Final Cut Pro X Master Course

1. Introduction to the Course: Welcome to the final cut Pro 10 full Force Provided to you by Studio X. This course is perfect for anyone who has never edited before or anyone coming from different editing Softwares like Adobe Premiere Pro I Movie or any other software. This course will cover different topics, starting from user interface. Lay out windows, how to import files, how to create projects, organizing things but keywords as well as different editing techniques, color grading and how to export your files. So let's get started. The first video will be down below. 2. UI and Tools: Welcome to the first video in this final cut pro 10 course. It covers the user interface and the different tools that come with final cuts. So let's get started. So to get started first, you need to launch the final cut pro application. You can either do that straight from the dock if you have it in your doc, or you can go to Finder, go into your applications and you should find final cut pro. I've renamed it to Final Cut Pro X. You could just double click on it, and it should open right up. Uh, it will load the last project that yet open, which for me was just the course. I will go and show you how to create events, projects and libraries. Later, in the second video here, I'm just covering the user interface, and I will be using this test project to kind of show you all the different little things that final cut has to offer. So the way final cut pro works compared to premier and other Softwares is you have a library which keeps all of your events and projects and source files. Then you have events as you can see here, which contain different projects inside, and you have the project and the files related to the events inside of that event. You can preview your different clips in this list format that I usually use, where you can look at it in a filmstrip. You filmstrip view allows you to see more frames of each file but the list view. But you see more information like the time codes when the file was created, you're gonna sign different camera angles, and you can customize all of these options by right clicking on the property and choosing whether you want to see the video frame, right file type Codex and many other options. The way to show and hide these windows are up here. So this is your media browser window. This is your settings window for the clips. These are your transitions, your effects. This lets you zoom in and zoom out out of the timeline, as well as making the clips themselves bigger in the timeline, as well as showing different options depending on your project. These are the different ways to see the clips. I typically work in the standard mode. This tool allows you to snap. So if you cut different things and you're moving them, it just helps you snapped, um, to where the cuts are. This lets you solo the items, and a shortcut to hide different items is the on the keyboard for visibility. This lets you skim through audio, so when you're moving your mouse, you'll be able to hear the sound that's down on the audio tracks, and this button allows you to skim on the video. So if you don't have the video enabled, you won't be able to do the sound. But you can turn off the sound if you don't want to get distracted by the sound playing when you're skimming through the video, the tools up here show you the video effects and settings so you can stabilize your clips. Get rid of the rolling shutter as well as scale them, move them, crop them left and right, change blending modes and a pass ity. Then you have the color correction time, which lets you dio different color correction to the clip. But I use a different plug in to do Michael or correction. Then there's the sound settings where you can apply different sound effects from the effects tab, as well as just doing normal audio enhancements, panning the sound left and right, as well as changing the sound from Del Mono stereo and reversed area. And then just the information tab that just gives you the information about the clip that is in your timeline, as well as whether the clip is optimized or if it's a proxy, you will cover all of these things in the next video. One of the biggest benefits of using Final Cut is its ability to background runner. So to show you how that works, I'm just going to take this artifact effect, throw it on this clip, and I'm gonna click this check box over here, which is going to show you the different background tests that are happening. So as you can see, if I'm moving my mouse and I'm doing things to the project, it's not background rendering anything. But A soon as I'm gonna walk away from a computer and get a coffee or something and just stop moving my mouse, you will see that it starts rendering the clip, so that is really strong for times when you're leaving your desk and you just forget to hit Render where you just forget that you have clips that you need to render were optimized or new proxies. You can just forget about it because final cut will do that in the background for you. So that is one of the strongest things in final cut compared to other editing software. To get to your user preferences, all you have to do is hit final cut, pro choose preferences, and it will take you to the different preferences inside a final cut, which is the way you want to display the time code. If you have any dialogue. Warnings in the editing is where you can enable different default fade durations as well as when you're dropping and still images. So this setting is really great if you shot a time lapse, so you want to just drop in all of your photos all at once, and you can set you know, the duration to be 0.5 seconds. That way, all of your clips are playing as a video, and you don't even have to put your clips into any other software. Opening them is an image sequence, an after effect or anything like that. You could do that straight up in final cut just by changing the editing duration of the still images. Then you can go to the playback top, which is where the background render settings were hiding, so you can change how long the computer waits for your input before it starts to background render as well as if you want to be reminded when your playback frames drop or anything like that. But these air the settings that I tend to use, as well as no pre roll or post roll because that just makes it feel Laghi for me. When I'm playing clips, you can choose the color for your player background. I usually go with black. You can choose your import settings whether you want to leave your files in place. When you import them as well as if you want to assign any keywords that are already connected to the files as well as any other settings, you can find them in here, and then your export destinations can be found in this destination step. Another interesting thing is that you can upload videos straight to YouTube out of final cut pro All you have to do is choose your log in settings and you're good to go now that you learned the user interface and the different tools that work inside a final cut. Let's go ahead and learn how to create project, make events and import your media and sort them by keywords so that video is gonna be down below. 3. Project Setup and Media Import: welcome to the second video in the spinal cut Proton Master course. And here you will be covering creating libraries, events and projects as well as importing media, categorizing them by keywords and a leading library generated files. So let's get into it. Now that you're in final cut, first thing we need to do is create a library. You can do that by going to file new library. What a library does is keeps all of the files like import as well as render cash and thumbnail previews, and any optimized and proxy media keeps it all in that folder. So in this case, I will go ahead and go to a hard drive. I will make a new folder and I will call this a new project January 2nd, and I will create the holder and I will call this january 2nd just for this. So I will it save so And if you if you navigate to your finder and go do this folder, you will see that there is a new final cut library named January 2nd. And if you're right, click and show package options. It will have everything that is related to final cut and once you start dropping in files and all that sort of stuff, everything will be stored inside of this. So that's basically what the library does. Also, by default, it creates a new event for you. With today's date. I usually like creating my own event with title. So for this I'm gonna call it in work teams Media tutorial Because we will be importing some media and I will uncheck create new project because you will do that by hand. So let's so now you can see you. You have another event in here, and what that does is each event has its own media and project. So if you're doing a film, you could separate each event into scenes. You're not mixing around all over the footage all in one place, which could be really distracting. And you'll just be wasting your time looking at files that you don't necessarily need at that time. Let's go back to importing editorial and I will make a new project and I will call this new media and you can see that if you go to custom settings, you can really choose all of the different things. But I usually use automatic settings and I drag in the clip that I will import into the project and that will choose the settings that the quick shot. So I will just hit, OK, and now you can see that you have a new project in the event. If it looks different for you, you might be looking at it differently. I covered this in the Victoria Will just before this video. So if you just skipped right through it, maybe you should go back because getting used to the user interface of Final Cut could take some time if you're coming from software like me, a pro, Sony Vega's or anything like that. So I like working in this list view because I get to see all this information. So now that we have a project and you created the library where all the positive restored and you made the event, now it's time to import footage. You can do that by going to file import media where you can do it with this little download button here which basically imports footage. So if you click on that, it will open up this media important window and you can choose the location from where to import your files. I would be importing some parts from a hard drive from a music video that I shot right here on acid corn. And I'm just gonna go to calling me, which is the name of the song. And there's a bunch of different things here, and I will just choose three clips for the sake of this tutorial and you can see you can leave files in place. So if you're working off of the same hard drive where your event is, I would suggest leaving the files in place. That way, you're not duplicating files all the time. And in this case, you know, I would use an extra 12 gigabytes for no reason. Just because of duplicate the piles if I copied them to the library. So I don't eat that. If you add any tags in Finder to the files themselves, you could import keywords. I usually never do it and find her. I do it and final cut itself, so I will keep those unchecked. What's really great about Final cut is you can analyze and fix and Transcoder files all before importing, so you can see here you can create optimized media as well a screening proxy Media, which is smaller sized files that are easier to work with. If your computer isn't extremely fast and you can't let's say, work with raw four K files on your computer. If you're just heading off a Mac book or something, you just hit. Create proxy media, and it will create smaller files that you'll be able to play back a lot faster in the edit . And then, when you're exporting it will use the actual original media when it's exporting so that you have a high quality project. One of the great things is find people. So let's say you're shooting an interview and there's tons of different B roll and things like that. You can choose Find people, and it will create a smart collection. After analyzing your files, it takes some time, but it's ah, it's a great time saver if you're an editor and you're just getting footage and you weren't on set so you don't really know which files, house interviews or people talking or people in the shot. So this kind of helps organized your footage automatically. You don't really have to do anything for it, Which is great analyzing fix audio problems. You could do that during import as well as well as all of these. But I usually like doing them by hand because, you know, if you had balance color and then it turns out you don't really like the way it auto balanced it for you, you would have to go back and change it. So usually I do it by hand to the clips themselves, and I will show you how to do that after So I will unchecked find people because all of these shots have guy in it. And so these air the settings they typically use when I'm importing files and I usually check the close window after starting import because I typically done importing my files after I select them by hand from here. So I'm just gonna hit imports elected and will start importing the files in. Okay, so all of my files were imported, and you can see that there's no tasks left because there's a little check mark over here, and if you click on it, it will give you all the background tasks that are being worked on for the project. So let's take one of the clips here. I will choose this one, and I will select arrange for for the file to import it. So I kind of like this shot here with the really blurry lights. So I will hit I on the keyboard to set a in point, and I would just play it through. Let's say this is good and I will choose Oh for out. And I could just take this clip and drag it into the project, and it already makes it with the automatic settings for the same properties that this file So you can zoom in in the timeline by hitting command plus and zoom in by hitting command minus. You can also use the track bad or the mouse to zoom in. If you forgot to import a file, you can also import by dragging and dropping a blip in, so I will show you how to do that right now. So let's say if you don't have clipped 31 which I would want to throw in here and drag it here, and it will just throw the clip in here. So this is just a mural footage over taxi going by before I get heavily into my edit. I usually organized things by keywords, so you can do that by getting the key button and you construct putting in keywords for the clip that you selected. So we're here. I can put in a taxi because I would use that a lot. And as you can see, as soon as you sign a keyword, there's a blue line that comes up on top to clip, which shows that you have keywords applied to taxi many people and night. He seems like a pretty good keywords for this clip. And for over here, I can put into words like ass off because that's his name. I can put an interior as basically all I need for this for this shot of him trying to climb , uh, this phone booth for a music video shot. Maybe I'll put the keywords exterior and night. Now you can see if you go to your event, you can see all of the key words that were applied. So when you click on him, it will show you the clips that were a sign so you can see night be assigned to clips. So you get to find them right here. Another great thing about keywords. You can apply them to certain parts, so let's go and find a part where the taxi drive by. So there's a shot where taxi goes by him. So I put in and out again with I and O on the keyboard, and I can put in keywords and type in taxi. You get you for taxi. Just that selection shows up. So if you have really long clips like especially for music videos, where you shoot long takes dissing the audio, it's really helpful to be organizing things. Keyword. Now, if you decide to play this file and it ends up being too big or too large, you can work with proxies even after importing our footage. And you could do that by right clicking, going to trance code media. And there's a button to create proxy. So let's hit. Okay, go into the background tasks, open this little window so that you can see the progress. So now that 20 years went by and you're almost dying of old age after all of your files, have a proxy. Let's take a look and see how big the files for now. So the original file that view were proxy ING was number 16 and it was 4.44 gigabytes. And let's go and take a look at the new proxy. New file is only 1.29 So about 1/3 of size. So because this file is a lot lighter and it's made with a compression that's really easy for final cut to handle, you can easily work with this file, and it's gonna be super easy. You don't even need to re imported or do anything again. All you need to do is go to view and the type of media that you're working with. You're gonna truth proxy. So because this file File 15 was not property, it shows up as red with mixed missing proxy. But now, in 16 I'm gonna take this in, take this out, throw this violin, and you can see super easy to handle. You can really work smoothly with this file without any problems. If you need to be searching for any files you imported because you have a ton eclipse, you can just hit the little search button here, and you can search for files that contain any specific letters or numbers in its entire name. So after working with all this footage and exporting your project and finishing with it, proxies, optimized media and other generated files can take up a lot of space on the computer. So well, you can do is click on the library here, go to event, go to file, delete generated library files and you can check delete rendered files. All delete optimized media and elite proxy media, then hit OK and that will empty out a lot of your data. So you can see right now if you only have 1.3 gigabytes, which is that one proxy video that we have. Okay, we'll take a little bit. And once you go back and take a look at the properties now, Tony, 4.6 megabytes. So when you're working with really, really big files, you can take up 205 102 terabytes and it's all like, proxy footed proxy files, optimized videos. So once you're done with it, you can just delete all the generated files. And if you're ever going back to the project, all you would have to do is just optimize everything again if you're ever going back to it to make any changes, which could take up some time, but it's worth saving all of the space on your computer. So now we have everything ready. So let's go and just look at the original media because we deleted all of the generator files and you're good to go if anything ever goes wrong in your project. Final cut closes, your computer shuts down and you can't open your project or library. You can always open it up from the back up. You can do that, but going to file open library from back up and you can choose the date from went to restore it because he just started this project today. You can see that this is the only option that we have. But if you're working multiple days, multiple weeks or months on project, you'll be able to restore from a lot of different points. Drop the progress of your video. So that is all. We're setting up a project and importing media. So now that you learn how to set up a project and import media, the next video down below is going to cover how to do some basic editing things like titles and lower thirds navigating the timeline, skimming versus the play, head safe zones and some basic volume controls, So I'll see you in the next one. 4. Basic Editing: Welcome to the third video in this final cut pro 10 master course. And hear of you will be learning how to do some basic editing things like titles and lower thirds navigating the timeline, skimming versus the play, head safe zones and basic volume control. So let's get into it. First, let's see what the differences between the play head and the skimming tool. So the play head is the actual line with the marker on top, and the play had is just where your cursor is. When you're scrolling through the video, you can toggle whether you want to be skimming through the sound as well over here, and the shortcut to toggle the skimming in general is s. So, as you can see now, when I move the mouse, it is not skimming around to turn off snapping. You can hit 10 on the keyboard. That way, when you're taking and moving clips, they're not snapping to any part of the video. If you hit and you can see that it snaps to where the cuts are, as well as where your play head is. Another good shortcut to know is the for the blade tool that way you can cut your videos A to go back for cursor. Now let's get into the titles. So I difficulty use basic titles as well as Basic Lower Third. So let's throw in a basic title to add it. The title. You have to go into your settings right here, and you can choose the name for this. I will use the name of the song, and you can see there's different parameters as well as color, correction and in general. So let me let me make the text a little bit bigger. If you scroll down, you'll see that there's an option for job Shadow. Maybe at that show for more options. I'm just going to add a bigger distance, blur it slightly, and now it should be pretty readable. Another big thing in Final Cut is compounding clips. So let me take two of these clips, right click and choose new compound clip, and then you call this with title. Let's also show the safe zones, so let's go to view overlays, show title and action safe zones. So my title is fitting right into that zone. Obviously, it's not super huge, so that is good to go, and the purpose for this compound clip is so that we can fade the text together with, the singer says. You can see it comes in together, and then you could go into the compound clip itself, shorten it and the transition. So let's go back and you can navigate into your compound clips from the actual event. Here. You can see they'll be titled whatever you need. So now you can see that the title comes on together with the singer and disappears. That is obviously not the title that I used in the actual music video, but this is just a example, so you can see how calm pounding flips work. Also, some basic audio adjustments for volume. You can see if you just press on the volume here, you can grab this line and lets you adjust the volume of the track. You can go either up to 12 extra decibels, or you can go to negative infinity to turn off the track fully. You can also click on the on the clip, go into the sound top and adjust the volume control there as well. Now that we are done learning the basic editing pools Let's get into some advanced things like multi camera editing that are going to save you a lot of time. That is gonna be in the next video down below. 5. Sync & MultiCam: Welcome to the fourth video in this final cut pro 10 master course where we're going to cover multi camera editing as well a sinking audio and video. Let's get into it first, let's see how to sync sound with video. So here you can see of a video where I talked to the camera and I was wearing a laugh. Mike, as you can see over here and here's the sound from the lab make. So in order to sink the sound and the video together, you can just hold shift, select both clips, right Click goto synchronize clips. You can give it a name. I'm just gonna call it C 0046 which is the name of the video synchronize clip. This is the event where it's going to save that combined clip, and I will be using audio for synchronization. I will use the automatic settings that the original video was shot in, so I would just hit. Okay, it will take a little bit and it will create the synchronized clip over here so you can see I started recording the sound earlier than the video. So you get some extra space and then the video and the sound or sink together. I don't want to be using the sound from the camera, so I will just take the volume and drop it down to negative infinity. So now we're only listening to the sound that is coming from the lab. Mike. Now the lab Mike Records sounded motto. So I will go to jail mono, and it will give me 22 tracks for left and right. And you can see one of the tracks is empty, so I would just disable it. So now I have a stereotype act with the same mono sound in both years. So that is good for now. And we have the synchronized clip here. So I will go to my sink project, take my clip and you can tell that they're sink because it has the little link and you will just take it dragon into cop. And I could just the first part of the video. And there you go. So you can work with your synchronized clip with the audio that was sink together with the video. Now let's move on to multi camera editing. So for this project, I have this video of a model doing yoga in. This was shot from three cameras. So you can see that this was shot from a GoPro. This was shot from Sony a seven s tooth on a tripod and this was shot from a Sunni A a seven art to on a gimbal attached together with. In order to combine all of these videos together, you would need to hit shift, select those three clips, right, click and choose new multi cam clip. I will call this yoga multi cam and hit OK, and I will use again automatic settings for video which is four k and use the audio for synchronization and I would just hit. Okay, you will take a little bit, especially that the video is about eight minutes long. It's going to synchronize the clip together so you can see that It says it doesn't have enough space to optimize the clips, Which is fine. For the sake of this tutorial, you're gonna watch back the second part if you forget how to optimize media. So here you can see it's a multi camera clip because you can see the four little windows. So if you hoping that up you get to see that there is three video tracks and they're all sink together with the video. So in order to edit multi cameras you don't edit inside of this multi camera clip, you actually drag it into project. So I have a project called the Multi Cam Here, and I will take this will take hammer video. Drop it in here. I would just cut the first section out just cause it's the intro. Well, just crops. The video here just we construct from here, and the way I edit multi camera video is I hide the browser window. I hide the settings window and I go into view show angles. So now you can see that you could see all of the angles at the same time. So what you can do is you can play through the video and let's say I want to switch to a different view. You just click on the view that you want to choose, and it automatically cuts your video and starts playing it from the other view. So you just continue playing it. Throw on, let's say over here, I want to switch to this camera. You just click on it, and you can see it switches to the other. So it's really easy to edit and cut videos that are done with multiple with multiple cameras using this method, you can also use keyboard shortcuts to be switching between cameras. So let's say here I want to switch to camera one. You could just hit one on the keyboard. You continue playing. Let's say I want to switch to Camera two. Here you can get to on the keyboard and let's say here I want to switch to Camera three. You can hit three on the keyboard, so each number corresponds to the camera number. So this is 123 And if you had more cameras before, as well as other cameras, you can choose how many angles. Let's say you recorded a race and he had five GoPro cameras inside of the car as well is attached camera and a lot of other things, and you wanted to add it that all together really quickly. You could use this multi camera options to edit multi camera videos really easy, and then just play the video with optimized proxy media and then used the keyboard to cut to the shots that you want to be using. Now that you learned how to edit with multiple cameras and sync audio with video, let's move on to some hidden tools. That video is down below.