Final Cut Pro X - Editing Wedding Videos

1. Introduction & Class Project: What's going on, everyone? It's Brian here. First off, I want to congratulate you for taking this course and taking steps to learn video editing. If you followed my work, you'll see I created a business that mainly focuses on weddings. But this course will be suitable for pretty much anything else you're filming. What makes Final Cut pro ten stand out is their magnetic time line. Which may seem frustrating at first, but I think it helps me edit faster. So I'm going to give you guys a class project and I understand that not everybody that's taking this course is in the wedding industry, or many of you have never filmed a wedding. A lot of the skills that I'm going to teach you in here can also be applied to pretty much almost anything else. I filmed corporate videos, a lot of school events, and real estate videos, and this is the same stuff that I applied into the other industries as well. I'm going to cover documentary edit, highlights, teasers. I've done the same thing for pretty much all the other industries. I did a lot of school events. I'll give you an example. Last advanced show I did was about an hour long. I had three cameras set up. I made them a 1 hour dock at it. And then I delivered a highlight, which is about 3 minutes long. Then I delivered a short teaser, which is about 20:20 5 seconds around there, you can use anything that you're working on for this class project. It can be a travel video, it can be a family vacation. Just go ahead and start filming and start editing based on what you learned over here. So don't overthink it, just go ahead and start filming something and start editing it, and let's see what you got. 2. Folder Structure: This is how I structured my folders before I open up Final Cut Pro. As you can see, I organize all my weddings by the year, month and day, along with the name of the couple. I'll open this up to show you. I create a separate folder for each camera. This is so I don't forget to copy over cards. What I always do is create a folder for just the raw footage. I'll make sure I'm in this folder. Then right-click with my mouse. Create new folder for raw footage. Now I'll select all the other folders in my raw footage and drag them in here. I'll show you another example of another recent wedding. You'll see I separate all the folders here by Camera, but I also have a folder for all my audio files. I'll create another folder for additional assets. I use this if I need to open something up on another software like Photoshop or After Effects, it's rare, but it happens. Sometimes clients send me photos. Music files will also go in here. The next folder I created, one for my finished project. I'll leave a copy of my folder Structure available for download here. So just like what I have here, I organized the Video by the year than the month, because it's easier for me to find the folder when I go back to older wedding videos a year or two later, I also keep everything in list view. Some people like icons so they can see the thumbnail. But to me it's harder for me to stay organized when I'm looking for the project. So I'll keep my folders and you can press Command Plus four minus to change the size of your list view. I also like seeing my path bar. Let's say you keep clicking folder after folder. This path bar helps me keep track where that item is at and my hard drive. You can go to View, then select Show path bar here. The status bar here shows me how much drive space I have left and how many items are in a specific folder. You can also go to View and select Show Status Bar to make it visible. So that's about it for this lesson. You can always organize your folders however you want. Sometimes I may even include a separate folder for just music. Either way, I think it's best to keep all the raw footage in a folder by itself. So when clients purchase the raw footage, it's easy for me to drag the footage into a new drive. 3. importing files: Now we'll import the footage into Final Cut Pro. These folders here will automatically be placed into categories. When we get started. Go ahead and open up Final Cut Pro. If you already have any other libraries open, you can right-click and close that library will create a new library, go to File, then New, then select Library. I'll look for their folder and make sure it's selected. Here's the folder for Leanna and wheels Wedding. I'll also Name it Leanna and will. Then I'll click Save. Now you created a library and it automatically creates an event. I'm going to rename the event so it has the date of the couples Wedding. I'll expand these triangles here for the moment, even though there isn't anything to show you. After I import the footage, you'll see categories created for each folder we made in the drive. Now makes sure the library is selected and click this Import button here in the browser. I'll find the folder for this couple and select the raw footage folder. You'll see the sidebar here on the right side. Add to existing event is selected and I'll make sure the event we created with their wedding date is selected. Under files. You want to leave files in place. You don't want to copy the files unless you want to have another copy of the raw footage in your hard drive, it'll take up so much unnecessary space. Under keywords. Select from folders. After the files are imported, you'll see the keywords from the raw footage folder under the event. This next part is up to you if you want to edit off of the raw files or proxies. I always edit with Proxy is to make the Editing quicker. If you're unsure what Proxy is are, I'll explain this in the next video. When I cover this more. Under Codec, I'll make sure progress Proxy is selected and I'll have the frame size 50% of the quality. This is basically making a copy of all the clips, half the quality size when you're ready, click Import selected. Don't worry if you don't see this window show up on your end. I just have some files for my drum clips that are not Video Clips. The files are imported in the New Library. You'll see under the events, each folder we created is now organized by keywords. I can now go find clips from each Camera here. I don't necessarily need to see the raw footage folder, so I'll delete that. You can delete a keyword by right-clicking and select Delete keyword collection. Now that it's imported, it's currently creating the Proxy Files. You can see the background task on its thumbnail here. In this window. Under transcode and analysis, it shows that it's still making copies. Since this will take awhile, I can go ahead and do something else or leave my computer running so it can finish. I'll end this lesson here and we'll continue on the next lessons. 4. Proxy files: I'll cover Proxy is a bit more. I currently pause the files from being trans coded after the last tutorial. You'll see here the library we created is now in this folder. If you closed final Cut Pro, you can always reopen the file from clicking on the library. If you ever need to change your workspace back to default, you can click on Window, then go to Workspaces and select default. So if you're following along, we should have a similar workspace. There's a difference from Editing the raw files and proxy. I usually have a much smoother edit when I'm editing Proxy. I'll go to View, then select the Proxy only. After the last tutorial I stopped Transcoding because I want to show you another way to do it. You'll see most of these clips currently say missing Proxy. You don't need to follow along this next part, as I'm just going to show you a few things, I'll go back to my hard drive, right-click on the library and select show package contents. I'll open up events, then transcoding media to show you where the proxy files are stored. When you create proxy files, it copies the clips here. Final Cut Pro will read these clips while you're editing and Proxy. Later, you'll have Final Cut Pro clear these out and you will export with the raw clips. Now you can follow along if you haven't already created proxies from the last tutorial, I'll select one of the clips in the browser. Then press Command a to select all the clips. Right-click with your mouse, then select to transcode media. I'll make sure create proxy media is selected and frame size is 50%. Click Okay. Once again, it's Transcoding all the clips into proxy files. When I'm just about done Editing my whole video, I'll switch this back to the original media by going to view, then clicking optimized and original. Then I'll clear out those proxy files by going to file, then select Delete generated library Files. You'll see over here is the option to select delete proxy media. I won't do this right now. But this is something you can refer back to later when you're finished editing. And you can save hard-drive space. That's it for now. And I'll let it finish transcoding media. I'll see you on the next lesson. 5. Final Cut Pro Interface: Now I'll briefly go over the final Cut Pro workspace. You'll start to get familiar with this more in depth as you're working on your projects. Over here on the left, you'll see the library sidebar. Just think of this as a way to organize all your clips using different keywords. Right next to the sidebar is the browser that shows each clip. Next to the browser, you'll see the viewer, which will play back eclipsing projects. On the right side you'll see the inspector. I'll make sure that clip is selected so you can see what comes up. You'll be able to make more adjustments to the clip in the media inspector. There'll be more options when we start putting clips in the timeline. This is the Timeline and the bottom where you'll be doing all the Editing. If you're unsure what's the name of a button, you can hover your mouse over the button or icon, and a tool tip will appear on top of the sidebar, you have the option to view the library. The middle one has sound effects. The third button has titles that you can use for text and your video. You won't have all these texts because these are many of the plug-ins I've downloaded over the years. Here's your menu, which we'll go through a few times. In your browser, you have the option to change the clip appearance or filter the menu. I go here often if I have clips that are longer than a minute, and I just want to find something specific that was only a few seconds. We'll go back to the inspector and I'll show you the difference. When you have a clip selected. There are three different types of inspectors. Right now you're seeing the video inspector. This button here is the info inspector. You can see the resolution and frame rate you reported this. You can get more info about the clip like the size, and you can add your own notes or Camera Name here. I will discuss the importance of Camera Name when you're using multicam Editing. Just below the inspector, you'll see the effects tab. Next to it is the Transitions tab. On the other side of the Timeline. Here are the tools. We'll go over the options as we're editing. This is a basic overview of the final Cut Pro Interface. You'll get familiar with it as we go more in-depth in the next lesson. 6. New Project & Timeline: We will create a Project and the Timeline so you can get started with Editing. Your Timeline will be created down here. You can press this new Project icon here. Another option is to go to File New and select projects. In this pop-up window, you can give it a project name. I'm creating a teaser. I'll Name and teaser. If I'm creating a highlight all Name at highlight, then you can decide what Video Format you'll be working on. If you filmed in for K, you can choose for K in the drop-down. If you plan on delivering and ten at, you can choose ten ADP. Under frame rate, I always choose 23.98 because that standard for film, and I want it to have that similar look we all see in theatres. You can pick the settings that fits your style or feel free to use my exact settings and click, Okay. Now we created a project, as you can see here in the browser. And we can edit this Project and the Timeline. Some people grab bits and pieces from their browser and drag only a few selected clips to the Timeline. What I normally do is grab all the video clips and drag it in the timeline. I don't need to drag the audio, so I'll select all Video in the collections folder. Then I'll select a random clip in the browser, hold command and press a on the keyboard to select all clips. Then I'll drag and drop all the clips to the Timeline. Or you can press W to insert the clip. Now we have all the video clips in the Timeline. I'm going to double-check that I'm editing the proxies. You can press Command Plus to zoom in or Command Minus to zoom out. I'm going to zoom in the timeline. The volume bar is right here on the clip. You can drag that down to remove the audio. Or you can go to the audio inspector and move the volume bar towards the left as long as you have the clip selected. There are several ways to cut off parts of the clip. You can press I on your keyboard to add an endpoint and press 0 on your keyboard to add an out point. This will select a range, and you can press the Delete button on the keyboard to remove that selected range from. Simple way is to move your mouse at the edge of the cliff. When you see the film icon come up underneath the mouse, you can start dragging the edge to trim the clip. One way to make cuts in the middle of the clip is by going into the tool, select the blade tool. Now you bring the mouse in the middle of the clip and make cuts. Then you can go back to the Tools drop-down and go back to the Select tool. You can drag the clip around and you can see how the magnetic timeline is used. Every time you remove a clip from the primary story-line, all the other clips move towards the left like a magnet. And this should be enough to help you get comfortable with Editing. Go ahead and play with it a bit and I'll have more tips on the next lesson. 7. In and out points: This is how we're going to make the best of the magnetic timeline. I take my hand off the mouse and use the keyboard to trim the entire timeline. I have my fingers on the J, K, and L key, while my thumb is on the spacebar. I do this for all types of edits, including real estate videos, corporate videos, or family videos. So even if you're not working on a wedding, you can do this for any project. My right hand will hover over the keyboard. The J button will reverse playback. The K button will stop, and the L button will play forward. If you press the G or L button twice, it'll double the speed. You press it three times, it'll triple the speed. Same if you keep pressing it a fourth time and so on. Now I'll press the J button several times to speed backwards. Spacebar will also play and stop. I keep my thumb on the Space bar because I make a habit of stopping or playing when it's needed. I use in and out points to select a range in the Timeline and Cut clips. I'll press the button to select the out point. Then it automatically selects the rest of the clip before my out point. I want to remove the beginning part of this clip, so I'll press the Delete button. I'll press the button to keep playing. I want to remove the end of this clip. When I press the I button, I create an endpoint and it automatically selects the rest of that clip. I'll press the Delete key to remove it. I can select a range using both in and out points. I'll add an endpoint, then add an outpoint, then delete a range of clips. That's pretty much what I do with my entire Timeline. This is what I do during my first four or 5 h of my editing time calling clips. Here, John, he went pretty cool. Decimeter, try this to remove all the unnecessary shots, the shaky footage or duplicates. Sometimes I can have 6 h of footage trimmed down to 30 min. After all the culling, I start the creativity right after this. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know 8. Projects for doc, highlight & teaser: I'll show you my normal workflow when creating projects. When I first started weddings, I only created highlights. Over time. I learned how to complete a full documentary edit by filming the entire ceremony, Toast first dance and other formal events. So now I create a project for the documentary Edit. Then I have two more projects for the highlight and teaser video. To create a new Project, I'll go to File New, then click Project. I'll name this one teaser. I want this to be the right format for TikTok or real. So under Video Format, I'll select vertical. Frame rate is always 23.98 frames per second. Your resolution can always be higher, but I keep it at 720 by 12 at, since people are just looking at this on their phones. When you're ready, click, Okay. I normally create a teaser first, since it's easy and I can just throw in clips for a short 30-second video. Then I create the doc edit. I started calling and assembling clips from that Timeline. After I'm done calling, trimming and assembling clips, I duplicate the documentary projects and rename this highlight. So let's just assume you finished everything in the previous lesson where I showed how I cut down the timeline. Once you're done with that, click on that project and select Duplicate project. Then you click on the new Project and rename it to highlight. If you've trimmed your clips, then you can start focusing on the creative parts of the highlight. Attention to the Name above the Timeline so you know which project you're working on. I've made the mistake before by editing the wrong project. So this is only necessary if you're creating a documentary, edit, a teaser and a highlight. When I'm creating a teaser, I usually insert my best clips from the browser and bring them into the Timeline. Now you're ready to create a TikTok or Instagram real 9. Stabilize footage: Let stabilize your shaky footage. As I play the video, you'll see how much the camera shakes. The first thing I'll do is trim most of the shaky parts of the clip and keep a small portion of it. Then I'll slow it down by going to read timing options and select Automatic Speed. This just makes the shaky less noticeable. As you see, I have more space to trim. In the video inspector, I'll select stabilization and that should smooth out part of it. I'll play it again and you can review it 10. Multicam 1 The Basics: I'll show you how I use Multicam plus with two sugars. And I'm filming here with my camera in front of the bridesmaids opening up their gifts. My second shooter has a side angle of them. I'll select any of these clips. Press Shift F, so it comes up in the browser. The clip is selected here in the browser. I can see my second shooters clip here in the browser. I'll press and hold Command and select the second clip. I'll right-click and select multicam clip, give it a name that's relevant. Then you can have your settings however you'd like. Click, Okay. Now you have a Multicam clip in your browser. I'll move this clip in the Timeline. And then you go to View select angles. You now have two different angles on your screen. You can cut between angles here, but you don't want to keep flooding the audio. So I usually select the middle button, enabled video. So I'm just cutting the video. You can see as I cut in-between clips, it will show the cuts in the Timeline 11. Multicam 2 syncing audio: This is a different way of Editing multicam clips when you have audio as a separate file. I already have all my three clips in its own keyword collection for the dad's first look, the father has a mic and a shirt. I also have the selections ready to sync together. I'll right-click and select multicam clips. I'll name this father first look, multicam clip. The Video rate can be 23.98 frames per second. I'll select, Okay. I'll double-click my nucleus here in the browser. In the Multicam clip, I always do some house-cleaning. It's up to you. If you wanna do the same, I'll just make sure the audio and the bottom clip is selected. As I trim the edges of all three clips in the browser. I'll select all the clips and move them to the left. You can select which angle you want to view in the monitor angle. I'll click the Back button on the timeline. Select the clip in the browser and press W to insert in the Timeline. Now I want to make sure the audio is enabled the entire clip by clicking this button here. Select the audio angle. I'll click the Video Only button so I start editing the video clips. Press Spacebar to play the clip. Just from looking at this, I want to trim everything before the bright enters the frame. I'll go ahead and stop the play head here and trim everything before this. I'll go ahead and cut in-between angles. Yes. But you're too beautiful for you and your jacket. Alright, you get the idea from watching this, I'll see you on the next video. 12. Multicam 3 edit with Toast or speeches Camera Name: This is how I edit the Toast using multicam, but here's also the importance of giving your clips a name. I already organized my clips and it Toast category. Most of you are using a camera that doesn't have unlimited recording. So you may have to restart each Camera within the three-minute time limit. Right now, I'm showing you an example when these clips don't have a Camera Name. Over here, you'll see in this Multicam, there's a new camera angle for every clip. I don't want it to look like this, and I don't want to waste time adjusting all these clips and I'll go back and trash this multicam clip. All my clips are still here in the Toast category. I'll select one of the clips and go to the info inspector under Camera Name. I'll call this one safety KAM. Then select and copy this entire Name. I need to find the next clip from the same cameras. It's easy for me to find it by looking at the last two numbers in the clip name. The first clip ends with the number 17. So I'm looking for 18. I'll select that clip, go to Camera Name, then press Command V to paste it here. I'm looking for the next clip that ends with the number 19, and I'll paste the same name here. I'll say Multicam clips have their Camera Name. I'm going onto the next Camera, which is a close-up of the speaker. All selected and under Camera Name, I'll call this cam a. You can name it whatever you want. The last two digits here ends with 79. So I'm looking for the next clip that ends with at. I'll continue to paste the same Camera Name. I'll do the same for the following clips. We have one more camera angle and I'll name this can be I have one clip with my gimbal since the couple went into their first dance right after the Toast. I'll name this gimbal camera. All my clips have a Camera Name. I normally don't give the audio a Camera Name since this clip was recording the entire time. Now I'll select all the clips, then right-click, then select New multicam clip. I'll name this Toast Multicam flip. Angle assembly and angle clip ordering is left as automatic. Fame rate is 23.98 frames per second. And I'll select, Okay, my Toast Multicam clip is here in the browser. I'll double-click this and you can see inside it is much more organized. I have can be can be gimbal CAM, safety, Kim, and the audio has its own angle. Since my audio comes from one channel, I always select the audio, then go to audio inspector and under audio configuration, change it to dual mono so the sound can come from both the left and right speaker. I'll trim up the edges a bit and move the entire clip towards the left. I'll go back here in the timeline to the project. I'll select this multicam clip and press W to insert this into Timeline. Now that I have the multicam clip ready, I'm going to enable audio only so I can select the audio coming from the DJ booth only. Since I want to cut the video clips. Without cutting the audio, I'll select Video Only button and I can start cutting the video in the Timeline. I'm not sure why they asked me to come up here and I'm not sure why they asked me to come up here and speak tonight. If you know me and you know my family, normally they're telling me to keep quiet. We're gonna get started with the speeches tonight. This is the point of the evening when people come up and television. That's how I edit the Toast. That's also why it's important to give each angle a Camera Name 13. Adding markers: If you have seen many of my videos, you'll notice all the cuts are on pace with the beat of the music. I add these blue markers on each beat so it's easier for me to trim the clips and snap it into the beat. Before I usually start marketing beats, I changed the clip appearance here so the music WAV files are bigger and easier to see. You can select the display of the cliff. If you want the audio files more visible than the video, I want the audio to be more visible and I'll also adjust the clip height and the Timeline here. Now it's real simple. I just make sure that clip is selected. Then I press M on the keyboard to add the marker. Remember it's important to make sure you have the audio clip selected so you're not adding markers to the video clips. That's about it. I already completed most of it for you to see how it's going to overall look on my whole Timeline. You can see most of the beats already have markers across the whole Timeline. Then I can finish the rest of these markers here at the end. So explaining this was pretty simple, but the whole process will take a bit of time. If I accidentally added a marker in the wrong place, I can easily press Command Z to undo 14. Exporting: Here's how you'll export the footage. You click the Share button here on the top right. You just need to make sure you have the project selected so it can export everything in this Timeline. I have all these options in the drop-down menu. If you want to include one click on Add Destination, you can drag one of these export options to the drop-down over here. If you don't have the default export option, I'll go ahead and drag that in here. I already have the default export options. We'll close this window. I'll click the Share button and go to export file. Under the Info tab, you can change the name of the file. You'll also see the settings, how it will be exported. The resolution and frame rate are listed here. Under the Settings tab. You can make adjustments how you want it, export it. You'll see here that under format, it's showing web hosting. On the bottom right of this window. It'll show you what's the file format and the size of the file. I'll switch to computer so you can see that the estimated file size will change. The format will be an MP4. Mp4 is very common for most devices, including PC computers. And this is what I mostly use to deliver the video of to a client. You could also use the master file, which is going to be a heavy file size and doesn't compress the quality. This button here will show you the different devices this file can play. As you can see, PC is not checked. This is why I usually don't use MOV files. I prefer MP4 files since it usually plays fine on PC computers. This is good for me. So when you're ready, you can press the Next button. You'll find the finished folder and save it in there. It'll show your progress in the background task here on the left. And you just wait until it's done exporting. I just covered all the basics to help you get comfortable with Final Cut Pro ten. If you want to get a more in-depth lesson and get an idea how I create my teasers, highlights, and documentary edits. Feel free to reach out about the full course as I'll be going over much more focused. See you there soon. 15. Color Correct CLog: This is a basic way to color grade C, log footage. Select the clip, go to your color inspector. In the drop down menu, select color wheels. The left side of each wheel allows you to adjust saturation. The right side changes brightness. I'll bring the saturation up on the global color wheel to adjust the whole image. I'll bring the shadows, brightness down. The highlights brightness up. You can now see a significant difference in the image. 16. Digital Zoom: A digital zoom can increase or decrease the scale of the frame. With your clip selected, make sure the playhead is in the beginning of the clip. Add a key frame in the beginning and set your scale. Then move the playhead towards the end. Increase the scale. It will automatically add another key frame for you. 17. Match color wide: This is how you match colors in post from two different cameras. Make sure the clip is selected. Click the drop down menu next to the enhancement options, and select Match Color with the clip still selected. You'll now select the clip you want to match, and select Apply Match. 18. Speed ramp course: This is how you speed, ramp, move the playhead to the area you want the speed to change. Press to select your outpoint. We will change the speed with everything selected in the beginning of this clip. Choose Clip retiming options, go to Fast, and you can pick any of these options to speed up the clip. This is optional, but I usually remove the speed transition since I like the speed to change abruptly. When you click and drag in between transitions, you can change the speed of the clip. You can click on either the green or the purple bar above the clip. To select a specific section of the clip, click the disclosure triangle to open the retiming options. I'll select custom. Since this was filmed at 60 frames per second, the project is 23.98 frames per second. I'm setting the speed at 40% Press Enter, and now you can see the clip speed ramp abruptly from fast to slow motion. 19. Outro: Alright, now that we're coming to an and go ahead and play with Final Cut Pro, start using it on your own projects, get familiar with it, and come back to these videos as a reference if you have any questions, once again, I'll put my social media right below. You can send me a message and I'll be able to help you anyway. I can, I know in the beginning if you're new to Final Cut Pro, using that magnetic timeline does take some time to get used to. But after you learn how to work with it, you're going to begin to love it and you're going to see how fast you're editing workflow is going to be. So I'll be right here. Feel free to message me and that's about it. I hope you enjoyed the course. Have a good one?