Video Editing Final Cut Pro X for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to this course on how to use Final Cut Pro X for beginner and also gonna go over everything that you will need to know. My name is Jim Dixon. I've been using Final Cut Pro now for over ten years professionally and in my spare time, in my professional career, I am a videographer and editor, so I work in Final Cut Pro all the time on all my projects. If you've never used Final Cut Pro before, this is the course that you wouldn't be watching. We are also going to go over everything there is to offer so you might learn something new. I Feel free to skip parts of this course located to the right and you'll see all the videos so you don't have to watch it all. But if you're new here, I recommend starting from the beginning so you don't miss anything. There were the intro done, we're gonna move on to the first thing which is very important, file management. 2. File Management : Okay, so file management is one of the first things that I recommend. You figure out I've only come across this way of working. Maybe in the past five years has really helped me speed up my workflow. It just keeps all your files organized. You know exactly what you're looking at. So I'm going to share my screen now and we're going to assume you've got all your footage. For this purpose. I've just downloaded some stock footage. So before we open up Final Cut, we're gonna go into our files. So first I'm going to get to my desktop. I made a folder called Final Cut Pro X. Here the first thing I would make is an assets folder. Assets is basically anything other than the final edit. So when we come to exporting the final edit, I make another folder here called deliveries. And the only thing that will go in there is all the exports that we do. So assets in here are normally create the footage folder. So I'd put in my SD card and put all the footage in here depending on how much swatches you've got and how many days you did the shoot? We've got day one. And then for me, this is all the stock footage that I downloaded earlier. And it might seem a bit tedious now doing this. But when it comes to a couple days into the edit and you want to find a shot but you know, shocked on day one, it's just so much easier looking through the file system in this way rather than trying to look through hundreds of hours of footage and you don't know where it is, not just footage. You can have your music and then you can put music. And I obviously got sf actually sound effects. I always have storyboards. So sometimes I'll put a docs folder and put my storyboards. And that just makes it really simple when you come to this later on. And obviously we need to make our final Cut Pro project. So I'll make another folder called I was put P, F, or central project file. And in here is where we're going to find our project file. So we've got our farm management all set up, ready to go. All we need to do now is create our project. 3. Creating a Project: We've got our file management all set up, ready to go. All we need to do now is create a project. So let's head over to where is it Final Cut. Now if you've never been final cup before, it might look like this. It might not, if it doesn't look like this or actually do is come up to Windows, Workspace and default. And then it's just going to send it back to how it was. Now to create a project first, we need to create a library. So firstly, you go up to the top file new library. Notice that at the top here, project is grayed out. You can't click that yet, so you have to create a library. Now, the word library is just Apple. I've chosen to use that working in Premiere Pro. They use sequences, so it's just a random word, but the best way to think about it is a library. We're not a libraries is the building where there's a books. If you want to create a project, a project is one of the books. There could be hundreds and thousands of books in the library. They're just individual projects. So first of all, you've got to create the building where the project's going to go. It's got the library. There you go. We want to call it test. You can call it whatever you want to call it. We want to save it in where we made our filing system. So desktop, Final Cut assets and PF for project file. Save it in there. Now a pair, we've got our library. You don't have to worry too much about the smart collections. The date, the event in the ten years of me using Final Cut, I've never messed with that. You just don't need to do it. But for now, we don't need to worry about it. We've got our library, how building with books. So we need to make a project. So now we can go into File New and we can now choose Project, one of our books. Go ahead and click that. I'm going to call it test again in the event, appear again where I said you can have the event, you can just make different events, different days just to store different things in there, but you don't need to worry about doing that. Video is how we can choose the resolution. We're going to keep it at 1080 today. But obviously you can do to k for k 360 vertical or custom resolution in there so you can change the resolution. But HD, HD for us, frame rate, I always do 24. They say the eyes 24 is just the best to look at. If you've got footage that's filmed in 60 FPS, doesn't matter. You can choose any of these. Rendering a prioress 42. I've always used that and it can leave the rest as it is. If you're struggling to understand this, it's okay. You can just click. Use automatic setting when you drag your footage in the project, we'll create all the settings for you based on how your footage was shot. If roads, we're going to keep it as is and press back K. And boom, we've got our project. Now it's up here as test. You can create other projects are the books in the library. You just want to have a couple of projects on the go. We're not gonna do that today because you didn't need to half the time. You're never going to need to do that unless you get so far. And in this particular edit, in this test project, we edit something. You maybe send it off to a client or something. And they want some things changed instead of changing the original test project one because they might want you to go back to it originally. You can just duplicate project As and you'll have basically a duplicate that you can add it and always get back to the first one. So you can have as many books projects as you want. So now we've got our project. We're gonna go on to the basic controls. 4. Learn the Basic Controls: Okay, so now we've got our project. We're gonna go over the basic controls. It so much easier personally, I think for you to understand it when you're editing. So I'd recommend maybe doing this with me, bringing in some random clips and string, doing it at the same time. So we've clicked in our project at the minute we've got no footage, we need to get our footage. And there are a couple of ways of doing that. You can go over to where your footage is. Simply just grab all of them are a couple of them and just drag them in or you can come up to File Import Media. That way. For us, we're just going to drag it in because we've not got too much. You can either drag them into the timeline and they will all be there, and then there'll be here. Or if you do it the other way, they weren't automatically go to the timeline, they'll just be up here in the projects so we can delete all these because they will appear now. Obviously you can grab the boards and make these thin or as wide as you like. I've always had a thin columns so I can see more of the project. So in order to show you the basic controls, I'm just going to drag a couple of clips and we'll drag the first clip in. This second clip in. So down here is our timeline is magnetic timeline. I can't drag this over there because it's going to snap it back to the beginning. This is the stuff. So you press Space. I'm just going to play. If yours is quite GOT at playing, it probably needs to render, just give it 2 min. Up here, you can see this circle with the tick if it needs to render, and we'll see that loading when it's done, it'll be fine. Now the basic controls, as you can see, my mouse cursor is the normal mouse cursor and I can't really do anything else other than move things. If you want to see all of them go over to this area here, click down, I'm on Select at the minute. Obviously these are the keyboard shortcuts. So a is select, the most used keyboard shortcuts are using. Final Cut is a and B. So the a select one and B for blade. So if I press P on the keyboard, it now switches to some scissors, which is quite counterproductive because it says blade, but it shows scissors. I want to cut this clip in half. I can just click press a to get back to the normal mouse cursor and you can now see a dotted line between that. So now these clips are separate. A lot of the time I make a mistake. The keyboard shortcut to undo is Command Z. To undo that blade cut that I've done. So Command Z to undo it and out as one clip again. All these others trim, position, range, zoom and hand. I've never personally used for this where it's going to stick with a and B, some other buttons that are quite useful to know. Let's click the first clip as highlighted. Now, over here is where you can change the blend mode. You can actually bring the opacity down or backup the position left to right, up and down. Command Z to undo. If you don't want to use these specific points, you can come down here to the transform there this way if you prefer, make it bigger. So you've got the rotate as well. You've also got down here the crop, you can crop it, but also over here, you've got the crop, basically anything here is just more of a shortcut way of doing it down here, stabilization. So obviously if you've got a clip that's all over the place, you can stabilize it, then going to analyze it. And over here we can see that it's analyzing it. So it's got the dots above here, meaning it needs to render. And as I said, if we go back up the top, there you go. It's just done rendering. So now it will play smooth. But it's going to place me that anyway because that clip didn't need to be stabilized. It was shot very nice. If you want to switch to coloring, which will come into later, but you just click over here, show the color inspector. They call your color wheels. And if want to get information on this clip specifically, we can see that it was shot at 1080, almost 30 frames per second. We'll get back to the normal view down here, we've got the term video and audio skimming on or off. Which means if I come over here you can see this red line that's going to follow me wherever I go. If you don't want that to happen, just turn it off. That red line is no longer following us. Sometimes it can be a bit annoying if this is changing constantly, I prefer to leave it on preference. The snapping is actually really interesting. I use it a little bit. I'm just going to zoom into the timeline over here by Command and plus. There we go. So now we can see a little bit more. Now if I just cooked here. So before blade a again for the normal mouse, you can see we've got a cut here. We've got 123, so we've now got three clips. The snapping is on at the minute. So if I bring this clip down and I want to move it around, the second I get close to this line where the cut was made is going to try and snap to it so I can't place. It's quite difficult to move left and right without it snapping. If want to get rid of that, turn it off. And now it's not going to automatically snap to it. You'll come to understand how annoying that is when you get editing a little bit further on, over here, carrying on, we've got the effects browser. This is where everyone really likes to go in and mess about with stuff. On the slide here is just specific ones that you might want to look for easily. And there are quite a few nice presets are down here. But e.g. you could have an alien lab, bring it on, drop it. And it looks a bit more alien like. To turn that off. You go up to your effects because you've added an effect. And you just click off and you'll see the change that it's making. It's not really looking very alienated. They come up here, select this, press backspace to delete it. If we go over the next one, we can get all of our transitions. Click all, showed them all. Down here. We've already got these two clips with a cut in-between so we can add a transition. However, you can see I'm going to zoom in a bit more. You can see if I click the end of this clip, shows a red border. And again, it does on this bomb, that's because that is the start or end of that clip. Now because that's the very beginning, the transition that we would want to add won't work because there's no There's nothing before it or after it. So in order to add a transition, we need to make a bit of space before it. So we should drag this clip in a bit. In reality, this is not the start of the clip. We've, we've cropped it in a bit more and same for this one. So the clip here has ended, so it's showing us read. So I need to move it in a bit. Hopefully that made sense, but it's really quite difficult to explain. So now we can go ahead. If you want a cross dissolve, There's a little preview there. Drag it to the middle. And now we get a nice big gray border. And if we press Play, it will cross dissolve nicely. You can actually stretch it. Make it shorter. So the cross dissolves gonna go real quick. Very nice to delete it. Just press Delete button and there's loads of different ones down there. We can get a nice wave effect. How nice? And if you don't want to see any of this, just close it down. And over here is how we go to export, but we're not going to come to that yet. That's basically the main buttons that you will ever need to know on Final Cut Pro. So now we're going to head over and do a bit of color grading. 5. Colour Grading: So you've learned the basics and we're now I wanted to dive into some color grading. Very easy on Final Cut Pro if we head over to this clip, so you want to edit the color on this, we just click it and select it. If you remember, we go up to this one now, color inspector, collect that. Now these are the color wheels. I'm sure even if you've never color graded before, you've seen or heard the color wheels. It might look very complicated, but honestly, it is so easy. It's scary. There are a few different ways to color grade. The default one is going to show us these four color wheels. Now, this is a beginner lesson, so we're going to not go too deep into it, but I'll go over as much as I can. At the top here is global. Now that means wherever I change on this specific circle is going to change everything, the shadows, the highlights, the mid tones. This side that shows blue. It's just showing blue as a default. This little arrow here is the saturation. So that's the saturation for everything. Here is a saturation for the shadows. This is the saturation by mid tones and the highlights. If we wanted to saturate everything, we just grab this arrow and bring it up. And if you notice here, everything now looks way too green and awful. Again on a D saturate it down. If you have moved this way too many times and you can't be bothered to press undo every time. Just go into the white bit, double-click and it will reset it. If I move over here to the, the orange area or the highlights, the white bits are gonna go orangey. As you can see, again, just double-click, but he can't do it by eye. You can get the graphs up. Now the quickest way to get the graph up is Command seven. Then it's going to get even more complicated looking for this part. We don't need to see our footage anymore because we just need to see it to tidy this space up. We go over to this part over here, this button, click it and it's just gonna get rid of that. We just can't see it. So now we've got more space to work, which is what you want. This waveform is maybe I can for some, but not the one that I use. If you go to this little graph icon here, wave form is what we want, but we don't want RGB, which stands for red, green, and blue. We would like the red, green, blue overlay this image or this footage. Is this up here? It says the lesser hundred. You never want the image to be brighter than 100 because the second is going over 100. It's overexposed and you've lost all the information. It just shows us white. Same for zero. If you go below zero, which is complete, blackness is just black. You can't see anything. And color grading and color correction is more in-depth video that I need to make. So if you want to see that, I can do that for you, but it's going to skim over it, so we're going to move on. That's the color wheels. You can also get a color board which is going to like this. It's almost the same thing. It looks a bit more complicated. Color curves is really cool actually, as you can see, we've got the RGB, red, green, blue. You normally you might have people with the S curve. So you'd put a dot there, a dot there and a dot there. And you bring this down slightly and you'd bring this one up slightly. And then you've kind of got an S curve, which just creates a lot of contrast. It just makes it a bit more normal. Again, just click them and press Delete to delete them. Saturation and curved, quite a cool tool to get quite a nice grades. So if I want to change the green to be a different color, I can get the color picker, select that particular green. I'm going to put three points in for me. You want to change. The middle point is if I bring this down, you can see the green in the image is gonna get blurrier and blurrier and blurrier, if I go up, it's going to get more warm, more autumn looking. So you can kinda trick the way it looks. If I wanted to get these parts of the green, I just move this up a little bit. And now it's going to affect all of it. If again, if one I get a bit more red in there, I'll leave it this way. And you just kinda expanding what you can modify. Nearest color, swatch the blue. And then again, it's made three points here. Choose the middle one. And if I go up, it's gonna go quite like a green, light blue if I get down and go purple to red. And she wants like a mess, you just kinda bring it up a little bit. And then you kinda have done a bit of color grade. And there you go. And if you wanted to see what it's like before, just come up here and toggle this on and off. They go. It looks quite automated, and that's all you need to know for this basic tutorial on color grading. So now we're gonna move by Burt to keyframing. 6. Key Framing: So keyframing can be quite complicated. If you're a beginner, you probably not gonna need to know this yet, but I'm going to go anyway in the most basic format that icon I can do. So we're gonna go back to editing. We're not going to do color grading anymore. So I'm going to press Command seven to get rid of the graph of color. We're gonna get back up here and get this panel backup. And go over to here and get our main area of editing mockup. Now as you can see it under Effects, we've got all the color grading bits that I added. If you don't want to see any of them, just turn the effects off. We'll leave them on for now because it looks quite nice. Keyframing. It's quite a daunting thing. It took me quite a while to get used to. It basically just means we're adding a bit of motion. So if I just play this first clip, It's got a bit of movement because that's how it was shot. But say we want to zoom into it slowly. You'd go to the part of the clip where you want it to start zooming in. So we wanted to zoom in from the very beginning. So make sure your play head is at the beginning of the clip. Select the clip. And if we're going to move it forward, That's part of the position. So under the transformation, so we're going to move it forward. The way to move forward, obviously, if we get the scale in, zoom in is going to go in and vice versa. And just click the little arrow down here and reset just to put that back to how it was. Now if we want that to happen on its own, we need to make a keyframe where you want it to begin. Go over to the bit that you want to adjust. So we're gonna just a scale. And over here you can see these little diamond, the square on the side things. Now your keyframes. So add a keyframe, so just click. And now it's gone yellow because we're affecting the scale. Press play and get it to where you want to end it. So we want to end it there. So stop it. And now it's calculated that we've moved from here to here. Whatever we do now is going to impact what happens at the start. So if we zoom in that press, but 125, press Enter, it's now going to a scaled in that however much that you've put in. And it's going to record that. So we go back to the star and press Play. It's not going to zoom in to where I want it to go. And if I press Play and you'll watch every at the same time, the numbers are going up because we've zoomed, it's going to stop at one to five because that's what we put in. If wanted to come back out, we would press Play. It's going in and the second it stops going in. Which is that pause. Create another keyframe. So this is now a start of another keyframe. Press play. It's memorizing all of this. We want it to stop zooming out there. So press pause, add another keyframe and type 100. And if we play from beginning, it's going to zoom in to one to five. That's what we set it to. And then when we added the keyframe button to zoom out. Again, you've done your first abbot keyframing. Want to undo all of that? Just go over. Press Reset, going to go back to normal press Play. Nothing interesting is going to happen. Can you just reset to 0? And you can kinda put a keyframe on anything. So if we go back into the color real quick, let's just go into the color wheels. That's the easiest to look at. Up here on the color wheel effect, you can see the keyframe option. So if we go to the start of the clip, make sure it's selected. Click Keyframe. So we're adding a key-frame, press play. And you always want to stop where you want the keyframe to end. Could be anywhere. Let's just go there. Now if we let us just move the shadows up a little bit, highlights down a little bit. Really not the way to color grade, but just so I can show you, and let's make it more purple, beautiful. Getting back to the start. And it's going to keyframe that movement. So it's going to slowly get to the color that we have just done. There you go. That's obviously not the nicest looking picture, but it shows the point. So keyframe is something that is taught me a while to get into my head and how it works. But it's just gonna be a case of you messing around with it. And it is difficult to understand how easy it is when you think it is rather difficult. But it is really easy when you get a hang of it. I would just recommend just having a little task, maybe spend an hour or so, just keyframing random, random things so you understand the concept. And then when you're doing keyframing, you're probably ready to export. And that's what we're gonna go on to next. 7. Exporting a Video: So you created your edit, you've done your color grading, you're doing, you're cutting. You do need keyframe and you're done, you've finished, and you want to export it. Anything that's in this timeline is going to get exported really, really easy. The way that I do go up to your test project, your book, make sure that's selected so that specific timeline is going to be exported, go up to the top. Up here. There are loads of different ways that you can export it. If you wanted to, you could export it to a DVD. You could upload it straight to Facebook. You can save it as 720 p, can save it as 1084 K. Obviously, we've created this project in HD 1080, so we're going to export it in 1080. Just go ahead and click that. You can rename it if you want to. We're going to keep it the same down here. It's going to tell you the size of the file. So 75 mb, terms of how long the final video is going to be. Here again, it is saying that it's going to be in 1082 settings. You can change the format a little bit. So if you want to just do video, click this one. If you want to, only the audio click that one. A lot of time I just choose web hosting because a lot of the videos that I create are going to go on the web. So I'm going to click that one depending on which one you click is going to either increase or decrease for file size. And you can potentially change the resolution if you really want to know why you would. And you can just forget about this one because no one ever uses that. You can quickly scrub through the whole track if you want to as well. Click Next. It's going to ask you where you want to save it. And again, if you want to change the name and we know where we're going to save it because we've already made the file. So if we go back to our desktop, final cut deliveries, you can put edit one if you want. Press Save, and then you get what peer you're going to see there's loading thing again. You can click it to open up and sharing. There you go. Depending on the size of your project. It's going to depend on how long it's gonna take to export. Once it's done, we can go over into our deliveries. And there you go. There is your video. There you go. Thanks for watching. Hope you learned a lot. If you have any questions, please do. Let me know down in the comments and you can leave a little comment on anywhere in the videos that you want me to answer, if you would like a more in-depth version of a specific area, like color grading or keyframing in Final Cut Pro, do let me know and I can create another video on that for you. Good luck with your editing and Final Cut Pro. Let me know how it goes. Thanks for watching and hopefully see you soon.