Final Cut Pro Video Editing: Edit Your Videos Faster

1. Why You Need This Masterclass!: Final Cut Pro is hands down one of the most powerful video editors you can get on Mac. And once you know your way around it, it's also one of the fastest and the easiest to create great looking videos. The problem is most people waste hours and hours or even days trying to figure it all out for themselves. So in this training, I'm going to take you through the most efficient way to edit in Final Cut Pro, all the key tools that you need to know to actually get great looking videos really fast. We'll go through everything from getting your project set up, importing your footage correctly. The key editing tools that you'll actually use dialing in your audio levels, adding your titles and effects right through to exporting a finished video. So all the key stuff that's going to get your results fast without wasted time and rework. I'm also going to show you some of the latest AI features built right into Final Cut Pro that will allow you to create amazing looking videos and effects again in a fraction of the time. Now, if we haven't met before, my name is Justin Brown, and together with my brother Mike, we've grown our primal video YouTube channel to over 1.8 million subscribers. And after years in professional video production, too, and even training our own editing team we've distilled all the important stuff that you need to know to be editing your videos, fast and easy in Final Cut Pro into this training. So if you're ready to level up your video editing, I'll see you in the next video. Cheers. 2. Kicking Off: Massive welcome to this Final Cut Pro training. This is one of my favorite video editing tools. I think it's really powerful. I think it's really fast, and I actually find it one of the most fun tools to edit in. And I think that's a key part of this, because if you're enjoying the tools, enjoying the process, and it's not overwhelming and daunting, then you'll do more of it, which means your message gets out there more. So I'm going to take you through everything from setting up your projects, importing your footage, through to the most efficient method for editing your videos down. Too many people get caught up and they jump straight into all the effects and the color grades and all of that stuff, and all it does is slow down the rest of the process because all of that stuff needs to be processed every time you want to do anything. So I'm going to take you through each step in the process in the correct order, and I'm even going to dive into some of the AI features in here, which will speed up your editing workflows and allow you to be more creative, too. Now, I do want to stress here that I'm not covering off on every single little feature and everything in here. There's so much in here. This is the key stuff that you need to know to get up to speed fast, to be able to go and create your videos as fast as possible. Now, we have made the video files that I'm using available for you to download and use as well to follow along with, but what I would recommend even better. Is to use your own video files. So by the time we reach the end of this training, you don't just have a video made. You have one of your videos made and ready to release. Now, I guess, the only other thing I want to mention here is that there are currently two versions of Final Cut. There is the version that you pay outright, and there is the subscription version in the creator studio. At the time of filming this, all the core functionality in Final Cut is exactly the same in both of them. If you're on the subscription, you'll have extra downloadable assets and title packs and those kinds of things as well. But really, you can get great results with either one. So with that stuff out of the way, let's jump into. 3. Creating Your Library & Importing: A So this is what you see when you first open up a final cut. This is a brand new install. No projects, libraries or anything created yet. If you have jumped in to have a play, don't worry. You can still follow along with this. But the first step that we need to do is to create our project library, our video library. So we can see here it's already calling our attention to this with it being like a blue purply color. We want to click anywhere on this to create or to open up a library. Now, we do get to choose where we're going to save this library. This is really the container for our video project. I'm just going to leave this here under movies, and I'm going to call it Justin Editing. I'm going to hit Save. And you can see now the next step then is prompting us to start to import our media, our video assets. So we can click on this now, and then this is the window where we can navigate through our files and folders and things to find the things that we want to import. But something really important that I want to call out here upfront is that that library container that we've just created that now we're going to import video files in to use with it, we actually have a very important question here, a decision point we need to make. Do we want to leave the files in their current place on your computer, or do we want to copy everything into that library package file? And for me personally, I prefer to just keep the files wherever I have them already on the computer so that I'm not doubling on extra files and having them in one location, but also having them in this editing project, too, and obviously taking up twice the amount of space and all of that stuff. But I'm calling this out for two reasons. The first one is that if you leave this on copy to library, you could end up with some massive files and duplicates and all of that stuff, and this library file getting pretty big. But also because in some cases, this might actually be the best option for you. So if you want to have one file that has everything related to the videos that you're making there related to that, then this would be a great way to do that, making the backup process and everything easy or transferring from one MAC to another. You could then just grab that library file and move that where you need it to go. So I just wanted to explain that one up front. Again, for me personally, I leave the files in place, and this just accesses them or links to them. Now, the other thing I want to call out here on this import footage window is that we do have the ability now to have some things run or processed on our videos at the time of importing them. You can see the default setting here is that it's enabling them for visual search. This is one of the newer AI features in Final Cut, where it's analyzing your clips with AI to know what's happening, what's in each of the clips. So when you're searching for things, it can actually look inside the video files and help you find clips fast. So I'd recommend you leave this one on, and I'd actually recommend you leave the rest of the settings as but knowing what you've got access to in here to customize this experience up for you, you also have the ability to do things like balance your color. So some AI color grading. You can have it auto detect and find people, you can name the people in your clips as well. If you're running an older Mac, you have the ability here to create optimized media files. So if your computer is struggling to edit the files directly off your camera or off your phone, this will create a temporary file. Is optimized to work on your system, giving you better performance. And likewise, you got some audio adjustments and things down the bottom here. Now, again, while I suggest leaving this here as stock and why I leave this here as stock or default and not applying these things is that I can easily apply them in the process if I need them and not just have them applied to all of my clips. And that would be what I would recommend for you. So the file that we're going to import here, first off, though, is our primary camera footage. If it's a video like a talking head video like this where I'm presenting to camera, that would be the main file that I'm bringing in. So I've got this clip here, camera recording. I'm going to select that and I'm going to choose Import. We could definitely bring in multiple files at this point, but the beauty of this is we can come back at any time and bring in extra files. You might find you're making something, maybe using an AI video generator, bringing that in or other titles and things. But the most important clip that you bring in first is that primary camera because that's going to help us set up the rest of our project. 4. Project Setup: You see how it's prompting us down the bottom here to create our project. So we have our library inside of a library. We can have multiple files. We can have multiple projects. So if you're going to create different versions of a video or videos that are going to be sharing the same footage, then it makes sense to have them all in one combined library. If you're going to be creating totally separate videos on totally different topics that aren't going to be sharing a lot of video files, that don't make sense to make a new library for each one of them. But a project is really an individual video inside of that library that we're making a timeline. That's our next step here is to create this project, they call it. So we can click down here, and this is where we can give our project or our timeline a name. Let's call it an edit. And then we can jump into our settings here if there's something specific that we need. So by clicking this use custom settings, we can choose our video resolution, whether it's four K or ten ADP. We can also specify if our video is going to be a vertical or portrait video as well. We can also lock down things like the video frame rate in here and our audio settings. So if you do have specific settings that you need to use for a specific platform or something like that, then you can manually set these here. This is where you. But what I would recommend for most people, and in most cases, is go back to using automatic settings. And it says here that these settings are going to be set based on the first video clips properties that you're bringing in here. And so that's exactly why we bought in our primary camera footage first so that when we go through this process and bring that in, it's going to set everything out perfectly for us, matching the frame rate, the resolution, the format of that main camera footage. Going to chose, Okay, here, and leave this on auto. You can see this is now switched to a timeline view, and then all we need to do to complete this project setup is to bring in our footage down into the timeline here. So we can click on this and drag it down. And we now have our project setup that matches that video file. So we can see at the top here, it's ten ADP and 30 frames per second. 5. Interface Overview: Now, I just want to cover off on the overall interface here and explain where things are. We've already been playing up here in our Import and media area. So this is where we can bring in all of our files and things. We can actually access our Apple photo library, Apple Music, Apple TV, and sound effects and everything directly from here. And you can see that there are some sound effects and things already in here for us to use. The next one across is where we can access titles and generators. And don't worry, this will make more sense as we go through. This next black box here is our video playback monitor. So you see, as I click down the bottom here, this is going to preview our video editing masterpiece as we build it. On the right here, this is really our command center where we're able to dial everything in. This is our setting control area. And you can see this is broken down into video settings. There are color correction settings, audio settings, and the information here where we can control things like our metadata and our timeline settings and all of that stuff is all accessible in here. Again, don't worry. This is going to make more sense as we go through. Down below that, we've got this row of buttons here, which you will be using quite a lot throughout the process. But this is where we can do things like hoggle our effects and transitions. So we've got a button here for transitions, and we can turn them on and off, and we have one here for effects. The idea is here that you're setting this up for you. If you have a big screen and you want to have your effects window open all the time, then yeah, we could definitely leave that open. But if it's taking up too much space or you want to prioritize your timeline view more, then we can hide that until we need it. Now, this next one is personal preference, but I do like to have this on. I would recommend that you do at least starting out, but it is something that you can turn on and off. That's the audio bars here, audio monitors. You see, as I play through this Images are grabbing people. Then we're seeing the visual representation of how loud or how quiet our audio is. We can turn this on and off at any time. Personally, as I said, this is something I like to have on just so I can gauge where things are. With the most obvious one down the bottom here, this is our timeline. This is where we're going to have all of our clips and all of our editing and everything is going to take place down here, and this is where you'll be spending most of your time. 6. Cutting Down Your Videos: The next step then is to start to trim down your video footage, to remove all the bad takes, all the mistakes, anything that you don't want to have in your finished video. This is kind of an iterative process. So we're currently starting with a lot of footage. We want to remove all the bad stuff, so we're working with a lesser amount of footage. We then can reshape our story and everything so we're working with even less footage. And every pass that we do here, you're going to be making further adjustments and tweaks and things until we end up at our finished product. So at this point here, we already have our main clip in the timeline, which was used to set up our project to get the settings right. I'm going to switch back to our media view here where we can see our file. Going to go ahead and delete this for now because I want to show you that there is a couple of different ways that we can actually bring clips down into the timeline. So before all I did was just clicked on our video file and dragged it down, that's one way and that's probably the way that I end up using this the most. But for you, this could be a fairly long file. This could be an hour long. What if there's only certain sections or snippets from that that you actually wanted to import? If we go ahead and delete this, the other way to do it is if we select on our video clip up the top here, we can just select the area using these handles. You'll see if I go to either side of the clip here, I can just drag out the section that we actually want. So let's just say I only wanted this small chunk of footage here. I could then click and drag that down into the timeline instead of the whole thing. And then maybe the next bit I want is just down here further. So we could grab that and bring that in. And so you could build out your edit that way. And you could even make that faster by using the keyboard shortcuts I and O. So we could be playing through our video here and let's say we want it to start here, we press I on the keyboard that marks an in point. Let's say we want it to go till about here, we can press O marks an out point, and we've now got that section that we would bring down. Go ahead and delete these, and let's just start it off again with our entire clip here in the timeline. I'll stretch this back out and let's bring this down. Now really quickly before we start trimming this down from the timeline here, there's a few different tools that I want to show you because it will make sense at different times throughout your editing process to use different ones or to turn some of these on or off. First one here is snapping. This is something I do normally leave on, and it means that if you click close to an edit, it's going to jump straight to the edit. It's kind of assuming that that's where you wanted to click, meaning that you can actually do things faster because it's going to help you out. So I normally leave snapping on, but if I need greater level of detail or something, then I would just turn it off for that moment. Now, while it just shows you this magnetic timeline here, how it automatically closes gaps and things for you, if you do actually want to have a gap in the timeline, you can. You've just got to switch the mode here. To position. And this will let you manually position clips. So if there's a clip here that you didn't want to use right now and you wanted it later in the project, maybe or just off to the side that you could grab it if you needed it or you wanted to move something with a gap or a spacer in there, we want to enable this mode, because now watch what happens. When I move this, it's now created a blank clip in here. So sometimes you will want to have a gap in your timeline because maybe extra B roll or things that you've got added up above this. But we almost have this empty placeholder blank video clip in here that then when we switch back to our normal arrow select tool, we can adjust. So I just wanted to call that out if you really want an extra level of control and move things precisely, sometimes a blank clip is what you need to use. But again, we can just select on and press delete, and they're gone. The next one I want to show you is this skimming feature. So it's currently off, meaning that I can move my mouse around anywhere, and nothing's really happening. If I click on different areas here, then we can see that my playback head, this red line, jumps to that section, and we can see is actually happening in that section based on the preview monitor here. But if I turn on this option here, skimming, which is also S on the keyboard, then now when I move the mouse, you can see that that red playback head is actually following the mouse. So this could be really quick for you to skim through sections of your videos to see where everything is without needing to click and stop all the time. This also works up the top here. So with that skimming enabled, you can see that I can quickly preview through to find and mark out those clips as I just showed you, to edit even faster. So this is something that I do normally leave on, and we can even have this skim through our audio. So right now this is quiet. We're not hearing anything. If I turn on skimming with audio enabled, now we're going to hear some sound. So again, depending on your edit, your workflow, your personal preferences, that is something you could have on and might want on for some things and then off for others. I'm going to leave it off so that it's not super annoying for you guys watching this. Every time I move my mouse, you're going to get that chipmunk sped version of me talking. And the last one that's probably worth noting is, if I just hit play now, you'll see that the timeline itself isn't moving, that red line. The red playback indicator is. Others will want the whole timeline to move and shift, and that's what we can turn on with this continuous scrolling. So if I hit play now, Then it's playing and the whole timeline is moving across. Again, another one that I personally leave off, but it's good to know that it's there. Now, in terms of moving around the timeline here, you can tap and swipe on your track pad. There is also a little slider bar down the bottom here that you can click and drag. We can zoom in and out on our timeline using Command plus and minus. So plus Zoom in minus Zoom out. We can see our entire edit here for fully zoomed out. And probably one more thing that's worth noting here is we can actually customize up what this looks. If we click on this button here, then we have the ability to again, zoom in and out on our timeline, but we can also change up what our timeline looks like. So we could just see the wave forms, the visual representation of what's been said. And so we can switch between these different layouts depending on your personal preference or also how complicated your timeline is getting. If you heap of different video layers in there, then it's probably not going to make sense to have all of this shown. It might not fit on your screen. But we can also adjust the size of these as well. So you can see that if we're not working with too many layers that we can just make this bigger. So for this tutorial to make it easier for you guys to see, I've just made it a little bit bigger. But if we come back to the start of our video here, let's start to trim this down. Clearly, it's a talking head video, and I can now see these areas down here where I'm actually talking. So just from quick glance and quick skim across here, I can see that this isn't anything that I'd want to use. I'm like, testing the microphone, making sure everything's all good. If I play this now you hear it. Alright. We are recording. Let's check the microphone. One, two. Promise, I'm not crazy. It's perfectly normal to test to talk to yourself. But we don't want any of this in the finished video. So what I can do is I could hit play and wait for it to get to the point where I'm like, Okay, this is it. Or by looking at the audio waveforms, I can visually see. Okay, here is where I start talking. This is where I want the video to start. There's a couple of different ways that we can do this. Again, there's times it'll make sense to do things one way, other times another way. So what we can do is come back to the start of the clip. We can click and drag all the way through to adjust that start time to where I want the video to start. So if we hit Play now. You can have the world's best video. That's where our video is now starting. Now, if I undo that, I'm just going to press Command Z. So we've undone that now. We have all this extra stuff here at the start that we don't. Also make cuts in our timeline. So we can press B on the keyboard, and that's going to give us our blade tool or our scissors. We can also access those in the drop down menu here, and it tells you the keyboard shortcut for each as well. So we're currently on Blade scissors. And we can just then with the blade tool, we can click and we've now cut our clip at this point. It's very hard to see, but there's a little dotted line there that we've just cut along. And if I switch back to our main tool, A, select A for arrow, how I remember it, then we can see that we've now got two clips in the timeline here. I could select the first one and press delete or backspace, and it's gone. So you could actually go through with the blade tool, let's press B, and you could just click here and say, well, clearly, I don't want any of this. So let's put a cut there, there. I can see here, I finish talking about here, so I'm going to cut there, and so on. We keep going through and adding cuts and things like this. And then we can switch back to our arrow, A for arrow, and we could then just select the ones that we don't want like this one, delete this one, delete, and we can go through and remove those gaps and the bad takes and things that way. And we can also use a combination of these. If I click on this clip here, we again get that yellow box around it, where I could adjust this. Let's say we wanted to finish a little bit earlier or a little bit later. We can bring things back just by clicking and dragging, as well. But I think for memory with this clip, I actually did multiple takes at the start. Can have the world's best video. But so let's click the next one, as well. You could have the world Right, so I started again. Did I do it three times? So to help you with this, no. Okay, so we don't need the first one. The first one's gone. And so let's hear out this entire sentence here. You could have the world's best video, but if no one clicks on it, no one's going to see it. So you need to get your content clicked on, and that's when your thumbnail strategy is so important. So to help you with this, you need to make sure that your thumbnail images are attention grabbing, that they stand out on YouTube. Another tool that you can use here is called Ripple Delete. And what that will do is essentially the same thing. So let's move this red playback piece here to where we want to have that cut happen, and we want to remove all of this stuff in here, right? So let's move it to where we want me to keep talking. And instead of clicking, adding a card, selecting deleting it, I'm going to press on the keyboard option square bracket left. So if I press that now, that's done the same thing. So it essentially added a cut and closed everything back up, going to the left because I press square bracket left. Now, the same will work back the other way. Let's just say we had a cut here in our timeline. So we're going to command B to blade it there. And let's say that I was playing this through, and I'm like, Okay, cool. I'm going to finish this here, and I want to remove everything up to that next cut. Could do that manually or I can press our Ripple Delete tool, option square bracket right in this case, so we're going to remove to the right, and it will remove everything up to that next cut that we made. So a combination of these things is going to be really fast for you to edit. I mean, look at this big gap here of me not talking. We can clearly remove that. So I can again blade that come up here to where I start talking again, option square bracket left to remove to the left, and we've just close that. Want to go ahead now and remove any mistakes, bad takes, anything you won't use in your finished video, that can come out now. If there's anything that you're thinking this might be used, then for now, leave it in and you can make that judgment call a little bit later. But what you'll end up with here is these little chunks of footage. Now, we can actually reorder these if you needed to. We can pick them up, we can move them around, and it's automatically going to reposition things for you. So you can really use this to build out your story easily. 7. Adding B-Roll & Overlay Videos: The next step then is to bring in any B roll or overlay footage. The things that we want to show on screen on top of us talking in this case. So I'm going to come back up here and I'm going to import our other files. I've got our screen recording here and our Test one movie. I'm going to make sure, again, we're just leaving them in place, and I'm going to import them. And so if we come back to the start of this video here, we're talking about thumbnail images, have the world's best video, but if no one clicks on it, no one's going to see it. So you need to get your content clicked on. Okay, so we're now going to look at what can we show on screen to make that more engaging? So I do have this video here. And if we scrub through this at the top and I'm not clicking. I'm just moving my mouse. It's a screen recording of someone scrolling YouTube. So, I mean, that's probably not bad to include. So maybe we just want this little chunk of it here, someone scrolling. Let's start it about here. I'm going to press I on the keyboard, and I'm just moving my mouse across here. Okay. Out. Oh. So now we can just bring this section and click and drag this down to our timeline, and we want to put it on top of our clip. We could drop it in line with if we wanted to. But if we did that, you'll see that our audio stops here at this point. Our narration has just been moved along. So if we undo that and instead, we drop it on the layer above, then this is now going to play the audio here. Then the viewer at this point is going to see this newbie role, the screen share that we just picked, but they're still going to hear me speaking underneath it. So just like any other clip in our timeline, we've got those same handles that we can adjust the start and the end times. We can pick up the clips, move them around. Let's take a quick look at this if no one clicks on it, no one's going to see it. Maybe we'll bring it in a little bit earlier. You can have the world's best video, maybe a little bit later about here. You can have the world's best video, but if no one clicks on it, no one's going to see it. Perfect. That's looking pretty good. Let's have a look at something for the next bit here. So you need to get your content clicked on, and that's when your thumbnail strategy is so important. Okay, so we need something to do with clicking clicking a thumbnail image. Okay, so I like this next bit where there's some of our thumbnail images zoomed in. Going to press I on the keyboard there. And maybe finish it here. And let's bring that down onto our timeline. Now, we can actually stack these if we wanted to. And the coolest part about the way final cut works is if you were stacking them, you could have them really big. Everything stays synchronized with the clip that they are on top of. It's gonna be hard to see, but there's this tiny little join here between the clip and where it is placed in the timeline. So you can see that if I move it across to this one, that clip is now appended to this. So those clips are now going to stay in sync. Idea is that you want to go through your project here, and based on what you're saying and what the viewer needs to see to be kept engaged, you want to bring in those clips. If you don't have the clips that would really help with your storytelling, there's tools and services like Envado and Artlist that have a great library of different stock media clips, different title packs, different music, all of that stuff that you can then use in your videos. So definitely recommend checking those out. We'll have links with this video to the sites and things that we recommend for. See, we can mix and match different clips here. We could bring in, say, this other test clip that I have. If that fitted at that section of the video, then we can just drag and drop that and trim it. Maybe we could even cut it in half if we needed to so you can split your clips. All of the tools I've just shown you applied to all of this stuff, too. But one thing to note here is that there is actually audio. We can see audio here with both of these clips. So what I would recommend you doing at the time of bringing these in is just muting the audio unless you wanted the audio on them. This is going to save you from coming back later when there's so many different clips and things and trying to work out noise is coming from. You can actually do this individually on a clip by clip basis. So we can select our clip here. We move our mouse cursor down to this line, and you can see that we now get these two arrows as our mouse cursor. If we pull this down, that's our volume level. We can turn it down to nothing. We also have the ability to select the clip to come over here to our audio controls, and then we've got a slider here for volume to lower it, as well. And we can also do multiple clips at a time. So if I click and drag from out here, I can select multiple clips, and then we come back up to that same place, volume, and we lower it, and you can see that we're lowering it for both. We will get to the actual volume controls and all that stuff a little bit later. But with your B roll clips, especially as these things build out and you're layering them up, it's a good idea to mute them at the time, if they've got audio that you don't want. If there's audio that you do want, but it might be too loud or anything like that, we're not going to mess with that now, get it in the place or close to where you want it, and we'll adjust the volume levels all in one go a little later. So you want to go ahead now and bring in any other clips, any other stock footage or anything like that to build out this timeline? 8. Adding Text & Titles: A the next step is to bring in any titles or texts and add them into your video. So I'm going to come back to the very start here and I'm going to come up to the titles area here. And in here, there's lots of different preset titles and looks and animations and things that you can actually use, just dragon drop and customize up in your video. For this one, I'm just going to go basic text. You can see even with basic text, there's a few different examples here. I'm going to choose this one, which is just plain text and then click and drag that down into my timeline. And you'll see that this is now positioned above those, but it's starting before it. So how the layering works is you're going to see whatever is on the top. So right now, if we have a look here, we can see that that text is on top of that B roll clip here. So we're actually seeing that text. If it was pulled underneath it, so we drop it down there, then our text disappears at that point because this clip here is blocking it. So just something to be aware of. Let's bring it back to the top, and let's double click on it so we can edit it or we could select on it and come back over to the options at the top and we can change the text. Type in my name. We can choose your name, all of this stuff that you would expect here to customize up your titles. You can see we also have the ability to switch it to three D to change the coloring and everything. Now, with these menus, you can see that there's not really much happening under face, right? Like what's face. But if we come over here where it says show, then this is where we can change color, change what it looks like, blur the text or any of this stuff. So if we wanted to make this a blue, something like our primal video blue, we can easily do then in terms of sizing and positioning, we can do this with the sliders and things here. You got position, rotation, scale, or we can actually just click on the text itself and move it to where we want it, and you can scale it down from here as well. So if we have a look at this now and we hit play on this, you could have the world's best. We've now got some text showing up on screen. Now obviously, when we jump to this next one, we probably want that gone, so we can just shorten that clip down, and it's going to finish the time that this clip appears. But likewise, if we find that we want to readjust some things, it's easy to pick things up to adjust the start times, the end times, to get everything the way that you want it as you're building this out over time. Coming back up here to titles. There are some pretty fancy titles and things in here as well that we can really use as openers. They call them dynamic titles. And we can customize all of this stuff up, as well. Again, it's just drag and drop into your timeline, even different sidebar ones as well, where we could bring out bullet lists and things. He's a bullet list one. And we can combine these. We could layer these up. There's also stuff in here for social media, like a title screen, lower third graphics like this that animate in, again, fully customizable. So you want to go ahead now and add in any text or titles into your videos. Now, we'll show you a little bit later how we can do this text effect, but have it appear behind the person. 9. Applying Transitions & Effects: Next up, we're going to look at transitions and effects. So a transition is something that will help two shots transition between them, right? Pretty obvious when we look at the naming of it. So if we come over here to transitions, make sure that we're able to see this, there's so many different types of transitions in here. Again, we can see what they look like we put our mouse over them. You'll see that one shot disappears and the other one appears. Is a bloom one or it just gets really bright, and then the next shot comes some in here that are going to look pretty good. There's some in here that are going to look pretty cheap. I would say use these sparingly, where it's adding to the video, helping you tell your story, change the mood, whatever it is. Don't just do what an amateur person does and load them in every 2 seconds. It's going to make your video very hard to watch. So a great simple one is just this cross dissolve. And to apply it, all we need to do is just click and drag it onto our timeline here, either onto the join in a clip or onto one of our B Roll clips, where it's automatically going to put it at the start and the end of that clip for you. So if we look at this now and we scrub through this, you can see it's now fading in to that shot, and then it will fade out at the end of. If you don't want to have it at the end, let's just click on it and press Delete. If you want it to go for a longer period of time, we can drag that out or shorter period of time. So you've got a great amount of flexibility in here as well. But also, if we click on that transition, then you can manually dial things in and change some settings on them as well. So this area up here changes to whatever you've got selected in your timeline. We can also add these on our primary timeline, as well. Pick something different, just so you can see the impact this would have if we played this now. If someone sees, they can work out Right. So we've transitioned between those two shots. Now, it's not really that good in this case, because both shots are almost exactly the same. So we wouldn't normally use a transition when both shots, both camera angles and everything, are the same. They noally transport they're normally to transition someone one scene like daytime to nighttime or something completely different. So instead of adding even a cross dissolve or anything like here, where you can see it kind of just goes a little bit weird. And what we do with our YouTube videos is we'll pick one of these two and we'll just zoom in on one of them, just so it looks a little bit different. So I'm going to pick this second clip here now, and I'm going to come to the transform area, so I want to make sure we're on video, transform. I'm going to come down here to scale all. So we want to scale both the X and Y at once. So scale all. Now, you see, I'm making this change, but we're not seeing it. Because the clip is selected here, the playback indicator is over here. So we do want to make sure that we are clicking here somewhere so that we're actually previewing the right clip. So now when we scale in, we go from 100%, that was standard. Let's come up a little bit. Now, you don't want to go too far, especially depending on how you've shot this. You might be losing a little bit of quality or something like that, but a little bit is fine. I would then try to line up the eyes when it's something like this. So it's less jarring for people watching we'll watch other people through their eyes. So let's just play this now. Scenario that they can work out exactly. Okay, so not bad. We could probably spend a little bit more time just adjusting this get a little bit closer, but you get the idea. It's broken pattern. It's now just a boring shot with just a hard jump. Actually zoomed in, and it will make it feel like a different camera angle or just a little bit different, different enough to be interesting. So you can actually just go through and apply that setting to each of the clips that you would want to zoom in on or you can actually copy and paste effects and settings as well. So with this clip that we have applied this transform setting two, we can actually copy that, choose edit copy, and it's actually copied the entire clip, but it's also copied all the settings and things for it. And let's say that we wanted to apply it to this clip here on the end. So we'll pick this one here and let's choose Edit. Let's choose paste. We can go paste effects and that we'll apply all the effects that on that original clip that we copied, or if we choose paste attributes, then we get to choose. So right now, we only want to paste in the position and the scale. Those are the two that we made changes to, and we can choose paste, and now those are applied to this clip. You can see this one has that zoom in now applied to it as well. So you can actually do this in bulk. You don't have to set this up every time. But also, this is where I'd be going back to our original clip here where we had this B Roll here was talking about getting your thumbnails clicked on. What I would do at this point here is I'd probably zoom in on this. Again, we want to click here so we can preview this and we could scale this up and maybe we adjust the positioning a bit here so that's framed up a bit better or at least showing the thumbnail image is big at that point. With these settings and things that we've applied here, you can actually animate them as well, using what's called keyframes I don't want to get too complicated too quick here, but we can create some simple animations here with this. So let's just say that we're happy with this now where it's starting. So what we can do is create a keyframe here at this start point where this is set the way that we want this to be at the start. So we want to set a keyframe for the position, where we can set one for the scale as well or any of the things that we might want to change. You can actually just turn them all on. We've kind of locked it at that point. So what we've just told it with the keyframes is at the start of this clip, that's exactly the place, the position, the rotating the scale that we want this clip. But over time, we want it to move to let's say about here, we can add some new keyframes, and it will transition between those two or move between those two lots of settings. So let's just say that with this one here, at this point in time now, we want it scrolled down more so we can this one, and let's maybe go to here, just for the purposes of this video. So now when we scroll back through here, you can see that that movement is happening. So it is really easy then to be able to zoom back in or move things around or have something spin. This is how we do it with key frames. Now, in terms of other effects and things, we do have a dedicated panel here for effects. There's lots of different things in here from different looks. We've got all of our blur controls in here if we want to blur something out, different lighting options. You can see we've got some light balls, booker floating through the screen here if we're going to use that one. So it is worth clicking through these just to see the types of things that you can do. Personally, I don't use these too much, but it is good to know access to in here. Now, in terms of other types of effects like your speed control, if you want to speed something up or slow it down, a clip, then we can just select a clip, and we can come up here to our speed control area. So if we press on this, we've got the ability to choose some presets, so we can adjust from 100% is normal speed. We go lower than that, it's going to start to slow it down. Got here 100% and even says it. If we want to speed things up, we're going above 100%. So you can either pick one of these presets here or you can choose custom, and you'll see we get this extra panel on here. We can either then type in the amount in a percentage. We can choose if we're going forward or reverse. So if you want to clip to play backwards, we could just set it to reverse. We can do it based on the amount of time. So the duration, how long do I want this clip to go for? And then it'll calculate what the percentage or amount of speeding up or slowing down is. But we can also do it down here in our actual timeline. So we've got this now speed bar at the top here. I can click on the end here and I can shorten this clip, meaning that it's going to play it back faster, or I can slow it down by dragging it out. And you can see that the speed now is at 45%. If you are slowing down a clip that wasn't recorded in slow motion, this new AI feature, a function here in Final Cut is absolutely amazing, and I would strongly recommend your turning it on. Right now, if we play this, let's just give you a worst case scenario. Let's drag it out a bit longer. So we're down to 24%. So I'm going to hit play on this, ignore the audio behind it. You can see it's not fluid at all. It's very stilted, very jittery. It's going to make a cut in the timeline here at this point. So we're just processing this piece of this now. But what I can do here with this drop down and come back here to custom is that we can change the video quality from fast to optical flow, which is okay and was previously the best option. Now I don't use it. Since the introduction of the AI, which is the machine learning, this is the one I would recommend you use if you've got this option. So if we press this now, it's now going to process. You can see it's analyzing, but it's adding all these extra frames in here to really make this good. So if we take a look at this now, not perfect. There was something a little weird happened with my hand. But the rest of it really, really clear. And look, moving water is one of the hardest things that you can actually have the AI to process. So this is just crazy. So if you've got something that you want slowed down, make sure you're enabling that machine, the AI piece. So that's the speeding up and the slowing down. Let's say that you want to stabilize a shaky clip. We can again select our clip. I'll pick this one over here. Doesn't have any other effects applied to it at the moment. We can then come up here to our video controls. Down here, we've got stabilization. So we can turn this on and we've got more options. We can then choose smooth Cam and we can adjust much smoothness. So this is going to come down to how shaky your footage is, but just know that the more that you're enhancing this, the more that you're taking anti shake out, if it's something that's really bad, the worse the results are going to be. It does a good job if it's just something that's maybe handicamed that you want to stabilize and have it look like it was on a tripod or was a drone shot or something like that. Does a great job at that, but you really need to dial it in up or down from here depending on the clip. But probably my favorite effect and so many people are using right now is the background removal tool. So let's just go ahead and delete this clip here so we can see our other clips in the bottom timeline here. I'm going to pick this last clip. Let's say we want to remove the background on this clip. All I need to do is again, make sure we're on the effects area here. Let's come down to masks and keying. And what we're looking for is this magnetic mask. Let's drag that onto our clip, and then up in the top here, we get a different cursor, this eyedropper. We can just click on our person or the object we want to select, and then we can analyze that clip. So it's selected through our entire clip. You can see that's processing there now. Love that it's doing the auto tracking and following any hand movements and all of that stuff, too. So now that's done, we've got options up here where we can change things if we want to reverse the selection. So if I want the background selected, not me, then we could do that. But just already by default, without changing anything else, if I deselect this now, you'll see that the background has been removed on this clip, which means that we can bring in another background. So if I come over here to the titles and generators, let's come down to generators. I'm going to pick backgrounds actually dynamic backgrounds. Why not? Okay, let's just grab this one. Let's drag this down into our time. Because this clip here is in our bottom timeline, our main story line and isn't treated as B Roll and lifted up, we do need to lift it up. So we can click and drag it up so that it's sitting on top of this other clip, and you'll see now that we now have me talking with a different background there behind it. So this is really cool. But some other uses for this could be to blow out the background or to put text behind you or the person presenting. So let's duplicate this clip. I'm going to select on it, I'm going to choose Edit, copy. I'm going to come down a little bit further in our timeline and choose Edit Paste. Going to bring this one back to our main story line, and I'm going to bring this clip over on top of it because these two clips are identical. The bottom one, though, we still have that magnetic mask applied. So I'm going to either deselect it here and it's gone or I can select it and delete it, and it's totally gone. But now our clip here will look normal, because the top one here has the background removed, but the background showing through from the bottom one. Which means that we can select the bottom one here, and let's come over here to blur, and let's apply a Gaussian blur to the background. And you can see we've it. So I'm going to pick here, let's come up and adjust it because it looks too bad. Let's just make it a little bit blurry, something like this, and now hit play. Text or too much happening. Your viewers are going to click on something else. Pretty cool. So we'd also then have the ability to bring our text in between these two. I'm going to go ahead and remove this clip. And let's go and grab our text from the start. I'm going to copy that, pressing Command C. Let's come back to the end here. I'm just going to paste it here. I'm going to pick it up and move it between these two. Now, we can stretch it out so that it fits that same amount. You can see now it's behind me. So let's make it bigger. We can adjust position of the text so we can even have this using the keyframes, ameacross. But you can see now that we've now got the ability to put things actually into the scene here. Maybe we will put it onto two lines and let's put it up here. As I'm talking, you can see that there's a little bit of extra polish there on the shot. We probably we go the other side, so the bookshelf is not in the way. This way, you can have some pretty engaging titles that look pretty professional really quickly. Again, at this point, we're going through adding in any effects, any transitions, any background removals, all your stabilization, all the fun stuff. This happens now. Then we go through and do another pass and refine our edit further. So this point, we're starting to get pretty close. 10. Music, Sound Effects & Volume Levels: This is then where we're now bringing in any music or sound effects into our edit. So I'm going to go ahead and import a music track back up the top here, File, Import media and go ahead and find. I've got a music track here from Epidemic Sound. This is a great place where we get a lot of our YouTube music and stuff from. I'm choose Import File. Now, depending on which version of Final Cut you're on, if you're on the Creator Studio one, the subscription, there is music files and things that you can download. If you come up the top to Final Cut Pro Menu. There's an option in here to download content library. Got my music track here imported. Let's scroll back to the start of our project here, so we're dropping in at the start, and we want to bring it down to the bottom. Again, this is tied to the first clip that you're putting it underneath. So you can see that the music here is linked to that clip now as well. So if we're moving anything around, it's going to stay synchronized to that. But just like any clip, we can adjust the start, the end, we can trim it, all of those usual things with our music tracks. Let's come across further because I would imagine our video finishes and our music track is going to keep going. We can use that ripple delete or blade here to cut our clip, press delete, and it's gone. Do want to watch this. You see that automatically generated a longer gap clip here for us. We want to be mindful that we don't have any of these things left at the end of our edit because it's going to create this blank time here for us. So select that and let's delete it to our video actually finishes at this point. Okay, so we're bringing in our music tracks. It could be multiple music tracks. We're also bringing in any sound effects. And there are actually some sound effects in here in Final Cut. You can see all kinds of different ones, so we can just click and drag those down into our project. Again, we want to have them down here somewhere. It doesn't matter where if they're below the music or above the music. But typically, you want all your audio stuff down below and video stuff up so let's say we had a couple of these sound effects and things in here when we want them. Again, they could be trimmed down and customized up as you want. But what you would do now once you've got those in where you want them, and there could be a lot that you're adding in here, depending on what you're building, is that we'll then do another pass of our video. We're playing through, and we might make some minor adjustments to things to match the music, to match the beat because your music is really going to give vibe, the feeling, the emotion behind what people are watching and what they're hearing. The music can be a big piece. Once you've got them all in, this is where we're going to dial in our volume levels on everything to really get everything exactly where it needs to be and where you want it. So to do that, what I'm normally doing, though, is I'm selecting all of my audio files, the music, and everything, and I'm just dropping the volume on them down to nothing. Or I'm pressing V on the keyboard to disable those for right now. Because what we want to do first off, even though we've just placed them in there, is we want to get the volume level right on our spoken piece first, so we know that that's right and at the perfect level. And then we can bring in our music and sound effects to match that so that it's not too overpowering or too much or too loud and distorting and annoying for people, we can dial that in as a secondary. So we want to mute or disable our other audio files. So we're just left here with our primary camera footage here. I'm going to come back to the start of our clip. I would want to make sure here that I'm playing this with our audio bars on so that I can see this visual representation, and I'm hitting play ideally with headphones on, so we get a true representation of what everything sounds like. And I'm pressing play, but I'm watching the volume levels over here. Can have the world's best video. Pretty much exactly where we want it, where it's going between the minus six here and the zero without going above the zero. Above the zero means it's too loud, and it's going to be distorting and sound bad. The other way that we can check that our audio levels are fine is actually by looking at this audio waveform here, and we can see those spikes and watch what happens when I increase the volume level here. Then we start to go into the yellow and to the red. Anything in the red is too loud. If you're seeing any red, it definitely wants to come down so that we're removing all of that. So this is the other way that you can do it. You can see our volume level here at zero is perfect. So we can either adjust our volume levels here as a clip by clip basis, where we're selecting the clip, adjusting the volume here in the timeline, or we're coming up here to audio and using this slider to adjust it. And even up in here, we can see this visual representation here as well. So we can see that we start to get some bits here in the red. Too loud. So we back it off a little. So we can do it on a clip by clip basis, or if it was the same camera and everything, you can again copy the effects, so we can choose edit, copy. We can then select all the remaining clips from that same camera, same audio source, and we can choose edit, paste attributes, and we can just select audio volume so that all of our volume levels across that entire clip or clips are exactly the same. Also have the ability just to select the clips and to manually adjust them all from up here as well. Now, from here, the next thing I would bring back is the music, and I would do this before I bring back the sound effects. And this is really the piece that I would want headphones on because there's no real right or wrong. This is a creative piece. This is art of how loud your music should be. And each music track is going to be different. And we can see already just looking at this. This one starts quieter and then gets louder and then gets quieter again and gets louder. So I like that you can visually see these things. But where I like to start with the music as a general is around -30, again, give or take for the music track. And then we press play, we see what it sounds like, and we can go up and down from here. Now, just as we use keyframes earlier for animating this section of our video, we can use keyframes to adjust our volume levels and effects and things as well. But there's also a faster way than manually adding the keyframes with audio. We can actually use the Range Selector tool. So on the keyboard or we come up here to Range selection, and we can draw out an area that we want to make an adjustment. Let's just say that we're happy with this volume level all the way through, but in this section here, let's just map it out. Let's draw and clicking and dragging with that range selection tool on. In this section, we want it louder. I can then with that selected with this tool, increase it, and it's only increasing it for that section. And the same will work back the other way. Let's pick another range. Let's go from here to here. Let's say that we want no music at that point. Let's lower that down. Now if you zoom in and look at this, it's not even just a hard cut. It's created those keyframes for us, and it's fading up or fading in at that point, automatically for us. So that range selection tool is a massive timesaver if you want to really get granular on your volume controls and things. So then at this point, I'll be doing the same with the sound effects, and I would be adjusting the volumes for those to where I needed them and the same for any of our B Roll clips up here. If we wanted sound like the waves in the background or something here, then I would be dialing that in so we can remove the sound from this one. In regards to the sound as well, if we come back to our arrow tool and let's select one of the clips, up here under the audio panel, we do have a really powerful tool called voice isolation. So if you are recording in a noisy environment and you want to remove some of that background noise, this does a really good job. Actually, why don't we grab that beach clip Test one. I'm just going to put this at the end of our video here, and let's just do a before and after to show you how powerful this is. Guess, this is a test. There is lots of background noise here and a rainbow. Okay, so the audio is not great. Select on this. Let's come up. Let's put on voice isolation. Let's enable that. And let's just have a look again at that audio waveform. This is the original with it not on. And you can see, as I start to increase this, there's the background noise here that has dropped out. So let's play this now. This is fairly high. It's 99%. I wouldn't ever recommend using it at 99%, but let's have a listen to it with all the background noise removed. Guess the test, there is lots of background noise here and a rainbow. Okay, so it has totally removed all the background noise. That does sound a little robotic. There's another one of those AI tools. But it also is unrealistic because clearly, I'm filming at the beach, there's wind, there's waves, all of that stuff. So you would expect some background noise. So let's drop it down to about 62%. And now let's listen. Guess the test. There is lots of background noise here. It's so much easier to hear, man, I'd probably even drop it a bit more so there's a bit more background noise. Guess the test, there is lots of background noise here. Yeah, so much better. And if we turn this off and go back to the original just to give you before and after here, Just as a test? That's the original. So huge improvement. But you can also use it even if you're recording in an area like this where there's not really background noise, but there might be a little bit of echo. Then we can use that just again, at a low setting, maybe 10% or 20%, and it will make your audio sound better, too. 11. Adjusting Color: The last main thing that we need to do here is adjust any of the colors, do any color grading, color correcting. And we save this until last so that we're not putting a big burden on our system to have to process every frame of the video with those adjustments that we make while we're still back editing. So that's why this is saved to one of the last steps in the process. Again, we want to apply this to the first clip first. So we select the first over here under effects, there are different looks. So there's even a category here called Looks where if we have a look at these, you can see they're almost kind of like Instagram filters and things, different looks that you could apply. So if you do find something in here that you like the look of, then yeah, by all means, you can click and drag that onto your clip, and you can run with that. Personally, though, I don't use any of those. And instead, I would come up here to the color correction panel, the color panel. And then in here, there's a few different options you've got. This is the new default panel here, which shows up, and that's probably where I recommend most people leave it. But there's also some really powerful professional tools in here as well. If we hit this little drop down arrow, we've got a color board, which is going to let us adjust individual colors and different sections of that. So right now I pick the black ones, or adjusting the blacks. We can adjust those and brighten them up and change the colors and all of that stuff. We could also choose color wheels, and again, just another set of controls to allow you to dial things. Can actually stack multiple of these effects. We can have color wheels and we could have some of the other ones applied here too. But the main one that I use, and I would say is probably the best or rounder for most people, especially without overwhelming you or anything in here is the color adjustments panel, the main one here because it just makes it really easy for you to do things like adjust the exposure, the brightness, the contrast, all of that stuff. You could really just go through manually here and make these adjustments to get it looking the way that you'd like. That's not. There is also some really cool AI features in here where it would automatically analyze your shot and do that for you. So I'm just going to reset this. I'm going to hit the little drop down and choose reset. So we're back to all zeros here, and I'm going to hit here, enhance light and color. And so that's what it is thinking is the best adjustment based on the AI, looking at the scene, the lights, skin tones, all of that stuff. And it's not. What I like about it is it's giving me here the adjustments. It's not just making them. I can actually see what adjustments it made. And then I could choose to say, You know what? That's still probably a little bit dark, but I could boost that up a bit. Or maybe the saturation's a little low. Maybe I want to bring out some colors a bit more, and I could boost that up a bit. So if we go before and after now, there's a huge difference. And it was just really simple adjustments from my end once the AI had done the first pass. Again, what we can do here is we can either save this as a preset. So it'll show up as a preset down here, a template that we can drag on like an effect, or because we've applied these just to the first clip, we could copy and paste them to the remaining clips. So that's what I'll do. I'm going to choose Command C to copy. I'm going to select the remainder of these. I'm going to choose edit, paste attributes. This time, the only one I want because we disabled the other is the color adjustments, and we paste that in, and now they all have that same look or color adjustments applied. Same goes for your B Roll clips, you can select an individual clip, and you can make the adjustments to that either manually or using the automatic adjustment and then tweaking it beyond there as needed. 12. Exporting Your Video: So now that all that's done, the last step is to export and save out our project. So we can come up here to the Share button. And you see there's a few different options in here, but the one I recommend you use is Export File. And we can customize everything up from here. Now, we can give our video a name here where it says Justin's Edit that just went off what we called our timeline or our project here before. But the main piece here is over under settings. And then in here there's a few different options that we can set. So the first one here under format, this is broken down into three different categories. We've got mastering, so saving out a final master version of your video. Got publishing and we've got broadcast. And so broadcast would be if you're going to broadcast Networks or Netflix or something like that. You want the absolute best quality thing out, then you've got an MXF file for that. That's probably likely not many people watching this. So then, really the choice becomes, do we want publishing and do we want social platforms? Or do we want mastering? And if it's mastering, do we want just the video, the audio, or do we want to save out the audio and the video, which is, again, most likely what I would imagine main difference between the social platforms and the mastering version is the options you have. And also the file sizes are a little bit smaller in the social platforms. And so if we pick social platforms here, you can then see that we can choose our video codec. So the default right now is h264, single pass. Unless you need one of the other options here, that's probably a fair one to leave it on. You can then specify your video resolution. Now this is based on our project settings which were set from the main primary camera footage right back at the start. So this 1920 by 1080, it's suggesting that based on our project, Ben 1920 by 1080. Really where I'm using this the most where I would imagine most people would want to leave this is under video and audio. So you're getting a slightly higher quality video that you can use on your social media platforms and use as a decent backup of your video as well. But then under the Codec setting here, this is where this gets pretty crazy. Again, for most people, most use cases, the h264 setting here is going to be fine. So you can see that our video here right now is going to be 146 megabytes on the computer. If we wanted the absolute best quality out of this, then we could use some of the PRs one. So if I click it here to ProRes four, 22 HQ, you can see that this goes up to nearly 1.5 gigabytes. So it's a much larger file. So for most things like YouTube, social media, videos, or anything like that, you'll be fine leaving this on h264, and then we hit next, and we choose where on the computer, we're going to save this. So I can put it here in my downloads, choose Save, and that's going to save the video out. Now, if we want to see the progress of that, it's this little thing up in the top corner here, which we can click on, and we can see that was actually a really quick export. With a more complicated timeline, longer edit. And depending on the system that you're using and how powerful it is, that could take quite a bit longer as well. So once that export is done, the default setting is that that opens that video file up for you to preview, to make sure everything is all good. If you're happy with it, then that's when you can release. 13. Reformatting for Different Platforms: Now, there's one more thing that I want to show you in here, which I think is really powerful, if, say, you've created a widescreen video like we have here now, if we wanted to repurpose this for portrait, so we want to convert it from a widescreen video to a portrait video, there is actually a feature in here that uses AI to help you reformat your videos for you. So the way that we do that we find our timeline in here. So we scroll up here Justin's Edit, the project, and we want to right click on it, and we want to choose duplicate project as. So we do this at the end of having a project. Then we're going to duplicate it and make a copy of it, but we need to choose duplicate project as, not just duplicate project, right? So we pick and let's call this Justin's Edit portrait. Now, in here, when we choose video, we can now choose a vertical format, and we can choose the qualities the resolution. I'm going to keep this here as 1920 by 1080. But the trick here or the tool here is when we tick this box Smart conform. This is where it's going to analyze the clips and reformat and reframe everything for us based on what's actually happening in our videos. So we can choose o, and now that's going through, and that's processing that clip or that timeline for us. What we have here is our original edit, Justin's Edit, and we've now got our new one Justin's Edit portrait. So now if we go ahead and open up the portrait version, make sure you've switched your timelines here, you'll see that we now have even the titles have been moved, our Bro has all been adjusted. I'm actually centered up in the shot here, even with my move this clip here has been framed, so my head is in the center. If we went back to the original, maybe I'll open the original here. You'll see that I'm not centered in here at all. And as we scrub through this, there's sections here where I'm really not in the center at all. So it's reframed all of our shots here automatically for us. So then all we need to do is obviously move anything that doesn't quite line up. So let's just say we wanted to make a minor adjustment to this one. I could select the clip, come over here to our video controls, and then we've got our position here, X and Y. I could just adjust the X position. Make sure I've clicked on that clip. And we can tweak that as we need to. So that's a really fast and easy way that you can use the AI features inside a final cut to help you repurpose your widescreen videos to portrait. 14. Wrapping Up: So wrapping up this final cut pro training, a couple of quick things. If you found this training valuable, I would really appreciate you taking the 30 seconds to leave us a review. It can make a huge difference in helping others find this training, too. You can also share any of your top tips or takeaways and things that you've learned along the way to help others going through this training as well. And if you want to see the other master classes and courses we have here on Skillshare, you can access those up in our profile area. So a massive thank you for taking this course here with us, and I wish you the best with your videos.