers that the out point should be the end of this clip. So if I zoom out with Command minus, there you go, then you can see that yes, indeed, it just assumed that the out point should be the end of the entire clip. Now I can just hit Delete. Now if I zoom back in, I can now select just the end of this remaining clip here and then apply a transition which will be a fade-out. Let me zoom out a bit. Then the next one. There we go, see, and then I can make that a little longer. Next one. Okay, so that's a nice little technique that you can use. Let me show you another trick that I like to use from time to time. Let's say that I'm teaching. Let me go to the middle here somewhere, just randomly someplace. Okay. Let's say I am teaching something where I want to talk here. Let me put my cursor here. All right, so Let's say that I am teaching a technique that my body is obscuring. I want to talk about something that is underneath me right here in this picture. And I want to make sure that the students can see that. What can I do about that? Well, I can temporarily make my self go away entirely, or I can make myself transparent, or I can move myself. So I want to show you a few of those techniques now. The first thing I'm going to do is to determine what range in this video that I want to make sure that the students can see the thing that I'm blocking. Let me zoom out a bit. Alright, so I'm going to make a break right here, Command B, and another one right there so that I can have a clip. Now what I can do is remember this is all a compound clip comprised of a clip of me and a clip of the background. So I can double-click on that clip there and get back to the original underlying clips. And now I can edit either of these two clips without affecting the rest of the compound clip. That was the whole point of me doing a command B and making a new clip. Okay, So now let's say that I wanted to just make myself transparent just for the duration here. And by the way, if I zoom out, you can even see here this grayed out stuff here. Those are the areas that are not selected within the clip that I made up in the compound clip. Sorry if that's confusing. All right. So anyway, if I wanted to make myself transparent, that's pretty easy to do. I select this top clip, then I go over here to the video tab. I can come down here to compositing. There's a property called opacity. And I can actually bring this down and look at that. I can become varying degrees of transparent. Now, what's underneath me is not obscured anymore. So now if I jump back up into the compound clip by hitting this little arrow here. Let's see. Here I'm solid settings with Apple numbers like opening within here. I'm transparent. Lesson here, and then I'm solid again. If I want a nice little bit of a smooth transition between those clip transitions, I can select this clip here, and then I can do a Command T. And that will apply my default transition to both the left and the right side of that clip. Now if I play that back document, I smoothly become transparent along those lines. So join me in this lesson. All right, so here we are. I can come back in here again. And I could undo that if I wanted to. I could or I could increase or decrease my opacity or whatever I want to do. Let's say that I want to move myself somewhere else, maybe to the opposite side. Okay, so let me go ahead and increase my opacity again. But this time I will turn off my flipped effect here. Then I will simply move myself over. So down here in the transform I can mess with my position. I usually like if I'm gonna do this kind of thing, we're moving myself. I usually want to do it this way rather than doing it by hand so that I maintain my vertical alignment like where I am vertically on the screen. So it's easier for me, I think, to just move this. And what I'm doing here is I'm just dragging that number now you can type a number in, but I never know what number to enter there. So if you put your cursor right on that number and then you'd simply drag with your mouse or your trackpad. Then you can move yourself around horizontally without affecting the vertical alignment. So that's another thing that you could do. And then I'll zoom back out and then I'll jump back out of here. And so we'll play that back, opening up documents. And maybe you've got a nice little transition. Those lines. Join me in this lesson. Alright, so here we are. That's a cool thing that you can do. You can do a lot of things with that. Now let me also take this opportunity to talk just a tad bit about how the layering works within Final Cut, although it might be kind of obvious. Now, if I jump back into this compound clip, we've got here two clips. Let me turn off my scrubbing there, by the way. So I don't remember if I talked talked about in the last video, but I just turned off my scrubbing with the Shift S. So that way when I My cursor over the timeline here, I'm no longer hearing the audio for it. We've got here two timelines, a primary timeline and a secondary timeline. And the long and short of it is that topmost timelines will show up on top of lower timelines. I could drag other media into here and put them above this green screen effect. And then that would show up on top of the green screen effect, which in turn shows up on top of my background. Okay, so it's just a layering kind of a situation there. All right. So having said that, let's make use of that. So I just jumped back out of the compound clip. I'm looking at the whole thing now, let's say that I have another video that I want to kind of show up over in the corner someplace. Okay. So let me show you how you can do that. Let's say that I want to use this clip right here. I can bring this clip down so I could just drag it down. Or I can click like maybe right here or something. I'm just clicking randomly someplace. And then if I do a cue that will bring whatever media I have selected in the browser, down and on top of my timeline. So if I hit Q, see that? It just placed it right there. So E would have placed it at the end of my primary timeline, but Q. Placed it wherever my cursor was, but as a secondary timeline. Okay. All right. So you see now that this new secondary timeline is superseding what's underneath it. But let's say that I want this secondary timeline to show up as a small box in the corner. There are a couple of ways you can do that. Generally speaking, you'll select it. And I will usually put my play head somewhere over that clip so that I can actually observe it without my cursor having to be there. If I move over here, I can still see what's going on here. All right, so then I can control, click on it and choose transform. Or I can come over here to the Transform options, which will let me do the same kinds of things. But I usually will prefer for this case to control click choose Transform. And then I will resize a corner of this and look at that, you see what's happening there. I'm already starting to kind of get things ready and then I can move this to wherever I want it to go. Let's say I want this to be here or maybe here, I don't know. Maybe here like that. And then I can simply click Done. And now with Apple numbers, like some numbers or something along those lines. So join me in this lesson. Alright, so here we are in Apple numbers. I don't know, Actually, maybe I do want this clip to be over here. Then let's say that I don't want this clip mode and I'll click Done. And then let's say that I don't want this clip to start quite that early. I wanted to start here. Well, I can just grab the left side of that clip and pull it in. Like so. Now when I just did that though, I just cut where it's starting. So maybe I wanted it to start at the very beginning, but I also wanted to trim it the way that I just did there. Because I just trimmed this clip which also trimmed where it's starting from, but I don't want it to start at this point in the video clip. I wanted to start at, it's at the video clips beginning, if that makes any sense, right? Because watch again, see here, I just, I'm, I'm trimming this, but by doing so, I'm also cutting off the starting point of the video. The starting point is where the red is, and now I'm trimming it down. So now it's going to start right here. But I don't want what's displayed in this little box to start at this point, I wanted to start at the beginning of its own video. So one way I can fix that is to hold down on the T key which is trim, like so. And now if I drag to the right, I'm actually pulling this video clip to its beginning. Some kind of rewinding it to the beginning. Or I could go the other way if I wanted it to start a little later while I don't have any I don't have any leeway to do that now. But you get the idea. You can use the Trim key to role where your video clip is actually going to start. Particularly if you have trimmed the beginning or the end, then I'll let go of the T key. Alternatively, I could have just typed the T key and then done the same thing. But then I have to revert back to my selection tool, which is my preferred tool by hitting a. Alright, then maybe I want to frame this clip also, just make it look a little nicer. I will select it. And then I can come over here to my effects with that button right there. And then I can come down to Search and type border. And there's a simple border effects. So if I double-click this while I have this clip selected. I have now applied a border. Now I don't like this gray color and maybe that's a little too thick. I want it to be maybe a black border so I can come up here to the Make sure you've got the video properties selected. And then I can come over here to the simple border and I can change this color. If I click on this gray right here, that opens up this color wheel thing here. So that's one way you can do it. Or I could also just click this drop-down here and then just choose a black. Okay, so there's a couple of ways to do that. Now if you do the color wheel thing, then you have other options of how you can select colors. And maybe you just want the simple colors here. So I will select black and I can close that. And I don't like how thick that is, so I can make that width a little less. So I can come over here and just again grab that and scroll down. I'm dragging the number down. Or I could enter a number directly like 12. Or I could use this slider here. Alright, so here we are in Apple numbers and maybe that's also too long. So let me zoom out a bit and I'm going to just shorten the length of that. Now that I've shortened the length on the right-hand side, I can use my trim tool here and I can scroll this way also to determine where In the video I want that to start. Alright, let me zoom back in. Now let's also say that I want this video to start exactly at the beginning of this clip below it. I can grab this whole, entire clip here and I can just snap it right to the beginning there, like so. Now the reason that that's snapping is happening is because I have an option turned on for that which is right here. Snapping is turned on. Now if I wanted to turn that off and freely put this kind of close to the beginning, but not directly at the beginning. I could hit the N key to turn off the snapping and look what happened there that's no longer highlighted. So if I do that again, it's on, it's off some toggling that on and off. And now if I grab this, I can just put it wherever I like. But if I want to snap at some place, I can either hold down on the N key and it will snap to all kinds of things. It'll snap to that little white playhead line there or I can snap it there. Or they're just makes it really easy to more precisely place things where you want them to go sometimes. Alright. That's snapping. All right, then let's say that I want this video clip to start off with a nice title page or something. Then I can come over here to this icon. There are a lot of titles that come with Final Cut. So basically you can just find one that I like. Now I have some extras that I've purchased, but there are plenty of free ones also. Alright, so I'm gonna just go for this basic 3D. Now, I've selected that basic 3D, just a single click. And what I can do here is first let me turn on my snapping. And then let's say I want that to come in. I want to apply that basic 3D title right here. Now. I could overlay it on top of this existing clip here with a Q. I could hit Q. And now that just placed that title right there. So that's one way I could do it. However, I could also inserted into my primary storyline. So I have my cursor right here. So if I hit W, watch what happens? See now that just inserted it right in here. Now I can change the text. If I select this, let me put my play head right there. If I select this and then if I double-click it. Usually double-clicking any of these kinds of effects that have text in them. We'll let you start to edit the text right away. So I don't know Apple numbers. And then I'll hit Escape. Now let's play that back. Hi, I'm Terry. Okay. That's a couple of ways that you can add a title. And then there are two other types of texts that I often use. One is called lower thirds, and those are accessible in this menu to, and here's some lower thirds right here. Lower thirds, our texts that's usually intended to not take up the entire screen. I guess traditionally they, it took up the lower third of the screen, although you can move them around wherever you want them to go. I'm just going to pick one randomly. And let's say that I want to have a lower third right here. Some putting, putting my play head there, and I will select this lower third right here. And I will do a Q because I want it to be overlaid, so there it is. Okay. Then I can change the text in it. I will double-click it. All right, so that's by default letting me edit this text here. And I don't know, I'll just say Terry, then if I want to affect the description, I just double-clicked on the word description. Teacher, then I hit Escape to get out of that. And if I want this lower third to stay on the screen longer, I can just pull it out. Notice how I put my cursor right there on the little handle there so I can shorten the length or or make it longer. See everything. Okay? Alright, so here's my document like that. And by the way, I could do the same thing down here as well. So for this title, I could select the right edge of it and then just pull that out. Now that title is going to stay there longer. And that's almost certainly too long, but you get the idea so I can shorten it as well. Hi, I'm Terry. And then of course you can replace these with other options as well. You can always just drag them right on top and replace them that way as well. Then the last type of text that I sometimes use is a less fancy one. Let's say I want to put some text on the screen right here. Okay, so I will click right there, click my play head right there, and then I can do a Control T. And this gives me just a default text. Okay? I can put my play head somewhere in here. Now, I default, the default text is white. So if I want to see that, I probably won't be able to see it here. But if I double-click it, I can then grab this and move it there it is. Okay. Maybe I need to put it somewhere where it can actually be seen. Then I can just start typing. Hello. This is my text. Alright? And then I can move that over. And then you have all these options that you should be pretty familiar with from Word processors, changing the font and the alignment and all kinds of things. And again, that will last for as long as I want it to last. Okay? Like so. Join me in this lesson. Alright, so here we are in Apple numbers and I'm going to go up to the File menu. Now, going back over here to the browser, just as you saw me pull in this video clip, I also could have pulled in music or photos, pictures, whatever PDF. So you can import various types of media. And then you can pull that media into your timeline and edit it to your heart's content, much as you've seen me do here. I think this covers most of my most frequently used techniques. In the next lesson, I'll show you just a few more techniques in general and how to export the video out to a finalized file. So I'll see you in the next one. 13. Exporting: All right, Welcome back. Now in this lesson I'm going to just show you a few other techniques and mainly how to export your video when you're done editing it. So the typical way that I will export is to just do a Command E for export. That's the quickest way. But before I do that, let me just show you a couple of the manual ways that you may use as well. So probably the next most common thing to do is to come up here to this little bitty Share icon right there. Then you are presented with various options here. Now I have some presets that I may talk about in a moment here. But the general way that you'll probably want to do this might be to simply choose Export File. And then you can go to your Settings here and then you can pin down a little bit more about what you want to do now, let me warn you. Final Cut doesn't give a whole lot of options for how you want to export, because you can get an add-on program from Apple called compressor. And it is in compressor where you will be given a lot more options. So at any rate, if you want more control over your video export options, you may want to use compressor, and I will probably show a little taste of that in just a moment here. But the basics are here. If you wanted to just export a basic video with its audio, there's a good likelihood that you're probably going to want to use H.264 if you're going to be sharing this video with other people, these other options are generally intended more like for professionals to share videos with each other so that they can be edited or color graded and things of that sort. Okay, for the most part, these ProRes options here are not video formats that you'd want to deliver to someone to just enjoy watching something. These are more of intermediate formats for doing more editing and stuff. H.264 though, is meant to be a final format for consumption and for watching and things of that sort. I would choose that. And then you can decide down here what to do with it. Just save it or launch QuickTime or open up compressor though that option. And not sure how much that makes sense. And then you can click Next and then decide where you want that file to go and what it's going to be called. So that's one of the most straightforward approaches to exporting your finished project. Now I'm going to cancel out of that. Then you can do that exact same thing by just doing Command E. Also. That'll accomplish the same thing. Let's say you just want to export a small range of your video for test purposes. Let me show you how you can do that. The way that I typically do it is to hold down on the R key for range. Or you could switch over to the range tool, but I'll usually just hold down on the archae and then I'll select whatever range of video that I want. So let's say it's just solid that now even though I've only selected it down here on the main storyline, It's going to allow me to export everything that's happening within this range. Then if I do a Command E or I could click that share button up there and then click Next. Now this is only going to export that range of video right there. So be careful about that if you happen to have something selected, if you happen to have a range selected somewhere in your timeline and you're meaning to export the entire video, make sure you deselect it. I just clicking off of a clip or whatever. Okay, so now let me show you if you want more control over how your exporting everything. Because this is another thing I didn't fully understand for quite some time when I first started using Final Cut like man, it's supposed to be this powerful editor. How come they don't give me any good options for how I want to export things. And the reason is because I, I guess Apple decided they'll put all of that in there. Compressor application if you want that level of power. So what you can do though is you can come up here to File, Send to compressor if you have compressor installed and then new batch. Now the cool thing about this is if you have multiple projects in your library, you can select multiple projects and then send all of them out to compressor to be exported or converted or whatever it is that you want to do with them. So I'm just going to choose new batch and then that's going to open up compressor. Okay, so here we are in compressor. So here's my project right here. Now you've got a whole lot of presets to choose from. They've even got them here for YouTube and Facebook for example, I can expand that up to four k. So these are defaults that they've already created. But let's say I just want to do a really, really basic MP4 kind of a situation. I can come down here to a video sharing services and look at that. I've got 4k ADHD 7201080. And so on and so forth. And you're not stuck with just these. These are just meant to be starting points really. Let's say I want to export that as four K though. So I can come over here and just drag that out onto this clip. Okay, then I can see my settings over here. I've got a tab up here, general video and audio settings. I can just see in general the overall, what's going to happen with this job. Then if I want to modify my video settings, I can click on the video tab here. I can change the frame size, frame rate. Let's see what are some good ones. Here's a good one, codec, H.264. But if you want to use H.265, which is roughly half the size without losing much or inequality, then you could choose HEVC, which is an H.265 codec. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's okay. But H.265 is the even tighter, better compression than H.264, which is most commonly associated with your standard MP4 video file. So you could choose that. You've got just a whole lot of options here. This is where all the good stuff is. Maybe I will choose HEVC and then you can also choose an encoding type down here. Let me give you a little warning. If you are on a Mac that has the hardware encoding chips for speeding up encoding, like doing this type of work, you'll want to leave this encoder set to faster, okay, you won't want to choose slower with higher-quality that will do the encoding via software instead of using the encoding chip on the computer. So especially if you have an M1 Mac or an M2 by the time you're watching this, maybe the m2g are in fives will be out. Who knows? But if you want to take advantage of the hardware accelerated encoding, so that this encoding job will happen quicker. You'll want to leave that set to faster. Lots of options that you can do here. You can crop it to put like letterbox or something like that. A lot of things that I'm not going to get into here, but this is the gist. Then when you're ready, you can just click Start batch. Then you could have lots of projects here and apply different settings to each of them and then start the batch process for all of them. This program can even encode via your network. If you have other computers with compressor installed on them, it can send jobs out to those other installations of compressor. And then you can get things done even more quickly provided that you have a network that is fast enough to shuttle all of those files back and forth. You can even make these settings available for quicker export within Final Cut. So that's another way that you can make it so that you can export something quickly without having to come in to compressor, but you can use the compressor settings. And basically what you would do is, let's see here, if you come up into Final Cut Pro file, share and then add destination, then you can click Add Destination down here and then choose compressor settings. So I will double-click that. And now this will actually show you all of the settings that were already showing up in compressor. Okay, so back over in compressor, you could choose one of these settings and then you could maybe duplicate it like I'll duplicate this one right here. That brought that duplicate down into my custom settings. And I could name this something like my fancy fork. And then I can change something over here. So maybe I will make this use the HEVC encoding. And I don't know, I could crop something or whatever. There we go. Okay. Here you're seeing the before and the after. So anyway, that's not even really the point. The point was just to modify this profile here. Then if I come over here and come down to my customs, I probably have to get out of this and come back into it. There it is my fancy fork. Now that's showing up there. Now it's very easy for me to just come up here to File, Share, and choose my fancy fork, like so. But, but the cool thing about this approach is that I don't even have to have compressor open and I can keep reusing that profile. This is a way that you can also have those custom settings and things for how you want to export everything without having to leave final cut. I have just a couple of other little techniques that I want to show you real quick, especially regarding exporting. So I've shown you now that you can do a Command E to quickly get to the export dialogue here. And you can export your video or you can even export a range. What I didn't really get into detail on though, is the fact that you can choose what export profile you are using. Now by default here, we're using this one that's called export file, which is simply going to export basically an MP4 at any rate, you can change this. And let me show you how if you go into the preferences and I can get there with a command comma, or you could go to the menu and get to your preferences. Here you see these destinations that we were looking at earlier of which you can even add to them. Especially from places like compressor. In fact, there is the my fancy for k. Let's say that every time we do a Command E, We want to be able to export to the My Fancy Forks instead of this default export file here. Well, you can simply right-click on any of these destinations, like so. And then you can make that your default. I will make my fancy fork, my default now. And then I can close that. Now if I do a Command E, okay, and so now we're back into this dialogue here. And now you can see that we're now going to be exporting using the my fancy for K settings. And if I go ahead and proceed with this, I can choose where I want this new video file to be placed. So maybe I will change this. In fact, I can open this up and I'll put it in this untitled folder here. Now when I hit Save, that's going to actually start exporting the file. Let me go ahead and do that. There we go. Now if I wanted to see this actually happening like the process of it so that I can know when it's gonna be done. I can do a Command nine. So here's the background tasks and here's the job working right there under sharing. Now if you had multiple tasks occurring or multiple sharing tasks, that is, you could click on this little triangle here and that would expand open to show you all of the various tasks that are taking place at that moment. But this is a nice way to see how long it might take for that task to complete. A couple other little things that I want to show you. We've seen how to apply effects, but I don't think I told you explicitly how to remove them. Let's see here. If I if I select the clip and I do something crazy to it, like, let's see, I will distort it. Let's see. I'll flip it backward. I just double-clicked on the flipped. So now this is all backwards. If you see here the text is backward and everything. Now let's say I accidentally applied that and I don't want that anymore. Well, I can come up here to the effect. And if I click on the title part of this effect here, I'm just going to click there. Now I get this yellow border here. And now that I have this yellow border, if I simply hit Delete bam, that effect is gone. Okay, so that's one way you can get rid of any effects you don't like. Another thing you can do. I will reapply that again. Okay? Another thing you can do is if you just want to see what things would look like if that effect wasn't there, but you don't want to delete it. You can always just uncheck it. I'm checking and unchecking. And that is similar to deleting it except that it's not permanent. That's a couple of things you can do there. Also, if we go back into the original green-screen compound clip, remember now to set up this green screen, we had to apply the mask and the Kia. And then I also flipped myself and what else did I do? And I moved myself and scaled myself smaller, so I did a bunch of things. Well, what if I was going to make many, many lessons and I wanted to apply all of those changes every single time. Two different videos of me against the green screen. I want to do the same steps. Well, rather than having to apply each of those each time, I could actually just create one custom preset of all of that and then just reapply all of that. The way I can do that is very easy since I already have it up here right now. All I have to do is come down here to the save effects preset, so I can click on that, then give my new preset a name like my new preset. And then I can choose a category so I can create a new category or I can put it in an existing ones so I could create a new one. That way, I already have a custom category here, Teres customs. And then I can choose which of these effects I want to save as part of this preset. So I used the draw mask, the key or the flipped, the position and the scale so it knows what I changed. But let's say I didn't want to include the flip for some reason. I could turn that off and then that wouldn't get saved. Then I can come down here and save that. And so now the next time I do a green screen effect, in fact, I will just open this green screen video up by itself. I can come up here to clip, open clip. Okay, So now I just have this by itself and I want to do all of those changes now. So now I can come down here to Terry's customs and my new preset and watch this, I will just make sure that that's selected. Double-click that and bam, look at that. It's looking pretty good and all small and everything and on the right and flipped and all of that, all in one step. Now one thing you will want to be careful about is if you're like me and you have to set up your green screen each time and tear it down. You may not put the green screen 100% exactly in the same position every time. And so you will want to just make sure because of changes in lighting and stuff that your green screen is getting masked properly? I don't know. I might come over here and just inspect it a little bit and make sure if there are some minor differences there, then you may want to have to sample the color again or something like that. So that's just one thing to keep in mind, but you can still save yourself a heck of a lot of time by using these presets. All right, then the last thing I want to show you real quick here is that when we did that green-screen effect, we first started off by having Final Cut to synchronize our screen recording and the green screen recording. We select these two clips and right-click and then did the Synchronize Clips. What that really did is it created a compound clip in which those two clips inside of it, we're synchronized by audio. But you can make your own compound clips for reasons besides wanting to synchronize audio. Basically, anytime you want to simplify in your timeline or be able to apply one effect to several clips altogether, you can select all of those separate clips, create a compound clip, and then apply whatever change you want to, the whole entire thing. So let me show you quickly what that might look like. Let's say here, I've got this clip here, and then I've got the, these other clips underneath. And let's say that I want to apply some kind of effect to the totality of all of this, not the whole entire project, but just these bits here. First thing I'm going to do is to make a cut on this primary storyline, right where this clip begins and another one where this one in so that I can isolate just what's underneath this clip. Okay, So I'm gonna put my cursor here and I have snapping turned on. Then I can select this clip down here on the primary story-line. Do a Command B right there, and then come over here, select this one, do another command B right there. Okay, Now here's the key with my selection tool, which is this arrow that I have right now. I can then just drag and select all of those clips. I'm selecting all better on the top and then everything that's underneath it right here. Then if I do an Option G, I can create a new compound clip and I can name it whatever test compound clip and hit Enter and look at that. Now all of that got consolidated into one virtual or compound clip. Now, with this clip, I can come over here and I can apply whatever effects I want to, and those will be applied to the whole thing. But I can also jump inside of here and get back to the original stuff that was here. Also. That's just a nice way of kind of regrouping up different clips and things and then simplify the result so that you can do like global edits and global changes to that whole little set. All right, so now you know how to do some basic edits. You know how to apply a green screen, you know how to export in multiple ways and have a high degree of control over your export settings as well. So though I haven't shown you every single thing in the universe here, I've shown you probably what I use 95% of the time. So you now have a watt that you can use to accomplish your goals. So if you haven't already been following along with me in this course, I now want to encourage you to make a simple library and a simple project with one simple lesson. Edit it preferably with a green screen if you have one, edit it and then share your finalized lessons, I'd like to see what you all come up with and hopefully this has helped you all to understand much better now how you can use Final Cut Pro to make great looking tutorials and lessons and things of that sort. I hope this has helped you all. And so with that, I will bid you all ado, take care.