Learn to Edit Video in 3 Days with Final Cut Pro

1. Introduction: Welcome to the Final Cut Pro Essentials course. This completely beginner friendly course will give you all the skills you need to edit a video from start to finish. I just 1 hour. Once you've completed this course, you'll be able to confidently edit using Final Cut Pro like a P. You'll understand how to use the most important tools, how to create a story, how to add effects, transitions, tech, sound effects, music and a whole lot more. This means you'll be able to produce super high quality videos that really stand out. Hi. My name is doctor repert. And I've spent over 30 years developing the most effective ways to teach with technology. Along with Josh who has worked in post production for over ten years, we have created some of the top courses in video editing. As mentioned, this course is completely beginner friend. Meaning we will guide you step by step from importing your media into final Capro to editing your footage, and then exporting it to share it with the world. Now, we've all been there drawn in by a lengthy online course. Left disappointed and confused. Just a few lectures, and that's not our style. This course is designed to be engaging and accessible. Instead of drudging through endless slides, we aim to fuel your passion for video editing and equip you with the skill for life. We won't just make you adept at Final Cut Pro, we'll teach you fundamental video editing skills that translate to any platform. So if you're a complete beginner and are ready to start your journey as a video editor, using a professional editing program. This is certainly the course for you. In 1 hour, you'll learn the skills to become a confident video editor with your own professionally edited project to show for it. But not only will you experience the magic of Final Cut Pro. You'll get to do this by developing a really fun project. So let's have a quick look at what we'll be doing. First, we'll make sure you understand the interface. After this, we'll bring you through the editing workflow, which starts with creating our libraries, events, and projects, and then importing, organizing our media, followed by building up a story, moving clips around, moving bad takes in excess media. And then we'll focus on how we can bring those boring sequence clips to life with effects, transitions, connected clips, sound design, texts. And a whole lot more. And finally, we'll export your project to the real world. Once you've completed this project, you'll be able to use these same skills to create professional quality videos for everything from YouTube channels to online courses to home movies, and more. So, let's not waste another minute. Let's get your learning journey started now. 2. Exploring the Interface: It's time for action and learning. So, if you haven't done so already, open final CP pro. Okay. Yeah, we are inside of the program. Now, if this is your first time opening final Cp, it should look something like this, not that much to see yet, but soon, you're going to see some really amazing things. Now, before we do anything, let us first get you comfortable with this space. And don't worry if some things don't immediately make sense because as we work through the course, you'll gain a complete understanding. So right in the middle, you will see your preview window, and this is where you'll see your media while you're editing it. And this is where most of the action is going to happen. Then right to the left of you'll see two rectangular gray boxes. This is where your library events, projects media will be found. It's basically where you'll find your footage. And if you're too sure what libraries and events and projects, I don't worry because we will also be covering that in more detail in a future lecture. Then just above this, you'll see a few buttons. Now, these are for importing different types of media like sound effects or music. And finally, the third button is for adding text objects and much more as you're going as soon discover. Now, to the exciting area, looking down at the bottom, you'll see a large rectangular area, and this is your timeline, and this is where most of the editing is going to happen. Then quickly looking at the right hand side, and specifically these last two buttons. Here's where you access different effects that you can apply to your footage like 50s TV or aged film and lots more. Now, the last button on the far right is for transitions. Now, there's a really powerful effect, which we'll use to make cuts between scenes look like really super smooth. And finally, the top right corner has the inspector. And as the name implies, this is where you can find out more about your media, as well as adjust different effects and titles, et cetera. Now, your final cut pro work space is very customizable. And you can hide the timeline or the inspector simply by kicking one of these buttons up here and it gives you a much more focused view. Now, also, if you move your mouse between the areas, you can adjust the size of the spaces. Right. It's all about making it right just for you. So that's the final cut pro environment. It's pretty simple and you'll soon be really comfortable with it. But just take a couple of minutes just to play around with it so you can get comfortable in the space as we move forward. 3. Making sense of Libraries, Events, and Projects: Before we leap into the fun stuff, there is one more thing we need to cover libraries. But we're going to keep a children sweet. In Final Cut Pro, libraries store our projects, events, and media. And knowing how to organize your final cut pro, content can save you a lot of time in the long run. So lean in and focus for a moment while we imagine your final cut pro library in terms of an actual library. Now, just like a real library that has shelves that organize books into different categories, so Final Cut Pro has events that organize projects and media into different categories. Now, depending on how big your project is, we'll determine what you store in your event. So, for example, let's say you have a YouTube channel with five minute videos, In this situation, for each video you create, you will store all your media and your project under that single event, and this is what you'll do most of the time. However, if you're working on a big project like a movie or a documentary, you would use your events to store media of a specific type, such as music media or B role media, which would make it easier to find. But enough talking, let's see this in action. Here you look at a running course that we created in Final CA project so you can get an idea. You can see there are multiple events in the course with names like 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, et cetera. And these names correspond with the section and lesson numbers, much like this course as sections and lessons. In an event, we'll have a single project, which is a lesson and all the media that is associated with that project, such as the main footage, B role, external audio, stock footage, and all that sort of thing. Now, this means we don't need to search around for these clips when it's time to edit. When we finished filming the course, we added and organized all the media into their corresponding events, and so had quick access to all the footage when we need it. Right? That's a brief overview of final Caps, libraries, and events and projects. As you use it more, you'll get more and more familiar with it. Now, one thing really important if you stay organized, future you will really think current. So be organized from the beginning. 4. Creating your Libraries, Events, and Projects: Enough talk. Let's get going with our project. To make a space for this project, we're going to create a new library. Now, to create a new library, all you need to do is go to the top left and click File, then then library. Now, we'll name our library projects. As we'll use this library to work on different projects. Yes, I know it's not too creative, but when it comes to naming things, try and say what it is, so you don't confuse because save your creativity for editing. Click Save and your new library should be created. Now, at the moment, there isn't much to see besides a folder Cord Smart collections, and then generated event, which is named after the current date. Your next step is to create a new event. So simply right click the library and select a new event and call it Fido. Now to create a new project in our event, we right click the event and select new project. And again, we also call this Fido. And that's all there is to do for now. Quite simply, we've created a library, and then we created a new event and a corresponding project. So now we're ready. We've essentially have the capsule or the housing that is ready for our media. And in the next lesson, we'll look at downloading and importing media so that you can follow along and join the exciting process, which is video editing. 5. Getting your Assets Bundle: It's time to talk about the assets bundle. Now, this is the media content that you can use to not only follow along as you do the course, but also use in your own projects too. The assets bundle includes videos music and our complete fighter project. So you can see the detail of every edit and effect. And it's also got lots of additional media that we haven't used so that you can get really creative and make your own videos. Now, check out the details below on how to download the assets bundle so that you can follow along as we build our project together. 6. Importing your media: Hopefully, you've now downloaded the media from the assets bundle. If you haven't, then, please check out the previous lesson, and just contact us if you have any issues. It's now time to import our media so we can start working on our project. Now, the easiest and most simple way to do this is by simply dragging and dropping from Finder. So going to our finder, we can drag the folder over to the Finder event and drop it. Now you should have the phyto media imported. And if you click on the event, you should see all the media dragged over as well as the phyto project. So that's importing media. There are other ways of doing it, but this is by far the fastest and easiest. With that, we have everything we need, and in the next lesson, we'll get going with our brand new project. Okay, so your turn, import the media that we've provided you so that you can then follow along with the next lesson. 7. Adding media to your timeline: With the basics covered, we are ready to get to the more interesting stuff. Now, by now, you should have imported the Pido media into your final cut pro project so that you can follow along. So let's begin by taking some of our clips and start working with them. To begin the editing process, all you need to do is move over to the project you want to work on. So in our case, we're going to work on the Fido project. If you double click on it, you'll see it opens up the workspace for our Fido project. And now, all we need to do is drag the media we want down to the timeline. As simple as that. We can grab another clip and bring it over the timeline by doing the same thing, drag it and drop it. And as you drop the media, you start building your timeline. And this is where the magic is going to happen where your footage gets put together as you start creating your video. Now, by default, Final Cut Pro will display your footage like this. And this can be useful to visualize your footage. However, it becomes impossible when you have a lot of media. So instead, if you click this button at the top, you'll see it changes how the clips are displayed. When you click on one of your clips, Final Cut Pro will bring up a preview window. If you move your mouse over this area, you can scrub through the selected video. And this gives you a quick and easy way to look at your footage to make sure you're selecting the correct clip. If you only need a selected part from a clip, all you need to do is click and drag and then move the selected footage down to the timeline. Now, there are a few clips on our time line, we can simply hit the space bar. Take it and watch it play. Obviously, this is a first rough cut of our final cut pro video, but it just shows how easy it is to combine clips together. Now, there are a lot more exciting things that we can do with our media as we transform it into our final movie. But for now, just spend a little bit of time getting used to moving clips down to the timeline area. 8. The Simple Six Step Workflow: It's time to let the magic begin. Now, in this lesson, we're going to look at how we can transform what is essentially nothing into our first rough draft of this id project. But first, we'll outline a simple six step editing workflow that will take you from nothing to completed video. This simple workflow is a six step process. The first step is creating your library and event, so you are properly organized when it is time to import your media. The second step is importing your media into your event, and this is where we are at the moment. The third step is building your first draft, which we will look at next, but it essentially means that it's forming a rough draft of your final video by importing what you want down onto the timeline. The fourth step is to arrange your clips in an order that makes sense, and typically, it means it's got to start, a middle and an end. At this stage, you also trim off any access media and bad takes. Once you have a rough draft which you're happy with, the fifth step involves adding different effects, transitions, and other edits that will bring your video to life. And finally, the last step is where you export your project and share it with the well. Now as you said, this is just a basic editing workflow, but it's a useful guide to follow to ensure you are as efficient as possible. Now, the good news you've already completed step one and step two. So now we need to do step three and build our rough draft of this project. 9. Setting up your first draft: Right, let's now get down to building your draft project. If you have imported the folder directly to your final cut pro event, you'll notice that under the event is this small arrow. If you click here, you'll see these little icons that look like keys. And this is Final Cut pros way of organizing folders. As you can see, we have our B role, our main camera, our music and stock sound effects. This gives us the ability to easily pick our media based on its type. As we are still in step three, which is building our first project, we can move over to the main camera and start building. Now, we encourage you to be as creative here and create your own sequence of clips, or you can just follow us if you like. Moving over to the main camera here, I will drag this first clip onto my timeline as this is our intro. Now, after this, I'm going to put some clips of me on boxing fighter like these ones. And after this, I will have to take some of these clips of the dogs of them playing in the garden. And then the next part, I want to show clips of me reviewing fighter, which is the main part. And finally, I want my tro. Now, during this course, we'll teach you all the skills necessary to create a great project from start to end. However, we are not going to be showing us importing every clip to the timeline or adding every effect, because if we did that, it wouldn't be an hour. Rather, we'll focus on the most important skills so that by the end you can create amazing videos. Also, if you haven't already, you can check out our complete project in the course resources to see everything we did. Right. That said, using the magic of editing, in a matter of seconds, I'm going to finish my first draft. And then you have it. My very first rough cut is done. Now it's your chance to do the same. 10. Select & Trim Tools: Well, I hope you created an interesting sequence of clips because in this lesson, we're going to be looking at the tools you can use to edit these clips. This lesson is kind of like opening up a toolbox for the first time and discovering what each tool can do. So let's take a look at Final Cut Pro amazing toolbox of tools. Let's take a look at the sequence of clips. It is the first few scenes of our final project, essentially the intro. As you can see, I have these clips here on the timeline. Now, these clips are completely unedited in our full length. So let's see how we can use our tools to edit these clips. Firstly, one of the quickest ways to trim down a clip is simply by moving your mouse to the end of the clip here, you'll see this pointer appearing. Next, simply by dragging, you can shorten the clip from either side. This is very handy if you find a clip is taking too much time in your video. In the same way, you can extend a clips duration by dragging it in the opposite direction, but obviously, this will only work for already shortened clips. Now, if you look at the tool bar just above the timeline where your clips are, you will see an arrow looking pointer. Click this, and it opens up a drop down menu. Here you can select different tools. The first one is the select tool, and we already have this one selected. We've selected select. The select tool is what you'll be using most of the time. It's your sort of general Jack of all trades tool. However, if you want to perform more specialized operations, there are other tools which can help us get certain jobs done much faster. The second tool is the Trim tool. Click Trim you'll notice that your point in no changes from an arrow to the trim icon. So let's see what we can do with this tool. You know how we shorten this clip in the beginning by dragging the end of it? Now, I suppose we don't want to change the duration of the clip. Now, we want to just start and end at a different position within the clip. We can change the part of the clip we are using by simply moving the trim tool over the clip and then click and drag left or right. Here, you'll notice that the media inside the clip is changing, but the actual duration of the clip is staying the same. The trim tool is really handy when changing a clip that might mess with other media in your timeline, and we will still see how this can happen in a later lesson. What you can also do with the trim tool is move it in between two clips and easily change both clips duration while keeping the total duration the same. You can see when I drag the tool to the right, it shows more of this clip and less of the other. And when I move it to the left, it does the opposite. 11. Position & Range Tools: The next tool is position. But before we discuss what this tool does, we need to talk about final cut pros, magnetic timelines. Let me show you what this means. If I delete this clip from the timeline, you'll notice that the other clips automatically jump in to fill the gap, sort of kind of like a magnet. This effect generally makes editing easier, but in some scenarios, it can really be annoying, especially if you don't want your whole timeline to change just because of one clip being removed. If that is the case, then the tool you want to use is the position tool. Don't forget. If you make a mistake, you can easily undo what you've done by pressing commands head. We can bring back the clip we just deleted. Now, using the select tool, if we try to move this clip above the next one, you can see how the one to the right immediately jumps into its place. And this subsequently affects the timeline as the whole the clips after that shuffle over. However, if we select the position tool, we can now do the same thing, and here you'll notice that the magnet effect is not happening. Instead, a gap is created, which is essentially a blank clip that final cut pro generates. But now you can see that the timeline as a whole is unaffected. What we can also do with the position tool is move one clip inside another and we'll simply displace the area of the selected clip, as you can see here. And this is really useful when the timeline is sizable. The next tool is range selection. And can you guess what it does from the name? Well, remember in the other lesson where we could easily select and move a range of video to the timeline simply by clicking and dragging. Well, if you try to do the same thing in the timeline, you'll notice all that happens is the clip just moves. So, how do we select a portion of the clip that we want to cut or copy? And you guessed, the range selection tool. With the range selection tool chosen. You'll notice your point changes to indicate this. Now, if we click and drag, you'll see now that you can select a range from within the clip, which you can copy by simply pressing command or cut by pressing Command X and paste elsewhere by pressing Command V. You can also select a range that spans multiple clips like this. And that brings us to the blade. Probably the single most important tool after the selector. And you undoubtedly find yourself using this tool a lot. So let's see what all the hype is about. So, selecting the blade tool, you'll see your pointer is ready to cut as a change into a pair of scissors. Let's see what it does. That you have it. Simple yet elegant. And as you can see, it cuts clips, it's like a blade or a pair of scissors. And you'll notice a fresh cut is indicated by the dotted line. It basically means you made it cut but did nothing with it. If however you crop the clip a little, the dotted lines disappear. Now, the blade tool is a quick way to organize your clips in the timeline and discard unwanted extra media. So, for example, if I thought this clip was way too long, I could simply cut and delete the excess. Or if I found the section in the middle of the clip was not needed, I can cut in between and remove this middle piece like this. Yeah, much better. Hopefully you can see why this is likely to be one of your most useful tools. 12. Zoom & Hand tools: The last two tools are the Zoom and the hand. And these two tools will come in handy. Yeah, Pun intended, especially if you don't have a track pad or a sort of side scrolling us. Now, Zoom lets us, as you might expect zoom in and out of the timeline to get a closer look at your edits. And if you have a track pad, just pinch in. With the zoom tool, if you hold down option, you can zoom out the timeline or with a track pad, you can pinch out. And you certainly need to zoom in and out of your timeline quite a lot, especially when it gets quite full. Then last but probably not least is the hand tool. With this tool, you can scroll through your timeline, and we'll be needing to do this when the timeline gets long. Alternatively, if you have a trap aad or a side scroll wheel on your mouse, you can use this to move up and down and along the timeline. But, that's it. Those are the main tools that you need to be familiar with as we get going. Now, we'll see how each of them gets used in practical senses in future lessons. But for now, just experiment and play around with each of them. Trim clips, reposition clips. Try range selection, and cut the content and paste it somewhere else. Use the blade to cut up clips and move parts around. Just play. And remember, your forgiving friend Command D to undo anything you don't want. 13. Editing your audio: Now that you have an understanding of how to use the tools in Fan Cap, we can move to step four, arranging your clips. This is where we can trim off any excess of our clips and re arrange if necessary. But before I do any of that, let's look at how we can add music to our project as oftentimes, you're going to arrange your clips based on the flow of music. So moving to our music keyword collection, we can see the different options we have. So for my project, I want to have the intro play this future Beats music. And then for the unboxing, I want to use this podcast intro. Now, just like dragging dropping a clip, all you have to do is bring the music to where you want it in your timeline and drop it. Again, we can do the same thing for the podcast intro music. However, if we play, you're going to notice that the audience is way too loud, and we are now unable to hear the speaking at all. Comes with level. Now, the easiest way to adjust the volume of audio and paralcp is by moving your mouse over the audio track where you see this line. You mouse will turn into this updown arrow icon, and you can simply drag down the sound level. I'll do the same for the podcast intro. Now, listen again. That's much better. But our dialogue is still far too soft, so we can raise up this volume. Now, the trick here is to get a balance between nice background music without overshadowing our dialogue. Now in a future lesson, we'll take a much deeper dive into the audio, but this will do the trick for now. Okay, so onto step four. If you notice, many of these clips have a lot of extra media in them, which we don't really need. Now, the easiest way to crop out excess media is by looking at the audio waveforms. Now here where you see a gap in the audio waveforms, it's generate indicative areas you can cut out. So I'm going to quickly run through this project and cut at all the extra media that I don't need. Right, and just like that. Notice how much shorter the project now is. Just as a side note, one of the biggest jobs of an editor, sifting through footage and getting rid of the bad takes and keeping the good ones. So once you've done that part, the fun part lies ahead. Okay, so here as you can see, I've added the podcast intra music under my unboxing sequence. Here I want the scene to change each time the person counts up. Now, if you remember from our previous lesson, there are multiple ways in which we can crop our clips. Now, in this case, the most simple option is using the blade. Now, here I'll make a cut for each count. Then delete the extra media. Now, listening to it, you can see how the video flows along with the time. All right, so that's pretty much it for stage four. We have our rough draft done. Our story is in order, and we are ready to add some of that editing magic, which you'll see in the next lesson. 14. Adding Transitions: I hope you had some fun cutting, moving, shifting, et cetera. It's sort of like being in the kitchen and playing with ingredients. But the real fun is when we start to combine these things to produce something really tasty. And that's what we'll now start to do. Right now, we're on step five, and this is pretty much where the editing magic begins. That said, transitions are all about how one clip changes into another clip. And you'll notice or if it's done well, not notice this effect in almost every video that you watch. So let's start with transitions. To access transitions, click this button here that looks like a kind of bow tie. In this window, you'll find all of final cut pros, pre installed transitions such as blows, dissolves, lights, movements, et. Or instead of browsing bicarr you can click to see all the different transitions we have available. If you move your mouse point across a transition, it'll show a preview of what the transition looks like. So, for example, we can see cross dissolve is a very simple transition going from one clip and dissolving into the next or doorway, which is more complicated transition, that makes it look like the clip is opening up like a doorway. But generally, with transitions, you want to keep it simple as transitions aren't really meant to be noticed. They should be subtle and seamless. So do be careful not to over use them between clips. This makes your video look amateurish and can even annoy your viewers. So, let's add some transitions to our clips and see what they can do. Let's start with our intro where we switch between the scenes of me unboxing pito. I want to add an interesting effect here. So let's try and add the cube transition between these clips. All you need to do is drag the transition over and you will see that this gray box automatically appears. And it shows a preview of where the transition is going to be placed. And then if we drop it, you'll see there's now a gray box that shows us that we have a transition between these clips. So let's play the video now. Okay, that's a lot more interesting. However, the transition plays out way too slow, especially if we want to have one for each of these scene changes. So let's shorten the transition. All you need to do is move your pointer to the end until you see this handle and then click and drag left and right to shorten or expand the transition. Playing it back, you'll see how the transition plays now much faster. Now I can add a transition to each of the points. Playing the video back again, you'll notice how it creates a very interesting effect. 15. Making your Transitions subtle: As we said in the beginning, transitions should often go unnoticed. But on occasion, you can do something a bit extra like we did here. However, the subtle transition is the cross fade. Let's add this transition in between these two clips. Notice how subtle this transition is and how it seamlessly blends one clip into another. Again, we can add this to the very start of our project to have it fade in. And also at the end of our project to fade out. Transitions are very much a sort of trial and error sort of thing. They shouldn't be applied to all your clips, rather apply them just where it looks and feels right. One thing to mention is a message you might get when adding a transition, there is not enough extra media beyond clip edges to create the transition. Now, this basically means there is not enough extra media for final cut pro to work with to make the transition. To fix this, we can simply crop a bit of both clips to ensure that there is enough space. Now, if we try and add a transition, It works. Alternatively, you can let Final Cut Pro automatically fix it for you? Simply drag the transition to the center of both clips, drop it, and ting okay when it gives you the warning. You'll notice that final cut pro automatically shorten the clip to get the extra media it needs for the transition. Right, so it's over to you. Try and create some transitions between different clips. Then copy the transitions that I showed you and also try your own. Can you make the scenes change even more interesting? 16. Understanding Storylines: Once upon a time in a distant land. Yeah. You want to hear a story, don't you? Well, stories attract attention. And so we need to talk about story lines. If you look at any movie or video game, there's always a primary story line that drives the plot forward. And then they are also like side missions in the case of video games or subplots in the case of movies that enhance the main plot, but they're on part of the main plot. Now, this is similar to what we have in Final Cut Pro. Media in the main story line drives the video forward, while other media, not in the story line is more of a subplot and can be used to enhance the primary storyline. Let's see how all this works. When we drag media down to the timeline for the first time, you can see it automatically goes into the primary storyline as Final Cut Pro expects you to create your story line and then enhance the media with connected clips. Here you can see we have created our main story within the primary storyline. Now, if we add media above or below it, let's say, some B roll footage that we have, you'll notice how there is a thin line that connects the B roll to the clip in the primary story line. This line indicates that this media is a connected clip. As Connected clips are not meant to be a different story line, but rather enhance the primary story line, you'll notice that if we move the clip in the primary story line, the connected clip will move along with it. Now, the same is true. If we delete the clip in the primary story line. All the connector clips are deleted as well. Final Cut Pro can essentially have an endless amount of media stacked on top of one another. And this is known as a pancake timeline. Because basically, you can add layers of media on top of one another to make something that is more interesting, kind of like a stack of delicious and tasty pancakes. However, if we add another clip on top of this connected clip, this clip does not connect to the connected clip, but instead it also connects to the primary story line. In fact, any media we add above or below will connect to the primary story line. However, this creates an issue. Let's say we wanted to create a cutaway. But we also wanted that cutaway to have a transition. You'll notice that this is not possible to add a transition to these connected clips. So at this point, we have two options. The first is to right click both of these connected clips and select overwrite two primary story line. And this adds this clip to our primary story line. And then we can now add the transition. However, this can now create confusion, when editing as it now disrupts the flow of our primary story line. Rather, instead of moving these clips to the primary story line, we can right click and select Create story line. Now, these attached clips become the own separate story line while remaining attached to the primary story line. And now we can add a transition. And if we move the story line, all the clips in it move as one. Right. And that's it for story lines and final P. This is your moment to go through your project and add some B roll above to enhance your primary story line. And they lived happily ever after. 17. Time saving Tools: As you can see, we've greatly enhanced our story, so we hope you've done the same with yours. It's now time to look out the last few buttons, and these tools we haven't covered within the main interface of final cut P. And by that, I'm talking about these buttons. Now, you may or may not know what some of them do, but if you have experimented with them, you would have probably figured them out. But if you haven't, this is definitely the right lesson for you. So let's have a quick look. Moving over to the far right before the effects and transitions, you will see an icon shape like a small clip from an old film camera. If you click on this, it opens up a control menu. And this menu allows you to adjust a few things. But the first slideer you can zoom in and out of the time line. Just like we did before with the Zoom tool or with the track pad. If we look below that, there are a bunch of different buttons. These buttons allow you to change how big your audio waveforms appear. And lastly, looking at this sliner if we move this, it basically zooms out on the y axis making clips thinner. Now, you might need to do this if you've got multiple tracks stacked up on top of one another. It's a really big pancake. There is also these options to show clip names, angles, clip rolls, lane headers. But for now, this is just not too important. The next button, which is appropriately called snapping. If we enable this and drag our playhead across the timeline. You'll notice that it snaps in between clips. It'll automatically snap things to a break in a clip like the start of the end. You'll see how this changes things when you start adding more clips to your timeline. Now, let's check out this option, which is shaped like a little headphones. If you click on it, you'll notice that all the clips except the one we're on get grade out. So what's this about? Well, basically, let you listen to a single audio track at a time without needing to delete other audio tracks. So if we go to the first clip and select the audio track here, future beats and click the headphones. Now, if we play, Notice how we don't hear the dialogue sound anymore. Instead, we'll only hear the audio from this track. Now, this feature is really useful when you need to listen to an edit audio of a single track without having the other audio interfering. The lost two buttons. The first one you'll notice is grade, and we can't select it. And this is because this option needs this option enabled to work. So what does this button do? Well, if we click it and move our mouse out to the timeline, you'll see that the video moves to wherever your pointer is, and this is known as skimming, just like skim reading. Now, skimming and final capri allows you to quickly skim view through your footage. You generally want to keep this option on as well as the snapping option enabled. So now that we have skimming on, you can see that we can now click this last button. And what this button does is also skimming, except audio. We can now skim through this audio like this. You probably don't want to keep this option able unless you are specifically editing audio. It can be rather distracting and annoying. A, and that's pretty much it. There are still a few other buttons that we will discuss in future lessons. But as we say, the best way of learning is by doing. So play around and have some fun with these buttons just so you can get familiar with what they are. 18. Special Effects: Just say the words special effects. Most people, especially video editors get all excited. Well, it's time for us to explore final cut pros, video and audio effects tools and get the excitement happening. Simply click this button that looks like two boxes, and it'll open up the video effects panel, and welcome to Final Cut pros ready to go special effects. Now, transitions, if you move your mouse across the effect, we'll give you a preview of what the effect is. So for example, if we move over aged film, it appears like aged film. And if you hover over bad TV, you can see it makes your clip appear as to how to look with bad TV. To apply this effect to your footage, all you need to do is click and drag it onto your footage. It's as simple as that. Now, if you look at the inspector, you'll notice there are a whole lot of different options that you can adjust to customize the effect, such as the amount, the static type, blend mode, and roll. Now, different effects will give you different options that you can adjust. Effects can be used to add just the right mode to your clips. So let's try and add some effects to some of our clips. Looking at these clips here, we have a preview of the dogs doing different things. So let's add in this frame effect. Bringing in our clip, it gives it the look of a 35 millimeter camera, which looks pretty neat. But you're not limited to having just one effect. You can add as many as you like. So let's add another such as this bad TV effect. Well, that looks a bit odd. As this effect is happening over our frame effect, and that doesn't really make sense, which brings us to the important topic of layers, meaning the effects above are affected by the effects below. So imagine painting a picture but painting over the frame. Well, that is essentially what is happening here. The bad TV effect is happening over the frame. So to fix, all you need to do is drag the frame effect below, and just like that, it's fixed. We now want the same effect for each of these clips. That sounds exhausted. The good news is, there is a much better way to apply this effect to the other clips. All you need to do is click Common C and then selecting all your clips, hit come on V. Doing this, you'll notice that it opens up this window here, which allows you to paste all your effects from one clip to another. And if you look here, this does not only work for effects, it works for transforming, cropping, audio, and a whole lot more. So clicking paste. You'll notice now that all these clips instantly have the same effect applied just like a magic. So, what are you waiting for? Have some fun playing with the different effects, drag them on some clips and play with the parameters in the inspector and see what amazing results you can create. 19. Transform Tool Power: I want to show you something so simple yet so powerful. It's the transform Tom. Now, this tool basically lets you reframe an image to whatever you like. So, for example, you could crop into a small section or you could flip the media upside down. Well, let's take a look at how to use the transform tool. On our time line, let's select a clip to try out this tom. Let's use this one. Here, I want to zoom in to the dog's face where he gives a weird look. So firstly, I'm going to cut this clip so that we only apply the effect to a small portion. Now, move the playhead over the clip and then select it to access the transform options. All you need to do is click this button right here. You'll notice that the video has a border over it with a bunch of different little blue circles around it. Well, basically, these circles are handles that you can use to resize your video and depending on which handle you select, it'll change how the video is resized. So, for instance, if we want to stretch the video, we can use either of these handles and stretch it out. Alternatively, to make it taller, we could use this handle and stretch it vertically. We want to zoom in. To do that, select one of these corner handles. As you can see, you can now zoom in. To position your clip, all you need to do is select anywhere on your video and click and drag it to where you want it to be positioned. It's as simple as that. And when you're done, well, now let's play the video. We can see how this particular clip is now zoomed in. There's a lot more the transform tool can do. But firstly, you may be wondering how you can change your video now that all the handles seem to like disappeared. Well, to get your handles back in view, if you look at the top, you will see a small little drop down with a percentage on it. This tells you the size of the preview window. If you click this, you can manually zoom in and out of the preview window. So if we zoom out to let's say, 25%, we can now see that our blue handles are back. Right. Let's briefly look at some other transform tool options. Firstly, we can flip our video, simply by dragging a corner to the opposite end. Or if you look in the middle, another handle you can grab this one, let you rotate your video in any direction. So perhaps your video was a little bit slanted. Well, you can easily fix it with this. Remember how we discussed final Capro uses a pancake timeline. Well, let's see this in action. Moving over to our media window. Let's grab a small section of a clip and move it onto this clip, just like that. Here. Just because this video is on top, doesn't mean this one is gone. It's still there. Let's see how we can make it appear. We can do this using transform. Now, this time, we can make this video smaller like this. And now you can see that we can see both of the clips at the same time. Now, this is useful in many scenarios, including cutaway, sometimes you don't want a complete cutaway, you just want a small one in a section of your video. 20. Transform Tool (extra) Power: If you click this drop down menu, you'll see two other options, which are crop and distort. Now, you probably won't find yourself using these options as much, but they still serve an important purpose. With the crop tool, instead of putting the handles to Zoom, we are cropping or re framing our shop. So if we do that, you'll see that the highlighted section is how the media will be reframed. Once you click done, you'll see how it now zooms into the cropped area. If we want to zoop out all the way, we need to do is just simply click this button again, and we can easily do that. So if you are simply looking to reframe a shot, this tool is what you want to use. But for more advanced rotating and reframing, the transform tool still is best. If you click the trim tool, you'll have these dotted borders around the video. You can now drag one of these square handles and the video trims for each direction. Now, this is useful if you want to maybe show two videos side by side like this. Or just fit more media next to each other. The last option is Ken Burns. Now, the Ken Burns effect is especially useful for still images because it brings the sort of illusion of motion to a still image. If you click on it, you'll see it brings up these two boxes, start and end with a big arrow pointing between them. Simply, what this means is that the video will start displaying your media at one point and then pan smoothly to the second point. So perhaps we want to start our frame here and end it here. Now when we play back, the video you can see how the effect works. And finally, we have distort and as the name implies. This lets you distort a video just like this. The effect is very useful in some particular scenario, such as overlaying a video into a real world object. We can then use this tool to match the objects dimensions. The last thing to note is that all of these effects can be accessed in the video inspector. For instance, I could zoom into video using the transform tool in the inspector and sliding scale, I can zoom in and out. Alternatively, I could trim a clip. Adjusting effects like this in the inspector can be a bit slower at times, but it's also a lot more accurate. So those are some of the tools transforming, trimming and distorting. Now, these tools are very versatile, and you can do so much with them. But as always, give them a try and see what interesting effects you can come up with as you play with them. 21. Retiming Clips: It's time to talk about time and more specifically, retiming. Retiming allows you to make your clip go at any speed or any direction. And you thought time travel wasn't possible. All right. Let's see how it works. Firstly, let's find a clip in the time line that we want to ret. Okay. So looking at this clip near the beginning where I cut open the box, you can see that because I'm trying to follow along with the bead of the music, I only cut through a small bit of the box. But I want to show the full box getting cut open, so let's see how that's done. Well, firstly, we need to expand this clip so that it is the exact length of me cutting the box. Here, as we have the transition, you'll need to drag this handle, and if you don't see it, simply zoom in and look to the top right in this icon pier. But obviously, now it plays for too long. So to retime this clip, all we need to do is selected and hit Command R, which brings up this small element above the clip. Moving your mouse over to this handle, you're now able to change the duration of the clip simply by dragging. And if I drag it to the right, it makes it slower or if I drag it to the left, it makes it foster. I want to speed up this clip to around about 270%. Now, if we play it back, you'll see how much better it now looks. Let's see how we can customize this even further. You'll notice on the retime bar, there is the small error. If you click here, you'll see it gives you options to quickly change the speed, and it also lets you set the retime clip back to normal speed. And there is also an option called custom. Clicking on this brings up a whole new set of options. Here we can change the direction of the clip to be either in forward or reverse. Or if we want the clip to play precisely, 1 second, we can also do that here. Now, retiming is super powerful. You can even use it to slightly speed up someone who is speaking too slowly. Now, it's your time to use retime. How about creating interesting effects in your project, whether you dramatically speed up certain clips? Or dramatically slow them down. Or even send them backwards in time. 22. Titles & Text: Say it with words. Sometimes title just adds that bit of extra info that is not immediately obvious in your video. In this lesson, we will take a look at titles. Now, titles can be used to introduce a video, highlight points during a video, provide context, display additional information, show rolling credits and lots more. So let's see how to use titles. In the first section, we looked at how if you click on this button here on the top left of your screen, it opens up titles and generators sidebar, and this is the place to access titles. As you can see, final cut pro provide you with many pre installed text options such as three D or three D cinematic, building out credits, et cetera. If you can't see these options, just make sure to click this little triangle to open the drop down. Let's see how we can add some of these titles to our project, as well as how we can edit them. The first thing we need to do is select a title to use for our project. So for the first title, I want to add some text that says features before I talk about Fido's features. Now, as you can see, there are a lot of titles that you can choose from. Some of them are static and some are anovated. However, the title I want to use here is this one with the typewriter effect. If I drag this down to my timeline, you can see that I'm now able to place it on top of my video. If I do this, you can see that the title appears on top of the video. However, in this case, I want the title to be its own element. So to do that, all I need to do is drag down the title between my two clips and doing this makes the title become its own clip. If we play our via now, you can see this typewriter effect title now appears and separates the two points in our video. Now we need to edit our title. Firstly, to change its duration, all you need to do is bring your pointer over to either edge of the title and drag it left or right. Next, to change the actual text so that it says features, we simply double click the actual text and change it to say features. Now, if we play our video. That's much better, but it still plays out too slowly. So let's see how we can edit this text and change its effects. We can make all these edits within the inspector. Now, looking at the inspector, you'll see that there are multiple different tabs that allows you to perform different edits on this text. Looking at the first tab that shape like a T. If we click on this one, it has different check boxes and sliders. Now, this window is where you edit the actual effects. And because this text has a typewriter effect, we can adjust that here. For example, if we move the duration slider, we can make this effect happen a lot faster. We can also adjust settings like fade in. The next tab over is where you can change how the actual text appears. And as you can see, there are a lot of different options. Firstly, we can change the actual font of the text, and let's collect a different one. Let's use this one chord and Delmono. Right. That looks better. We can also change the font size, vertical align, line space and a whole lot more. We can also change the text face. Here, we can change its color, pacity, blur, et cetera. Now going further down, you can see there are even more options such as adding an outline, a glow, or a drop shadow. Right. So that's a quick look at titles and something you are sure to use a lot in your video. So Kit playing, have some fun. Kit learning. You're entitled to have some fun. 23. Export your project: The big moment has arrived where you export your project to a final rendered file. Now, while there is still more we'll do to make the video even better, your patients and physicians is about to be rewarded by creating a first version render. Now, here we have our project with all the special effects and edits that you've made. If you look to the far upper right, you'll see a box with an upward pointing arrow. Now, if you're wondering where it's pointing, it's pointing to wherever you want to send your rendered file, and this is where you export your project. Clicking Export file default or simply press the Command E brings up this preview window. Now, move your mouse over the preview window and you can quickly skim through your project. Now you'll notice some useful information at the bottom, such as the resolution, duration, and estimated file final size of the video. Now, high quality source footage can result in a large rendered file. So if you need to reduce the size, this can be done by clicking settings. Now, here you'll see there is a format option, and this is where you can decide if you want your video high quality or a low quality, but smaller file size. If you want your video to be a smaller file size, select Apple devices under publishing as this file type takes up a lot less space. Now, although it says, Apple devices file is supported by most devices. The next option in settings is the video codec. Now this is essentially how the videos compress. Now, if you're exporting for Apple devices format, which we recommend, then you can leave this as it is. Otherwise, you can try different codex to see what impact they have on the video size. If you have chosen the Apple devices format, you can also adjust the resolution to further reduce your file size. However, we don't recommend you using resolutions below 12 80 by 720. Otherwise, the quality can become quite poor. Right, enough for that, let's get exporting. We'll leave all the settings exactly how they are and click next. Choose where you want your file to save and simply click Save. Now at first, it looks like nothing's happening. But if you're alert, you may have noticed a little circle at the top of your screen slowly completing. If you click this, you'll be able to see how the render is progressing. And when it's done, it'll send you a notification, and you can just click Show and let the show begin. Well, that's it. You're an exporter, a movie maker, and it's time to let your show begin. 24. Adding Audio: Sound is what you see. Just think about the impact of sound in a scary movie. Sound can bring your footage to life, so let's take a moment to see what you hear. In an earlier lesson, we added some music to our intro, and that made the clip much more interesting. So let's see what Final Cut Pro can do with audio. If you downloaded our media, you'll see that we included some copyright free music that you can use in your project like the ones we have here. So let's add more music to our video to enhance the viewing experience, just like that. And as I also want music after, I'll drag another track after this music. But as you can see, this track does not cover our entire project. So this means we're going to have to do one of two things. Either, we're going to have to duplicate this track. In Final Cut Pro, you can easily duplicate anything on the timeline simply by selecting hitting Command C, and then common V as easy as that. However, again, even two tracks are not quite enough, and I don't want the music to be too repetitive, so I'll switch to a different song. Right. That's the music added. Now, let's see how we can get this audio to really work with our video. A very handy tool to have open pretty much all of the time, and especially when editing audio is the audiometer. You can open the audiometer simply by kicking this little button here. Now we can see our audio levels to ensure that it isn't too soft. Or too loud. Generally speaking, your audio levels should be between -12 and -6 decibels. Let's play the audio. We can see that it peaks at 0 decibels, and we even get a warning that our audio is going into the red with this meter. So how can we fix this? If you remember from before, you can easily lower your audio by bringing your mouse to the middle of the audio track. And after seeing these two arrows appear, you can drag down the level. Otherwise, you can also change your audio up in the inspector by simply moving this slider here. Now off it's quicker to make the edit here, but it's far more precise in the inspector. If we play back our audio, you can see that it's described seem to initially reject the pairings. One of the fundamentals of audio editing is making audio seamlessly fade from one track to another. And one of the easiest ways to do this is by adding what are called audio fades. So all you need to do is move to the edge of an audio clip, and when you see the sideways arrows, make sure you see these arrows, then simply click and drag left. It's as easy as that. Now we have a nice audio fade out effect. And we can do this for the start and end of our clip. So looking at these two songs here. Notice how it's a harsh switch from one to the other. Well, using fades, we can fix this. Firstly, let's drag this track so that start plays during the end of this ones. Now, if we fade both of these tracks. Listen how much more seamless the audio transision is now. It's smooth like butter to the ears. 25. Adding Keyframe power to Audio: How about something a bit more fancy. Let's see how we can precisely control our audio levels with key frames. Now, this gives us a lot more flexibility. As you'll notice, I have a large gap here that has no background music. But I want this podcast music to continue playing through the rest of this part. So expanding this clip, you'll see that it covers the entire duration. But it's too loud for our dialogue. So we can I could lower the volume like before. But then it's too soft for our unboxing sequence. You see the problem here. So let's see how we can solve this. To add a keyframe to an audit track, when you see these arrows again, hold down the option key and click. A small diamond shape indicates where you have added a keyframe. Now, the magic happens when you add more keyframe. So moving a little bit forward, I'll add one more keyframe. So now that I have two, I can click on one and bring it down and notice how the audio here is loud and then fades into the background. But this is not where it ends. You can add as many key frames as you like. And this gives you amazing flexibility to create really immersive audio effects. However, sound design doesn't end here. In the media that we provided, you will see there are sound effects. And part of sound design is imagining what sound the viewer might expect to hear. For example, when I cut open this box, you might expect to hear a tearing sound. Or for this text, you might expect to hear a typing sound. So, some for you to have some fun. So looking at the sound effects we provided, add some of them to the video where you feel they could most enhance it. So, that's your taste of some of the things that can be done with audio editing. Some things may require a little practice, so give it a try and see if you can hear the difference. 26. Seeing Color Magic: Well, you've certainly come a long way, and you should have the skills now indeed to create really excellent videos. However, before we finish, we just want to quickly show you some really useful effects that can greatly improve your videos. The B roll we used for Pier was shot on multiple camera. And so the color doesn't always quite match. And plus some of the clips are also under exposed. And often, footage isn't perfect, but final cut Pro has magic to fix it. So looking at this iPhone clip where the dog is swimming, you'll notice that the colors are very warm compared to the other clips. No, clicking on this little magic one icon here, you'll see that it brings up this option to balance color. Clicking on this, you'll now notice that it appears a bit cooler. However, if we go up to the inspector, we can choose white balance instead of automatic. Clicking this, you'll be prompted to click on an area that is pure white, so the white balance can be calibrated. Now, ideally, you should have a white piece of paper, but the dogs first should do the trick. So clicking on it. Notice how the colors become dramatically cooler and match our other clips a lot better. So, go into your project and try this out and see how you can balance out your colors to get a better and more consistent look and feel. Okay. 27. Applying Stabilization Magic: Unless you filming on a tripod, it's unlikely that your footage is stable. However, final Capra can fix us too with its stabilization effect. Now, look at this clip we have here. And notice how shaky the camera is. It's almost unusable. But if we simply click on it, go into our video inspector and hit stabilization, notice how much smoother it becomes. And just one thing to note is if your footage frame rate is low, like 24 frames per second or less, and this might not work as well. However, looking at the inspector, you can see you can change different settings like translation, rotation, smoothness, and scale smoothness. So the stabilization effect is great, and it can really save footage that almost seems unusable. So don't find some footage, either your own or from what we've provided, and give stabilization a try. Play with the settings and the inspector. You're going to be amazed at how powerful this effect can be. 28. Using Voice Magic: As we've said before, the quality of your sound is really important in video production. Have, what do you do? If you have media where the audio of someone speaking is being spoiled by distracting background noise. Well, Final Cut Pro has another magic tool called voice isolation. Have a listen to this audio. Right, let's now get down to building your drought project. If you have imported the fall directly to your file. Notice how much background sound is, and this could almost seem unusable. However, if we go into spect and select audio isolation, Then play back the audio again. Let's not get down to building your draft project. If you have imported the for the direct, notice how much better it sounds. Again, if we go into the inspector and increases effect to remove even more background sound if needed, now see how it sounds. Right, let's not get done. Right. Let's now get down to building your draft project. If you have imported the file directly to you. Like final cut pros, other effect features can remarkably improve your footage. And the best way to see this is to play with it yourself. So give it a try and also don't forget to tweak the inspector settings to discover what is possible with this. 29. Conclusion and Beginning: You've reached the end of your learning journey. However, you've also just opened the door to an exciting world of possibilities as you apply your new video editing skills. So right now we encourage you to find a project, whatever it may be, a YouTube video idea you had or a home movie or some content someone needs you to make and use what you've learned and make something amazing because that is how you reinforce your learning. Again, a big congratulations from us. This is your moment. Your journey starts here. Don't make something spectacular.