Today, I have a 90-minute class to teach you everything you need to know about Final Cut
Pro.
Hey everyone, David Cox here with Tech Talk America.
Yeah, buckle up.
We've got a very thorough class to go over today.
If you had been wanting to learn the basics of editing, I'm going to teach you everything
you need to know today, and I also have a ton of extras for you at the end of the class.
A couple of quick notes I wanted to share with you before we begin.
First of all, for those of you out there who saw my video that I did on this last year,
I made the little mistake of saying, at the end of the video, that I was going to do a
Part Two.
What I decided to do instead was, basically, instead of a bunch of shorter videos, and
then I ended up incorporating most of those topics into the end of this class.
If you were kind of looking for Part Two of my video from last year, this video will have
all of the extras that I was intending on putting in that video, plus the class, itself.
Also, to help you learn how to use this software, because it is very complex, I've created a
free PDF guide.
It’s available to all of you out there.
If you want to go to my website at TechTalkAmerica.com, there's a new page that I’ve created.
called The Guides.
You can download it for free, right there.
Also, because this is a free class, as with basically all of my classes, I just want to
say something, especially in this class.
The way that I'm able to do this for free is by having ads, so you will notice that
every 15 minutes or so, there will be an ad that will play.
Now, technically, I am not actually allowed to tell you to not click the Skip button.
However, I am allowed to tell you that if you click the Skip button when an ad is playing,
I don't get paid.
Two else little things before we begin; first of all, if you do get stuck with any of this
stuff, one of the things I want you to know is that I do offer remote private lessons
with folks.
I'm able to do it more during certain times of the year, but if you want to find out information
about working with me – I try to keep my prices pretty reasonable – you can find
all the information at TechTalkAmerica.com/privatelessons.
On that subject, just in case any of you out there are watching this class because you're
looking to create your own YouTube channel, working with YouTube content creators is one
of my favorite things to do.
I've been using YouTube as my platform for the last, I think, six years now, and it's
just been an amazing journey.
I love getting to work with other content creators, and help them grow their brands.
If that is something that you're interested in, you'll find information about my consulting
services on that same website I just referenced, TechTalkAmerica.com/privatelessons.
Now, without any further ado, here it is: Final Cut Pro 2018, coming up next on Tech
Talk America.
All right, everyone, I want to start today's class off with going over where you should
consider storing your footage, because you can theoretically keep it on your computer,
or you can move it to something like an external hard drive, and there’s benefits to each.
Let me explain it.
If you decide to keep all of your footage locally, on your computer's hard drive, it
is going to take up a lot of space, so you need to make sure that you have adequate space
to be able to do this, but you're going to find that the whole process goes a lot smoother.
Everything is going to render faster; files in general would just process more quickly;
you'll have less stutter.
It'll be a smoother process.
That being said, a lot of people can't edit locally, because their footage is either just
so giant, it's bigger than the hard drive that you've got.
That's where an external hard drive comes in handy.
Unfortunately, because we live in a world where there are a million different connections
out there, because people at Apple can't make up their mind, as well as other companies.
What I would recommend that you do is, if you don't already have an external drive,
check out my website.
There's a page on TechTalkAmerica.com called Product Recommendations.
Just know that the hard drive quality that you get for something like a Time Machine
backup, yeah, that's great for a backup.
That's not really probably good enough for what we're going to be doing here.
You really want to take whatever is the fastest possible connection from your computer, and
have that be the connection that you use.
If you have Thunderbolt, go with that.
For today's class, what I thought I would do to try to make this class fun, and entertaining
at the same time is I just basically pulled a bunch of my favorite drone footage that
I've taken over the last couple of years, and I just threw it into this folder that
you see on my desktop, called Editing Class.
Now, for those of you who are following along at home, what I do tend to recommend doing
is just take everything that you want to go into that video – graphics, photos, whatever
it is – just dump it all into that folder.
me people like to get even more organized than that.
They like to put their music in a music folder, whatever.
The point here is to just get it all under one umbrella.
Part of the idea here is that if you ever do need to move the project from local to
external, that way it is all self-contained.
One last little note about that process – if you do end up creating a whole project, and
you put it in a folder on your desktop, including, by the way, the Library folder for Final Cut,
and then, one day, move that folder, and everything in- its contents over to an external hard
drive, and then try to open the project from that external hard drive, there is a very
common issue you may run into, where, basically, it’ll temporarily not know where any of
the files are located.
If you should encounter this problem, literally the only thing you have to do to resolve it
is just actually import all of the contents again, and it'll re-link everything, and you'll
be good to go.
That's just a little problem you could encounter at some point down the road that I wanted
to make you aware of now.
Now we're going to screen over here to Final Cut Pro.
I have it open here; we haven't really done anything.
The first thing that I feel like I need to cover in this software is we need to go over
just a couple of quick definitions.
We have three different levels of hierarchy – we have a library, we have an event, and
we have a project.
Let me give you the little rundown on each of these.
The library is basically the file that just contains all of Final Cut Pro’s data.
This file does tend to get to be pretty big, so, when you're choosing where to save that
file, you want to save it within that self-contained file, which I'm going to do right now.
I'm going to go here to the very top of Final Cut.
Go to File, and you'll see here we have New, and we have a couple of different options
here.
The first one we have to do is library, in this case.
I'm just going to name, in this case, the library the name ‘Demo.’
I'm going to locate it in that same folder that I created just a little bit ago.
From here.
what we're going to do is we're going to start to create events.
In one case, an event can be a scene; in another case, it could be basically the entire video.
A lot of times, when I'm creating video content, I tend to gravitate towards shorter formats,
so, for me, usually my event is the same thing as, really, the project, which I'll go over
in a moment.
Let's next create an event, so File > New > Event, and we can call it whatever we want.
In this case, just to keep a consistent, I'm going to just call it Demo.
You will notice that there is a button here to also create a new project.
What is a project file, you ask?
A project file is the specific edit.
For example, you could have a library for a movie, and you could have different projects.
For example, you could have a director's cut.
It's the same content, but it's different edits.
That would be just one example of it.
In this case, I'm going to tell it to create a new project.
What it's going to do is it's going to set the quality based on the first clip.
Now, sometimes, that's a good thing; sometimes, that's a bad thing.
For example, with my drones – it’s the footage you'll see – some of my footage
is in 4K; some of it is in 1080p.
Now, I want the video to look as good as it can, so, I'm going to tell it to ignore this
setting, and I'm going to go here, where it says Use Custom Settings, so I can tell it
exactly what format I want it to be.
In this case, we're going to go away from 1080p, and I'm going to go to 4K.
Just one thing you should be aware of, and I'm sure a lot of you do know this, if you
are shooting things in 4K, the file size, it is amazing at how it balloons up, so, just
be prepared for that.
Okay, looks good.
We got a resolution.
We got a frame rate.
If you don't know anything about frame rate, basically.
the faster the frame rate, the more it's going to look a little bit like a soap opera.
For me, it's a little bit too smooth.
My sweet spot has always been 24p.
That's just the rate that I find looks really good.
Let's hit Okay.
At this point, we are good to now begin the process of importing our footage.
Like with many things in Apple world, there are different ways that you can [deal with
00:09:16] these things; there's a lot of shortcuts.
This is where that little page that I have for you, included with the PDF guide with
all the shortcuts, will help you.
If you want to import footage, a little shortcut way is Command + I.
Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just pointed towards – it's actually already
done for me.
That’s not bad – towards that folder that I have of all of my content, and I'm just
going to tell it to import everything.
If you notice here, on this side …
Okay, let’s go over a few things here.
Files.
Just check this out; make sure that it's good on your place, so you can either copy it to
the library, or leave the files in place.
Actually, I'm glad I did this because I want it to leave those files in place, because
the thing is, if you copy it to the library, now you're creating duplicates, so your file
size there just doubled, just with that one click.
Keywords … We're not going to really talk a lot about keywords today.
There are plenty of other people out there, who deal with setting up keywords for your
video files.
I think it's actually rather straightforward.
We're going to skip over that.
You'll see here, there are also a bunch of other options to just kind of automatically
analyze certain aspects of your video.
I tend to not really go with any of them.
I'm just going to, at this point, hit Import All.
The next thing I want to do is I want to go through what these various windows are; what
they do.
Some of these are going to end up getting closed over time.
One thing you'll notice is, if you go to the Advanced Keyboard Shortcuts PDF that I'm going
to make available for you all on TechTalkAmerica.com, there is a little section here with shortcuts
for just how to quickly get to, and close- open or close any of these various windows.
Let's start here at the top left; this top left quadrant is referred to as the browser,
and the browser contains a few different things.
Here at the top of the list, we have the library called Demo.
Underneath that, you'll see we have our event called Demo.
Now, here to the right of that, you'll see we have all of the footage.
This is everything that we just imported.
There are two different ways that you can view this screen.
You can either view it in this mode, which is actually referred to as Filmstrip Mode,
or you can view it in List mode.
I find List mode is better if you are, let's say, working with a client who is giving you
time code.
They're saying, “Okay, from this second to this second, we want this part of the footage.”
To get to the other view, if you look up here towards the top, you can click over here,
and switch over.
You can see, now, with each of my various shots, I can see the start time, stop time,
duration, all that stuff.
If you need that kind of information, that might be a better view, but, for today, we're
going to be sticking here to Filmstrip Mode.
The next tab that you'll see over here, we're not going to go over a lot, but I do want
to reference it.
The first thing you'll see here is a connection to get into photos.
If you have albums, for example, already created within the app, known as Photos, you could
theoretically drag and drop those photos from there into here.
The reason why, again, I don't recommend doing that is because if you ever need to come back
to the edit, down the road, if you have ever deleted those photos, those files are now
going to be unavailable.
I tend to recommend, if you are going to take some photos from the Photos app, what I would
do is export them out of Photos into your folder that you're going to be using, and
keep them that way, so that way, they're separate.
You also see here we have a direct connection into GarageBand, iTunes.
If you ever need sound effects for your little videos, one thing to note, your Mac actually
comes packed with a ton of different sound effects.
Oops, didn't mean to do that … If you ever need a sound effect, it's worth going through
here.
You never know, you just might find something.
Then, the last have that we have here is definitely a pretty fun tab, when you start to get into
some of the extra stuff that you can do here.
We have Titles, and Generators.
The next place I want to show you … Actually, before I do that, I’m going to switch back
over here to the library.
The next window we're going to talk about is right here in the middle.
This is your preview window.
Basically, whatever video it is you are currently working on, that's what it looks like.
Then, over here on the right, this is referred to as the Inspector.
The Inspector, you'll notice … If you look up here at the top, see how we have these
three icons right here?
You’re really going to ever close the middle one there, but you'll see … This is the
browser.
You see there- see, it's there; it's gone.
Why I like that- to point that out, is that when you're editing, once you've imported
all of your footage, and you're actually starting to work with it, it's kind of nice to hide
that screen so that you just have a little bit more space to work with.
Again, your ability to open or close the Inspector, you'll see, is right here.
The Inspector is basically just information about whatever it is you're clicked on.
In this case, it looks like I'm clicked on an audio clip.
Show me the audio information.
If I'm clicked on a video clip, it's going to give me the information for that particular
video.
We'll go into that a lot more, coming up in a bit.
Down here at the bottom half, basically, of the screen, this is referred to as the Timeline.
This is the area where the actual edit is going to take place.
Two other quick places, just to show you where they are; we're going to go back over them
in more depth, later.
Here at the very right-hand side of my screen is this little bow-tie icon.
That is going to open up this window here, which is your Transitions.
If you need something like a cross-dissolve, or you need it to flash white between scenes,
that’s where you can go to get that.
One over, these are your effects.
We're going to go over a few effects here.
That's going to be more than, I think, covered in the little bonus section that I have for
you.
Thanks for watching folks.
We have a lot more.
We'll be right back.
At this point, what we're going to do is start to process our footage.
We've imported everything into the event.
Now, we need to tell Final Cut Pro what parts of these various clips to actually bring into
the timeline.
There are a couple of keystrokes that I want to show you here to help make this process
very easy.
Let me use this clip here to begin with.
First of all, you should know that Play and Pause is typically always the spacebar.
If I hit the spacebar right now.
you can see it’s kind of playing a little preview of my clip.
One thing to be aware of when you're editing, it's not going to actually play back at the
full resolution.
You'll see that when the video is done, but when you're just kind of playing things back,
don't expect to see it at full quality.
When you you're going through here, and you're looking for your shot … Let's pause after
we switch to the next shot.
Let's say I want to tell it to start this shot right here.
At this point, what I'm going to do is I’m going to tap the “I” key on my keyboard.
What that does is we are setting an endpoint.
We're saying, “Start the shot here.”
I want to make something really clear to folks – you do not need to nail it, okay?
You just have to be relatively close.
If you're a few frames off, you can always correct it later.
Now that we've set our endpoint, I'm going to hit the spacebar so that it keeps playing.
Let’s say I want the shot to end right there.
I'm going to tap the “O” key, and that sets the outpoint.
If you actually look here, you'll see we have a little yellow bar [around 16:53].
That's kind of a visual representation of our clip.
At this point, we want to bring it from here to down here.
Of course, there's a couple of ways that you can do it.
You could theoretically drag it, and drop it, but the way that I tend to do it a lot
more these days is with shortcut keys.
There are three different ways that you can bring it here into your timeline.
The one that I use by far the most, especially when I'm just starting to process my footage,
is the “E” key.
What the “E” key will do is it'll put it at the end.
Because this is the first shot that we're bringing, the end and the beginning are in
the same place, but as you can see here, when I tap the “E” key, it brings it down here
to the bottom.
One of the things you'll notice about this space down here is that you can kind of zoom
into it.
If I need to blow it up, I can ... I'm using, right now, my touchpad, in order to do this,
but I can also pull backwards, kind of pinching my fingers together, and it zooms back.
This is where, if you do have the Apple magic trackpad, I tend to think it's a really nice
feature, especially for editing.
The “E” key brings it to the end of the project.
Let's go over what a couple of the other ones are there.
Let's find another shot.
I'm going to hit the spacebar.
You can see my cursor is back up in the browser here.
I'll hit the “I” key right there.
That's a nice little shot of the breakwater.
You know what?
I actually went a couple of frames too far, there.
One thing that's good to know is that you can use the left and right arrows to go back,
one frame at a time.
There we go.
We have the very end of that shot.
Now, I’m going to tap the “O” key.
This time, instead of hitting the “E” key to send it to the end of the project,
I want to do something different.
I'm going to show you this feature here, knowing that it's going to not look good.
You'll see that we have this little yellow bar here.
I'm able to move around.
That bar is referred to as the play head.
It's just showing me, again, where in the edit are we.
I'm going to very specifically put the play head in the middle of this shot.
The second import key that we're talking about … We already talked about “E,” which
brings it to the end.
The next key is the “W” key.
What that will do is it's going to basically split this clip apart, and it's going to insert
it.
Starting to see why I never, ever use that feature?
At this point, I'm going to undo.
If you didn't know that, undo is Command + “Z.”
You should know that by now.
The final way that you can import a shot is to use the “Q” key.
What that's going to do is it's going to actually make it a B-roll shot.
If you're not familiar with this terminology, think about it this way: you know when you're
watching the news, and then they show you the file footage, but you still hear the reporter?
That's an example of B-roll.
You still have your primary story going on, here, but then you cut to other footage.
You can still hear everything else, but you just see whatever else that you put on top
of it.
If I hit the “Q” key, watch this.
You'll see it puts it above the shot.
The original clip is, technically speaking, still here, but as soon as you hit this point,
you're not going to see it, because this shot is on top of it.
Video, it is layered, so that the layers that are higher to the top, obviously, are the
ones that you’re going to see.
Part of why I like to bring that up is, as you're going through the edit process, and
obviously, right now, we only have two shots, but as you go through the process of editing,
you can definitely have moments where you have a little pyramid of shots going here.
I get people all the time asking me, “Do I need to worry about those shots that are
below?”
For example, this clip right here, it goes from this shot to this shot.
This part of this shot, it's pretty pointless.
Do we need to clean it up?
No.
You don't need to worry about it; it's not taking up any more space.
The idea here is, as long as the final product looks good, that's pretty much all accounts.
Don't worry about getting everything perfectly stacked, so that it's just visually perfect,
from an editor standpoint.
As long as your video looks good in the end, that is all that truly matters.
At this point, what I'm going to do, folks, is I'm going to basically repeat that process
over, and over again.
I'm going to go through all of this footage here, find all of my endpoints, set my out
points, and then, bring it into my timeline, and when you come back, it’ll be magically
done.
I've gone through.
I've kind of isolated my initial shots here.
I’m ready to show you some of some additional tricks.
I want to show you, if you kind of focus in right here, this is a very common thing that
you'll run into.
Let me just play it, so you can see what happens.
Watch the preview screen.
Did you see that quick clip there?
That, obviously, wasn't supposed to be there.
The way that that quick shot there … The way it got there in the first place was when
I was setting my endpoint, I set it just a little bit too early.
Now, what I want to do is I want to crop that part out.
This segment is referred to as trimming.
The way you can trim – it's very easy – is you just click on the clip … You’ll notice
… See, right now, the way I have it, see how the icon looks like that, and it's kind
of pointed a little bit to the right?
What that means is if I click down, and drag just a little bit to the right, it's going
to crop that out.
We're dragging it back in time, trimming out that shot; as opposed to, if I move my cursor
just a little bit over here to the left, see how it switched just like that?
What that means is that now, we're going to be trimming the other shot on the reverse
end.
That's just the 101 on trimming.
The next thing we're going to do – this is really just to set up the next technique
I want to teach you – I'm going to add the music, at this point, to this video.
If I go here into my little media bin.
I can scroll down to the bottom.
You'll see music/audio; it's usually either green or blue.
You can just then drag it down, and you'll see, I'm going to put it actually below the
video.
One thing to know about, by the way, music is it sticks to a shot.
See this?
I don't know if you can see this.
See how that little green dot right there?
That means that this is attached, right now, to this shot.
For example, if I delete that shot, boom, the audio deletes with it.
If you ever encounter that little problem, just know either how to just bump the music
back to another shot, and then you can always delete your clip, whatever it is.
That's actually not what I was trying to set up, but I am glad I went over that with you.
Now, the real thing that I want to show you is something that I know a lot of people encounter,
and I want to show you how to get around it, because this is going to drive you nuts, otherwise.
Pretend with me, if you will.
Let's say this video is maybe a little further than it actually is, and I've got these different
clips kind of synced to different points in the song that's playing below.
If I go ahead, and delete one of these shots right now … Let me just delete this shot;
let's say it's out of place.
If I delete it, watch what happens to all of the shots that are after it.
See how they kick back like that?
Well, sometimes, you're going to inevitably want that to happen, and sometimes, you're
not going to want that to happen.
I'm going to undo that, and I want to show you how to prevent that from happening.
There's actually two different ways – it depends, ultimately, on what you're doing.
If you are actually deleting the shot, like I was just doing right now, here's a little
trick.
Instead of hitting the Delete key, what you're going to do is you're going to hold the Function
key on your keyboard, and then tap Delete.
Check out what happens.
What it replaces it with is basically a black screen.
Now, if I play it, we've got this shot … Whoops, sorry.
Didn’t mean to have the audio on.
We got that shot.
It goes black, but the idea here is that all of these other shots are still locked to the
same time code.
They match up with the music.
I mentioned there is another way to do this.
Let me undo that for a moment.
All right, let's say I want to … Maybe I don't want to delete this clip, I just want
to move it to somewhere else.
At this point, I want to just basically introduce you to my own terminology, because if I went
through the actual stuff, I think it's fairly confusing, all right?
I'm going to just refer this as A Mode and P Mode.
A Mode is the mode where, as I first showed you here, when I delete it, everything bumps
back.
If you wanted to do that, all you have to do is tap the letter “A.” Now.
I'm going to undo that.
If I want to just simply move that out, and not have everything else after it shift back,
that's where you go into P Mode, technically.
I believe it's, if I remember, it’s Position Mode.
What is it?
Yep, it is!
Hey, I was right!
It is Position Mode.
Watch this.
I tapped the letter P. Now, I drag this clip out, and see, it's preserved the time code.
Everything's there, and I can just move my shot from one point to another.
Now, if I want to drop it between these two shots, like right here, I would have to first
drop it on top, then tap the “A” key, so that it switches back to the other mode,
and then I can drop it in, and it shifts everything else over.
The next technique I want to show you is Splicing, also known as Blade, also known as Cut.
Whatever your preference is, let me show you how to do it.
There's actually a couple of different ways to create a cut.
Let's say I want to create a cut right here at this moment.
One way that I can do it is I can simply tap the “B” key.
Just think “B” for Blade.
You'll notice that my cursor turns into the icon of a little razor blade.
Ouch.
All I have to do is click, and you can see here, it has now separated that clip into
two clips.
Another way that you can do it a little bit faster, and allows you to keep in the arrow
mode, is you can just hit Command + “B.” The other thing that’s nice about this is
that that also is, by the way, how to do it in iMovie.
If you knew some of the hotkeys in iMovie, if you took my class, perhaps, you will be
happy to know that quite a few of those do translate over to Final Cut; not all of them,
but a good amount of them.
I hope you're enjoying the class.
We'll be right back after this brief commercial break.
The next couple of techniques that I want to show you all have to deal with audio.
what I'm going to do right now is just kind of temporarily hide the project that we were
working on, and I'm just going to open up a blank one.
I'm actually just going to import the opening to my last video that I did for Tech Talk
America.
In this segment, what I want to do is I want to teach you just basically a whole bunch
of different techniques having to deal with audio.
The first thing I want to do is I want to show you just a great visual tool that you
can use to help identify where you might have some issues with your audio.
A common issue with audio is peaking.
That's where you have maybe … I'm just going to give you an example here.
Maybe you're doing an interview, and someone sneezes in the background, right?
It's not related to your subject matter, so, what you would want to do is you'd probably
want to dip the audio for that sneeze, and then very quickly bring it back up so that
the audience doesn't even really notice it.
In order to identify, visually, where those key points are, I want to show you a little
trick here.
We're going to go over to the right-hand side of my screen.
We've already talked about a couple of these little icons, but we're going to go and talk
about this little filmstrip icon.
These are your visual settings.
For example, this first slide bar here, I don't really need, because of the fact that
I have a trackpad on my computer.
I can just spread my fingers apart, in order to zoom in or out of the timeline.
The one that I really want to show you here is the second one, right here.
Technically, this is the third item down, but it's the second slider.
This is the size of your clip.
Check it out.
As I bring it up to the right, see how, now, if you look over here – this little segment
right here – see how it goes into the yellow zone there?
Actually, I'll just make a little adjustment.
Okay, now it looks really bad.
See how, now, you can really see that?
Watch this.
If I move it back to the way it was, it's a little bit harder to be able to catch those
little moments, where it does peak out, so, this is a good little trick to be aware of.
Now what we're going to do, is we're going to talk about how to make adjustments to the
audio, itself.
I'm going to start with a very bulk one, which is just how to adjust the volume for the entire
clip.
There are two different ways to do this, and it is important that you know both, because
sometimes, one technique is going to work better for you than the other.
The first way – and, by the way, if you did iMovie, it's the same way – see this
little thin blue bar that's running through the clip?
You can grab that with your cursor, and you can simply drag it up or down.
You can see, right now, it’s lowering it by eight decibels.
If I bring it up, now it's up by four.
Here's the point that I want to make: see how every time I move it, it's a full increment;
it's a full decibel?
If you want to get in there, and make some little bit more refined changes to it, here's
how you do that.
First of all, you’ve got to make sure that you're clicked on the clips, so you've got
that little yellow border around it.
Then what we're going to do is we're going to go up here to the Inspector, and I want
you to notice where we are.
We have four different icons here at the top.
We have a filmstrip.
We have a little triangle – that's color correction; we'll get there later, and, right
now, we're talking about the Audio Inspector.
Right up here at the very top, this is our volume adjuster.
Watch this.
If I click and drag here, see how now I can make much, much more refined corrections;
instead of just going just from two to three, I can get it somewhere nice, there in the
middle.
The next technique that I want to show you here – something you're probably going to
use potentially even more than that – is how to make those little dip moments that
I was just referring to a moment ago, like if someone sneezes in the background.
Right now, let's just take … Let's actually use this part right here.
Let me zoom in.
Let's just pretend that this little part of audio, where you see it kind of peaks out
here, pretend that's a sneeze.
I'm going to create that exact dip that I was just referring to.
The first thing you're going to do is you're going to put your play head just before the
incident takes place.
Make sure you’re clicked on the clip so that it's highlighted.
Now what we're going to do is we're going to use a feature called Keyframes, in order
to make this very refined correction.
Now keyframes are something that you can use in audio, but you can also use them in video,
for things like animation.
If you want text to start off here, and then move here, and then move there, that's how
you do it.
It's all through keyframes.
Let's talk about how to do it.
We're going to go up here to the Inspector, and you'll notice, if I put my cursor over
this area, if I take it away, it disappears.
You see that little diamond icon right there?
That is the Keyframe.
What we're going to do is I'm going to give you the instructions for how to do this first,
and then I'm going to do it with you, because it can be a little confusing.
When you're making keyframe adjustments, this is the order.
You start off with placing your play head where you want the transition to begin.
In this case, right there.
Then you're going to add a keyframe, adjust the play head to where you want the transition
to end, which, for this kind of thing, is probably only going to be about one or two
frames out.
Then, you make the adjust … I’m sorry, after that, you make another keyframe, and
then make your correction.
In this case, it would be lowering the volume.
Let's actually do it right now.
I have my play head where I want it to be.
I'm going to now add a keyframe.
I'm going to now tap the right arrow on my keyboard, so that it just goes ahead one frame.
Sorry, forgot the speakers were on.
I just hit the arrow once, so that it just goes one frame ahead.
Now, we're going to add another keyframe.
It might be a little hard to see there, but there are actually two diamond little icons
there, on my timeline.
Now, I'm going to make that adjustment.
I'm going to take the audio levels, and I'm going to bring them down.
You don’t want to bring it down to zero, because that's just going to sound like a
glitch.
I'm just going to bring it down to the point where it's kind of, you know, good … Minimal.
Okay, we've got a right there.
Now, all we have to do is we've got to make the same adjustment going the opposite way.
Let's move our play head to just after the incident, and we're going to create a keyframe;
hit the right arrow, so we move ahead one frame.
Sorry, I was not clicked on the clip … One frame ahead, create another keyframe, and,
now, let's increase the volume.
See?
We just created that little dip, and no one even knows that there was a problem in the
first place.
Next technique that we're going over is how to fade your audio.
Let's go back to the beginning of this clip.
If you look here on the left-hand side, you'll see I have this little blue dot.
If I put my cursor on it, I can click it, drag it, and bring it to the right.
What it’s doing is it's creating a curve.
What it’s showing me, in this case, is that it's going to take one second – that's one
second – to go from zero volume to the maximum volume.
You can use that for either fading in, or fading out any audio.
The next technique is simply how to separate the audio from the video, so that you can
independently manipulate it however you want.
In order to do this, all you have to do is secondary click on your clip.
You'll see here, it's the third option down to detach audio, so that now … Let's say
I want to get rid of the video … I’m just going to mute it.
I can keep my audio.
Maybe it just becomes voice over, and I can put something else visually on the screen.
The next technique I want to show you is how to disable a clip.
Now, this applies to either video or audio.
Right now, I'm going to show you in the context of audio, because, frankly, that's probably
how I use it more than anything.
When I'm creating one of my little drone videos for Droning Provincetown, a lot of times,
I'll have several different pieces of music that I want to just see how each sounds with
the visuals that it's paired with.
Rather than having to bring in a song, and then delete it, and then bring in another
song, and delete it, this is where disabling can be a very good feature.
For example, here I've got one track that I was thinking about using, but what I'm going
to do is I'm just going to drag it here into the time.
I’m putting it below … Sorry, there we go … Just below my audio is my dialogue.
Okay, now, let's grab another piece of audio, and let’s put that right below.
Let’s go right in there.
Obviously, if I was to play this right now, it would be a big mess, because both of these
would be playing at the same time.
This is where disabling can be a really good trick.
What I might consider doing is I might click on one, and then disable it.
The shortcut to disabling any clip is the letter “V.” You don't have to hit command.
It's just the letter “V,” and you'll see it kind of grays it out.
It's still there, but we're just ... It's muted, basically.
When you're editing, you don't have to worry about deleting clips that are disabled.
They don't add, or really remove anything from your project.
The next technique I want to show you is how to add a transition between two shots.
In order to do this, we're going to go to our Transitions browser, over here on the
right-hand side; the little bow tie icon.
You'll see a bunch of the different ones here that come with your Mac.
There are, of course, a bunch of different third-party transitions that you can always
buy.
I'm going to cover a couple of those at the end of this class, but, for now, we're going
to use the most commonly used transition, which is cross-dissolve.
What I'm going to do is I can drag this from here, either between two shots, or if I were
to actually do it at the beginning of my project, it's just going to fade it in from black.
If you need to change the duration, all you have to do is put your cursor at either – depending
on where you have it – either the beginning, or the end of it, and just drag it to the
left or right.
For example, right now, you can see here it's going to take a little bit over two seconds
to transition from total darkness to my shot.
All right, folks, the next thing I want to show you is how to add a title to your video.
We're going to be putting text on the screen.
Here's the thing, there's a couple of different options that you have in regards to doing
this.
You can either put text on top of your video, so you could put … I'm going to end up doing
that for you first, here.
If I want to say, “A David A. Cox Film,” while the video is playing behind it, that's
one option.
Another option is if you want to add it, and you just want it to have a black background
– very, very common.
The third option would be if you want to put text over something like a still image, like
a still background, like a solid color, or a pattern, something like that.
Then yet another option is to have something like an animated background, maybe bubbles,
or something like that in the background.
I want to show you how to do each of these, so let's start with just doing the overlay.
What I'm going to do is, here, at the browser window, we're going to go to the third tab
over, the one with the little “T.” Here, you will see all the different title options.
I'm going to be showing you the basics of this now, but I want to just make a little
note that I'm going to show you how to take this part to the next level, in the end of
the video, because the thing is that a lot of these little things that they have, they're
cute; they're fine.
The basic title one, I have to say, is probably the title that I use the most of the ones
that do come with the Mac.
The reality is, is that if you use like boogie lights here, everyone who's ever used iMovie
has seen this effect.
If you want your video to really stand out, really look professional, if it is a kind
of … That's the video you're going for, if you're going for professional, one of the
easiest ways that you can take this to the next level is to add a graphics package.
I'm going to show you how to do that; again, that's at the end of the class.
For now, let's just do an overlay.
I'm going to just grab this one right here, a basic title, and I'm just going to drag
it and drop it on top of my shot.
You can see it's represented by this purple bar.
Now, in this case, right now, you can see it's actually going a little bit too far.
See how it kind of bleeds into that second shot?
If I want to adjust the timing of it, I can grab either side of it, and I can just drag
it left or right.
The next way to add a title – let me delete that one – would be to just put it over
a black background.
Maybe this time, instead, I want it to start on just a black screen, say, “David A. Cox
Film,” and then open to the shot.
The way that you would do that is you grab, again, whichever title it is you want.
We’ll just do a Fade 3D.
I'm going to just take that, but this time, instead of dragging it above, I want you to
see this.
You can drag it above a shot, but you can also drop it between shots … For example,
if I were to put it there, see how everything spreads apart?
Well, now, we're just going to do that at the very beginning.
Text can either float above footage, or you can have it be the shot.
I don't think I need to put the text in for that yet.
Let me show you the other methods here.
The other version that I mentioned here was some sort of a background.
For that, if you look over here, see, we have titles up here.
Then, down below here, we have generators.
Generators are a combination of still images, and animated.
For example, one cheesy one they have here is clouds, so you can make it look like you're
flying.
By the way, if you want to see the animation play, the way that you can do it is you just
basically put your cursor over this space, wherever it is – here's drifting, the bubbles
one – and just tap the spacebar, and you'll see the actual movement of it.
Another thing that can be handy in generators is we have a place holder.
Sometimes, you just want to kind of make a note, as an editor, that you have a shot that's
going to be going there.
Maybe you have the audio, but you don't have the video.
You can just throw this there, and it's just a note to swap it out eventually.
All right, if you want to add text over any of these things, all you basically have to
do … I'll do the glimmer one, here.
You just drag this first into your timeline … Let me put it at the very beginning.
Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to just screen over like that.
Sometimes, I have a tendency to do that.
I just put it here.
Now, if I play it, you'll see it's playing that little animation.
Then, I'd have to go back up here to Titles, and grab you know whatever title I really
did want, and then drag it over, and lay it on top of that layer.
Another thing I want to go over about this is rendering.
Jere you can see I've just kind of added … I swapped out the generic text with just my
name, and you'll now notice that it has, above the clip, all of these little purple dots.
What those dots indicate is that that shot is not yet rendered.
Basically, your computer has to process certain types of shots more thoroughly.
These would include shots that have text, animation of any kind, different generators,
backgrounds, when you add certain types of special effects.
This is a very common thing that you're going to encounter.
Now, by default, I believe your Mac will actually begin rendering if you don't touch your cursor
for a few seconds, but, for me, I really like my computer to constantly be rendering.
The way that you get to the setting for this is you're going to go to where it says Final
Cut Pro at the very top.
Go under Preferences.
Here, you'll see we have a tab for Playback.
That's where we are right now.
It's this very first option right here.
Rendering, you want that checked, and you can start it as soon as 0.2 seconds.
In general, rendering times are going to be one of the things that will be the most dramatic,
as far as whether or not they are fast, or slow, depending on if you are editing your
content locally, or editing on an external hard drive.
Now, I want to show you how to actually manipulate the text in the first place.
I'm going to show you a couple of things here.
Let's start with just adding a basic animation.
I'm going to do a fade title here.
I do want it to be animated, in this particular case.
I've added it to my shot, and, as of right now.
it says Title in the middle of the screen.
That's not quite what we want.
If we click on it – it's got to be highlighted – go over here to the Inspector … You'll
see we have all of these different tabs.
In this particular case, because there is an animation involved, there is this particular
tab, which is the Title Inspector.
Let's say, for example, I didn't want the text to actually fade in, for whatever reason.
I could uncheck this option here.
If I wanted to change the direction where it was coming from … Right now it's going
… It's a forwards-fading title.
Let’s see what that looks like.
If I want to reverse it, I can just go in here, and go backwards, so, now it looks like
that.
See I’ve just reversed that?
All of your different animation options are basically right here.
Next, let's go over here to the Text Inspector.
This is where we're going to actually go to change the text that we see reflected right
here.
Now, depending on which of these little title templates you use, sometimes – in this case,
you actually can – sometimes, you can actually double-click in this space, and you can just
type it yourself.
If you want to position it, you can just drag it where you want.
However, that's not always the case, so I'm going to still show you the manual way to
do this.
I put it in my title.
We’ll just leave it the way it is for now.
If you want to change the font, which is usually a good idea, since Helvetica is slightly overused,
you can click here, and, of course, have access to all of your fonts.
If I may give you a slight tip, at this point, in general, I would say it's probably a good
idea to go with a font that did not come with your Mac.
If you want it to look a little bit different, I think that's usually a good thing.
A couple of other things that we have here … Of course, we have some basic formatting
options right here.
Those should all look very familiar to you.
The manual way that you can reposition the text – this is, again, the way that I really
want you to learn – is right here.
We have your X, Y, and Z axes.
In this case, it's not 3D, so Z isn’t going to really do anything, but what I can do is
if I … Let's say I want to put that text in the bottom left corner.
What I can do is I can click in here.
See where it says “0?”
I can click in this area, and then just drag down on my cursor.
I don't have to actually guess the number; I can literally just figure it out as I go.
Let's say right there, and now I release.
Now, let’s change the Y axis, and let's go down … Let's just say we'll leave it
right there.
If I wanted to change the rotation, scale, any of that stuff, you can see those options
right there.
If I wanted to make this 3D text, all I would have to do is literally click this box.
There are a whole bunch of different other options that would then pop up, as far as
the texture, and what material does it appear to be made of.
Just all of those options, I'll just show you real quickly.
You can see here.
we can change the lighting style, the intensity, environment, material, substance, blah blah
blah.
Let me just uncheck that for now.
Also, the big one I really wanted to mention here were outline, and drop shadow.
One of the reasons why I wanted to just mention this is that, if you don't have at least a
slight outline, or a little bit of a drop shadow, it can sometimes be a little hard
to read it, if the color of your text is the same as the background.
Also, I just want to mention, if you check, for example, drop shadow, see over here on
the right-hand side, it says “Show?”
I have to click on that to change the various parameters here.
If I want to change the distance of the shadow, the opacity, all those different options you'll
find here.
Each one of these little options here has their own options, there.
I got one more title trick for you here.
A lot of times when you're dealing with titles, many times, you need more than just one of
that type.
Especially if you go through, and you make all your little changes to make it look just
the way you want.
It's a pain in the butt to have to do it again, and again, every single time.
Here's a really easy way to duplicate a title, once you get it the way you want it.
All you have to do is, on your keyboard, you're going to hold down the Option key, and then
you can click, and move whatever title it is.
You can either move it to the right, or the left.
Just see, when I do, ta-da, there are two, just like that.
Just hold the Option key, and drag it either way.
Now, if I wanted to duplicate this one, check it out: hold Option, move it to the right,
boom, I got another one.
See, isn’t that cool?
Hope you're still enjoying the class.
We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.
All right, folks, at this point, what I'm going to do is tackle the very broad topic
of special effects.
I'm going to give you a couple of different tools that I think are going to make this
process a lot easier for you, and a bunch of advice, I think, to also help with this
process.
Here's the thing, there's a bunch of effects that come with your Mac.
Some of them are good, but the thing is that if you really want to take your abilities
as a content creator, as a video producer, or whatever it is that you call yourself,
to the next level, you really need to get some third-party plug-ins.
Now, the thing is, they're not really all that expensive.
As a tool, I think they're just really incredible.
I'm also going to give you a couple of tips for how you can basically add a bunch of effects
to a shot, and then duplicate those effects on different shots, so you really only have
to do it once, and get it pretty close.
Then, you can apply it to a whole bunch of different shots, and then, if you need to,
you can always make little refinement corrections as you go.
We’re going to be using this shot, here, as an example.
This is actually a completely autonomous shot that I did with my DJI Mavic Air.
This is, I think, actually one of my- my second flight I did with it.
I just basically tapped on the crashed boat here, and said, “Fly away.”
It just takes off on its own, and does this little reveal shot.
That's the footage the way it is, raw, out of the camera.
We're going to add a couple of effects to just make this look a little bit more cinematic.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go over here, on the right-hand side of the screen,
to the Effects browser, or you can do Command + 5, if you're into hotkeys.
There are a whole bunch of different effects, as you can see, right here, that come with
your Mac.
Not all of the ones you see here on my screen are the ones that are default, but these are,
by no means, even close to how many effects that I actually have.
One of the things about effects packages is that when you apply them to Final Cut Pro,
they're per user.
They're not for the entire computer.
This right here that we're on, right now, is my demo account.
My real account has quite a bit more than this.
The ones that I wanted to show you … Right off the bat, one very, very simple effect
that I think will immediately make your videos look far more professional is the Vignette
feature.
I can just type here, into the little Search feature, or I could just go through it … V-I-G-N-E-T-T-E.
You’ll see I have a couple of different options here.
In this case, I'm going to use this, and watch this – as I cursor over here, it immediately
shows me what my shot is going to look like, if I skim through here, with that effect.
Now, if you are editing your footage externally, it might not load that quite so quickly, so
don't get frustrated, if that's the situation you're in.
What I'm going to do now, to apply this, is I'm going to just drag it, and drop it onto
my shot.
With any effect that you use, any effect that you drag onto a shot, you're always going
to go up here to the Inspector, in order to make changes to it.
Some effects are just going to be located here, under the Video Inspector, but others
are going to have other tabs up here.
Depending on what kind of effect it is that you're going for, just know that everywhere
that you need to go, in order to make the little refinement corrections to it, all of
that is going to be located up here in the Inspector.
In this case, for the vignette, we can adjust the amount of blur that we have.
We can choose, you know, where is the falloff for this vignette?
I can darken it, or I can lighten it.
If I want to make it a little bit more subtle, I could just do that.
I actually kind of like a good amount of vignette, so, we'll do that.
Then, the other effects that I wanted to just talk about briefly in here … One important
one that I know a lot of people care about is I wanted to talk a little bit about keying.
A keyer is when you have an actor, typically in front of a green screen.
You want to delete the background, and put something else behind them.
It could be a still image.
It could be a video.
It could be some sort of an animation that loops.
Whatever it is, this is the tool that you're most likely going to use, unless you go with
a third-party keyer.
I've actually had pretty good success with the keyer that comes built in with the Mac.
I do have a third-party one, which I’ve occasionally used.
I really don't green screen a lot anymore, because I just tend to prefer more of a live
format.
Anyways, that's the tool that you're going to go to.
If you needed to do this, you’re going to actually see it's attempting to actually add
it to the shot.
Watch this: if I put this clip right below, you'll see … Let’s see if I can give you
a little preview, here.
No … If you look at the water … Well, watch this: we can apply it to this shot.
It's going to make no sense … See the water?
See how it’s now kind of clear there?
That's basically what a keyer is, right there.
If I wanted to adjust the strength, all of the different options are right up here.
Just know, any effect that you add, you're going to make all of your little adjustments
up here.
That's little bit of keying.
Let's move that shot back.
The next thing I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about color correction, and some
of the things that you can do.
Again, one of the major tools that I use that actually ends up dealing with color correction
does not come with Final Cut.
We’ll go over it at the end.
Let's apply it to the shot.
That's okay.
We're going to go over here towards the middle of the screen.
You'll see there's a little magic wand icon.
If I click on the little arrow next to it, we have three options that show up.
We have Balance Color, which is just … It does its own thing.
I don't ever use this tool, and I'm not going to really go over it.
Match Color – Match Color is really handy, if you are in a situation where maybe you
have an actor or actors, and you're shooting with more than one camera, but the cameras
are different.
It's inevitable that the colors might look a little bit different on one camera.
What you can basically do with this tool is you just click it, and you will just kind
of, with your cursor, click on another shot, and it will attempt to match the color profile-
the lighting profile from one to the other, so it just makes them look like they're the
same.
All right, the next one is the Color Inspector.
That's the one that we're actually going to go over right now, or if you're into hotkeys,
this is Command + 6 to get into this.
There's a couple of different ways that you can deal with color correction.
If you look up here at the top, we have this little arrow.
We can access a Color Board, which is what you are looking at right now, in the background.
This is the one that people have been using for the longest.
A Color Wheel is relatively new.
This is a little bit of a different way that you can deal with adjusting the colors.
Your Color Curves, this is dealing with the Luma, the reds, greens, blues, all that good
stuff; and your Saturation Levels, your hue and saturation curves.
The one that I really want to talk about more than anything is just the Color Board, because
I think it's probably the one that most people are going to end up using.
Within this, we have three different options.
We have Color, Saturation, and Exposure.
Each of these categories has their own master levels, shadows, mid-tones, and highlights.
Really, here, what you just want to do is you just want to adjust, and get it to the
way that you want.
In this case, I'll just add a little bit just so you can see what they do.
See, if you add too much saturation, it just- well, it looks fake, and areas of the screen
that are red just really don't look so good.
Your mid-tones give it maybe a little boost there, and my highlights, which, if you could
see the sky, you'd really see that affected a lot more.
Then, of course, our exposure levels.
You get this the way that you want; you apply it to your shot, and now, I want to show you
a trick that will save you a lot of time, so pay attention, folks.
All right.
When you get your colors, when you get your effects the way that you want them, a lot
of times, you're going to want to apply that list of effects to multiple shots.
Here's the thing.
Sometimes you want to apply everything, and sometimes you want to just apply some things.
I want to show you how to apply everything, so you’re going to have to literally clone
all of the settings from one shot, and just plop them on top of the next shot.
Let's do this shot right here.
If I want to take those exact settings, and move them over, what I have to do is I can
do Command + C, the standard for copy.
Then, the difference between applying everything, and just some things, is one keystroke difference,
as far as the difference between these two.
If you want to apply everything, it is Command … Let's see if I can remember this, myself
… Command + Option, and the letter “V.” It’s similar to paste, but you add the Option
key.
That … Whew, it did it.
Thank goodness.
That applied everything to that shot.
The vignette is the same; the color profile, all that; all the color correction is the
same.
Okay, let me undo that, so I can show you the other way.
The other way, very similar.
Instead of the Option key, it’s Command + Shift + V. Then, when I do that, check it
out, I can choose exactly which effects that I want to move over to this other shot.
Let's say I want to move over the adjustments that I made in regards to the color wheel,
the curves, and the board, but not the vignette effect.
Now, I can hit paste on that shot, and I have exactly that.
If I go here, into the … Here we go.
See, I have all of those except the Vignette feature.
Just to review one last time, to copy everything is Command + C. Then, to paste it, in general,
I think the one you should probably just use more than anything is the second one I went
over, which is Command + Shift + V.
One more trick on that subject matter: if you end up creating an effect, and you want
to redeploy it, not just in maybe this video, but in future videos … For example, if you're
me, and you tend to shoot, a lot of times, similar lighting, similar everything, similar
effects, what you can do is once you've assembled your list of all of your various shots … Let's
go back to this one, since this shot has the vignette effect.
One of things you can do is you can go in here, and if you look, it says “Save Effects
Preset.”
We're just going to click here, and what it's going to do is it's going to combine all of
these effects that we have just created into one preset.
What I could do, maybe, in my case, is I could call it you know Cinema Glory.
I don't know, that's just what I came up with.
Then I can choose the category.
It's not 360.
I'll just put it in Basics, for now, and I can hit save.
Now, if I go back here into my effects preset … Let's get out of … Let's go into Basics.
Check it out, Cinema Glory, right here.
Now I can just apply one effect, and in the process of applying that one effect, it can
have multiple effects attached to it.
For any of you out there who especially are doing YouTube stuff, where you are going to
be doing that thing, where you're going to be using just a bunch of different effects
all the time, this will save you a lot of time.
Hey, guys, I actually have one more trick that I wanted to share with you in regards
to color correction, in general.
This applies to not just Final Cut Pro, but also any photo-editing software out there.
I cannot tell you how many times this has actually happened to me.
I was up editing a video late at night, and I had finished the video, and I decided to
just color correct the whole damned thing.
It was very, very late.
When I woke up in the morning, and I saw the video – I re-watched it – I was just in
tears, because it was completely wrong.
That's when it hit me, I had color corrected the entire video, when my Mac had gone into
Nightshift mode.
For those of you who are not familiar with what this is, Nightshift is a feature that
was introduced in one of their recent operating systems, where, at a certain time of the day,
the whites on your screen become warmer.
The idea here is that it gets your eyes more easily adjusted to the low light conditions,
so that you can go to sleep easier.
The problem is that if you’re color correcting, you're going to be completely wrong.
I just want to show you, for those of you who are photographers, if you go into your
Mac, if you go into System Preferences here … If you go into the Energy Saver mode … I'm
sorry, not Energy Saver, Displays.
It's a tab right here.
It's Nightshift mode.
You can see on mine, right now, it's set from sunrise to sunset, or sunset to sunrise, rather.
If you turn that feature off, that might be a good idea.
I was trying to think earlier if there was a way to create some sort of a script, so
that every time you turn on a Final Cut Pro, or Photoshop, or something like that, if there
was just a way to make your Mac automatically just turn that feature off … I don't know,
Tim Cook, if you're stalking me out there, there's an official request, okay?
Any time any Mac user is using any video, or photo production, kill that feature.
Hey, folks, we have to go to a quick commercial break, but we'll be right back.
All right, folks, the next technique that I want to show you is where to go when you
want to make timing changes to your shot.
For example, if you wanted to slow motion, or make things go faster.
We're going to work with this clip right here, so I'm just going to click on it, so that
it's highlighted.
We're going to go to this icon right here.
Currently, it's in the middle of my screen.
You'll see here, if I actually close my browser out now, it's shifted over here to the left.
Just look for this one.
It's the one that looks like the little speedometer.
If I click on the little arrow here, you'll see we have all of our different options here
for if we want to make it slower, faster, and a whole bunch of other options here.
We'll go over a couple of those.
For example, if I want to make this slow down, it actually doesn't really matter which one
of these I pick, because the thing is that no matter which option you go with, you can
always grab the little line that you see here at the very end of the shot, and you can drag
it to the left.
This is making it faster.
What you'll notice is that when I hit 100 percent, it switches over, because now, we're
going faster than the original footage.
Couple of other things you can do here in this menu … You can also hold it, if you
need to freeze the shot.
Also, parents, let's say you're doing fancy videos of your kid’s sport games, it might
be good to know some of these down here, like Instant Replay, where it'll freeze it.
It'll actually add a little title that says, “Instant Replay.”
Sorry, it won't actually freeze it, it'll just kind of rewind, and put it in slow motion,
automatically.
Another one that's good to know about here is Speed Ramp.
Speed ramping is when you are changing different speeds throughout your shot.
It starts off going at one speed, then it goes to another speed, and then so on, and
so forth.
Another feature here that I wanted to really point out is the Video Quality, especially
if you are making your footage go slower than the original.
You might notice that if you use the Normal mode here, it looks a little bit choppy.
That's where Frame Blending, and Optical Flow might be good options to explore.
Next, I want to show you how to use the Voiceover feature, if you want to add something like
narration to your videos.
In order to do this, you're going to go to the very top of your screen, and just here,
under Window, you'll see it's right around the middle of the screen, we have Record Voiceover.
Let's go into that.
What, basically, you're going to need to do is you're going to most likely need an external
microphone.
You don't really want to use the one that comes with your Mac.
For those of you curious about what equipment I'm using right now, there's an audio company
that I've been a big believer in for years now, called Blue.
I'm specifically using the Yeti Pro.
If you want, there is a link to it, both in the description of this video; it's also on
my website, under the Product Recommendation screen.
The other thing that I would recommend, if you do decide to get into doing voiceovers,
is you need to get something called a pop filter.
It's basically a little screen that goes between you and the microphone.
There's one I'm using right here.
What it basically just does is if I … Well, let me remove mine for a minute.
I don't know how well you're going to be able to hear this, but the Bs, and the Ps, when
I talk, I will bet you, aren't sounding so good right now.
Whereas, right now, I’ve just added it back.
It cuts out those little pops that are in your voice, and just makes it a lot more pleasant
to listen to.
In order to use the Voiceover feature, you're just going to basically put your play head
wherever you want it to record.
At this point, it may be helpful to you to also have a pair of headphones, if you want
to be able to hear whatever audio is going on normally in the video.
Of course, you can't play the audio from your speakers, because then it would be recording
it through the microphone.
That's where that can definitely be a good feature.
If I click here, on Advanced, you'll see here this is where we can go to turn the monitor
on or off.
That would be the ability to hear the actual project.
Also there's just a bunch of options here.
When I go to record it, it's going to automatically rewind by three seconds, and just give me
a little countdown.
Then I can just record, hit the stop button, and it will insert my voiceovers.
I can move it around just like any file.
When you're done with your project in Final Cut Pro, all of the export options you'll
find are here, under File, and under Share.
Usually, what I tend to do is I tend to just always do the master file version, and always
get the highest resolution copy of my video that I can … I always like to preserve that,
even if I might make smaller versions just for social media.
I like to have one version that's really like super-duper high-rez.
At that point, when you're done with your video, of course, you have the option to either
archive your project, or delete it, and maybe just keep that final high-resolution copy,
and, yeah, you're pretty good to go.
I think what I want to do at this point, folks, is I have just a ton of little extra tricks
to teach you all now.
When you feel like you have the basics of Final Cut … Please understand, it is a massive
piece of software … There's plenty of things that I'm still learning how to do.
I want to just share with you, in no real particular order, a bunch of tricks to just
take your editing abilities to the next level.
The first is I want to introduce you to a website.
Since I've been using this website, I ended up somehow becoming friends with the guy who
created it, Simon … Hey, dude.
His website is motionVFX.com.
I actually have it hidden right over here.
MotionVFX – this is not the homepage – is a website that has just a ton of different
special effects, and plug-ins, not just for Final Cut Pro; they also some other stuff.
They have stuff they now make for After Effects, and for Premiere, and Motion; they do a lot
of Motion stuff.
That's on my to-do list, as far as things I need to get trained in.
If there was one effect that I had to recommend to all of you out there, over anything else,
it would be one of these.
These are what we refer to as LUT files.
What is a LUT file?
It’s basically a lighting profile.
I'm going to open this one up here as an example.
Now, I have to mute my computer speakers, here, because I don't actually have the copyright
to be able to play the music, but I can show you guys the footage.
Basically, what these effects do is – video will clear up in a minute – you can see,
that's kind of like a before and after.
The idea here is you can take these different color gradings, and just apply them with really
just a couple of keystrokes to your footage, and it just immediately enhances the cinematic
experience that you get from your footage.
Don't worry so much about getting the expensive camera.
I mean, yes, you want to get a camera that can capture enough information that … Of
course, that is important, but the whole idea here is that, look, if you know how to edit,
as long as you've got that information about the basic composition of the image, you can
really make anything look amazing.
I was shooting my Droning Provincetown videos for the longest time on my iPhone, and that
blew people's minds, when they would see that in the credits.
Let me show you how to use one of these types of special effects.
One of the things I need to mention about any products through this website, through
MotionVFX, you need their special installer to be able to let it communicate with Final
Cut.
If you look up here at the very top of the screen, there’s this information for Learn
More.
That just basically directs you for how to do this.
Anytime you're installing special effects, or LUT files into Final Cut Pro, you cannot
have Final Cut Pro running at the time.
In order to use mLUT, mLUT installs right here into the Effects browser.
Let's go in here, and you'll see that it's listed here under Video Effects.
We now have a little thing here for mLUT, as well as you'll start to see some of the
other ones that I have of theirs.
The clip that I want to show you here … I want to show you what this clip looks like
without any special effects.
This is just a drone shot of the Provincetown Inn, and the breakwater there in the background,
which now has a crashed ship on it, currently.
That's the way it looks right now, out of the can.
What we're going to do is we're going to grab mLUT, right here, and we're just going to
drag it, and drop it right on top of that clip.
Now, at this point, so that we can make some alterations to this, let me just juggle my
windows around here, and add back in the Inspector.
We can hide that, at this point.
Here we have the initial controls for mLUT.
Typically, the first thing I usually do is you'll notice that the intensity, by default,
is set to 100 percent.
I usually don't do that; I usually bring it down to like 40 – maybe even a little bit
less than that –percent.
A lot of these effects, it's one of those things where, if you apply it at 100 percent,
it's a little too much.
You want to scale it back just a little bit.
From here, what you would do, is you'd go here to mLUT Library.
As you will see here, of those various packages that I showed you on that previous screen
back there – not that screen, actually – I do own quite a few of these.
Basically all of these, like I said, are just different lighting profiles.
If I want to see how they would look … Let me do the one for Alice in Wonderland.
This is kind of a very bright one; goo when you have lots of color.
I just click on it, and boom, it's applied in the background.
If I kind of juggle my windows around a little bit here, sort of like that, you can notice
I can actually, right now, just play with that intensity.
Actually, that looks pretty good at 100 percent.
I don't know.
I’m going to scan the image over a little bit.
That actually looks pretty good.
Let's check out the before and after on that.
Where can I move this?
All right, let me just hit Apply for now, so that we can do this.
That's the after.
That's the before.
Suddenly, the before doesn't look quite as impressive, right?
You add that in; suddenly, oh, my God, those blues just pop right off the screen; the greens,
very good.
I’d probably still throw a little vignette on top of that, and I'd say we're about perfect.
You can change some of the little aspects here – the highlights, mid-tones, shadows,
all that good stuff – here.
Just know that's how easy it is to make your footage look amazing.
You don't need all these expensive things.
By the way, that LUT file?
Yeah, $59.
That’s not bad at all.
Now, hopefully, you're having a little bit of fun here.
Let's move on to the next effect that I want to show you.
This is a great effect for any of you out there who are looking at getting into YouTube.
A lot of things you need with YouTube, you need these little pop-up thingies.
You need these little cute animations, where you can put your name, and someone else's
name, their title, all that good stuff.
All those cute little animations, you don't need to know how to animate anymore.
All you need is a special effects package.
I have to say the one that Simon put together for MotionVFX is very cool.
The name of this package is called mTuber, and if it looks familiar, guess what?
I use it in my videos every single week.
Basically, this installs into your video.
I'm going to use this clip, just because we're already on it.
This installs into a slightly different window, so, let's juggle around here again.
I'm going to bring back the browser, and mTuber is actually here in Titles.
You can see here now, when I'm in … I'm in the browser; I'm in Titles.
We scroll down to the very bottom …
I just want to go through here, and show you some of the different little effects that
you can do.
This one would be just a little something that pops up at the end of the video, if you
want to try to get somebody to subscribe to your YouTube channel; that cute little animation.
It's just literally, all you do is you just drag it and drop it on top of your shot, right?
How easy is that?
Just like that.
If you want to make it shorter, just like any other title, you just click it, and drag
it, pull it back.
When it comes to making alterations to the text, you guessed it, we’ve got to go back,
of course.
Now we juggle windows, yet again.
Okay, up here in the Inspector, we have all of the information that we need to do, to
change the information about this.
Let’s say I don't want it to be red, for whatever reason.
I can just click here, boom, change it to blue.
Any of the text, if I want to change the wording … Maybe instead of “Our,” and say “My,”
literally, that's how easy it is.
This package has a whole bunch of different things, all for people who do YouTube, so
I highly recommend you check it out.
It's just, it's so easy to manipulate this stuff.
I love it.
Very, very easy.
We love user-friendly, here at Tech Talk America.
By we, I mean me.
Next one we have here is mArrows.
Again, this is going to be a big one for different YouTube people.
Sometimes, when you're showing people different things, if you're giving presentations, you
need to get people's attention.
“Hey, look over here, buddy.”
This is a great way to do it.
All of these cute little animations you can get.
They're all included with a special effects package, and it's super-easy to be able to
use them.
See, check that out.
Isn't that a cute, cool little effect?
If you look at the cost, it's 59 bucks.
Not bad.
That's mArrows.
Next one here, I guess we’re kind of going with a theme here … If you need to simulate
a message, like you're having like a little text conversation, here … Let's check out
their little demo video, here.
Okay, these cute little text effects … You'll notice that they do also track, which is kind
of a really cool feature.
One of the effects that I want to show you about this, that involves tracking, because
that is a very common feature in a lot of special effects is you want something that's
going to move with your image … I'll give you a perfect example of one.
Let's see if I can find … We had a car shot there, didn't we?
Yes.
Let's say, for this car shot, pretend that you could see the license plate.
A very common thing that you need to do is to be able to blur things.
Here's an example of a really simple effects package that'll do that for you, and it's
actually … I have it saved up here.
Where do we have it?
I thought I had it saved up here.
Anyway, it's called mCensor.
It's down here in the … Down here.
Sorry, mCensor, right here.
We’ve got a lot of windows going here.
See?
This is why you need to know how to do these hotkeys, because it's a lot faster.
It's a little hard for me, with my current setup, when I'm doing voiceover work, for
me to do hotkeys, but … Anyways, mCensor, great little effects package.
All you do is you drag it and drop it on top of your shot.
You find the first frame where you actually have your subject enter.
I'm just using the arrow keys right now, on my keyboard.
I’m waiting until I can see that license plate.
There we go.
From here, all I have to do is basically … See this white thing in the middle?
We can move this, and we can reshape it.
We're going to just try to line it up there.
I’m doing a very sloppy job, but we're doing this quickly.
That looks about good, right?
Then, if you look over here on the side, we have just … This is the really simple control.
It's like what kind of effect do you want?
In this case, let's just blur it.
You can do … Also, you can kind of like do a mosaic, or you can just do a block; just
make it look black.
For now, we'll just do this.
Now, all we have to do is hit Track, and the Mocha software will do it all for us.
It's right now going through every frame of this shot, and it's tracking that license
plate.
When it's done … I'll speed this part up in editing.
Now we play it, and I don't know how well you can see, but it is- if you watch there,
it is tracking it, so now that’s all blurred out.
That's a great tool.
I love that one.
Let's go back here to the official list … This is really just a general type of effect that
you can get through these guys is they have a ton of different, really funky, kind of
funny … This one I actually used in a video that I did last Halloween.
If you have not seen my little Droning Provincetown videos, some of them are quite … We'll just
say unique.
I actually used these titles in the end credits for my video for Halloween last year.
You can see, you can swap out all of this text with your own text.
I used that particular one.
You can do end credits.
It's really, really easy.
It basically just installs just like … Yep, let's go back to it.
I'll show you real quick.
For that one, that is … Let's see, that’s MHalloween.
Where is it?
Halloween.
There we go.
All you have to do to make one of these cute little animations is I just literally drag
it and drop it into my into my shot … Let's do a crazy midnight one.
This is not going to fit with this video, somehow, I suspect.
We click on it.
We go into our Inspector, so we can pull up the Properties … There we go.
Here we go.
Check it out.
All I have to do is just swap out the text.
I can say, instead of Midnight A, David A. Cox … Why do I always do that A?
Cox Productions … Now, I have to, of course, shrink it.
Let's make the text size a little bit smaller.
Looks good.
Let's give it a little space to knock that production down.
Check out how quick did I just create that … There was no special effect in editing.
One thing I will say about some of these ultra-high-definition effects is some of them do take a little bit
of time to render.
When you initially go to … If you try to immediately play it back, you'll see we have
all the little dots here, above the image.
It's going to take a while for it to process away at that.
In fact, I think I can hear the fans on my Mac starting to turn on …
Let's just give you a little preview of it.
It's going to look a little choppy, but when it's done, it’ll actually look very cool.
See?
Just like that.
Yeah, and then it would fly away, just like that.
As far as all the different little things that you can change, look at this- the size
of the moon, you can change right here.
The moon scale … If I want to make the moon bigger, check it out.
I can do it just literally by sliding this little scale here.
The bats that saw that entered earlier … Let's see, see those bats that are right there?
Check it out, you can choose how big they are.
That's bats.
Let's see, Bats Two, Bats … Oh, I think I want Bats One.
Okay, that's Bats One.
Those bats in the background, that's Bats One.
Then, the other one is … You’ve got the idea.
You just play with it, and you make it your own.
Okay, a couple of other little fun ones we have here.
This one can be good.
It's a very cool effect, I find.
It's Transition Zoom.
If you're trying to kind of impress people with the editing, especially if you have drone
shots, you'll see that's how they tend to use it in their demo footage.
It just kind of zooms in.
This would be an example, just one of those extra special effects that you would find
in your transitions.
Some of these effects I've showed you in the Effects browser; some of them are in Titles.
They can kind of go all over the place, depending on what it is they do, but you’ll see … When
you see 20 of them in a row, then it gets a little nauseating, but you get the idea.
It's pretty cool.
Here's another kind of a funky one.
Don't know how many of you would actually like this, but I actually use this to transition
segments in Tech Talk America, occasionally.
When you want to have someone holding up a phone, if it's got something on it, same basic
concept.
It’s just you bring in your footage, swap it out, and it makes the animation really,
really easy.
I think that one’s a $59 template.
Yep, there you go.
Noticing the theme here?
Next one is Glitch.
For those of you who are kind of doing techie videos, if you're trying to look like the
cool kids … A lot of kids using Glitch these days; I don't know why.
It's a very, very popular little effect.
If you want to kind of transition things in, if you want to add it to someone entering
the frame, you can see a couple little examples of how they're using it here.
Very, very simple effect, and they even have a little tutorial there, showing you how to
do it.
That's mGlitch.
This one here, I love … I think it's good to have some different titles, because sometimes
you just need to say something with text, and this just gives text a little bit of a
personality.
This is just one of several different- this style of templates that they have.
This one, again, is called mPop, I believe.
Is it mPop, or mTitlePop?
It’s mTitlePop; sorry about that.
Very, very easy.
Just swap out their text; put in your text.
It's so easy.
It animates everything for you.
Love it.
Another website I want to show you here is FCPeffects.com, and I do … Just a little
favor, if I may ask?
I am an affiliate of these guys, so, if you do use my link, it is much appreciated.
These guys have a whole bunch of different effects for Final Cut Pro.
You can see there's a giant list, right here.
If you're into doing weddings, you'll notice they have like a Wedding Title pack, lens
flare plug-ins, all sorts of different stuff.
One of the ones I have been very impressed with is the one called Skin Smoother.
If you are dealing with an actor, or someone on camera who doesn't … If they're not experiencing
a good skin day, this is basically like Photoshop, but for video.
You just apply it to the face.
They actually have a little tutorial that comes with it, and actually, I believe I did
a tutorial on it, ages ago.
All right, guys, this next resource is a big one.
This is VideoHive.net, and there are several different things that you can use this website
for.
For example, if you look here, we have a few different subcategories here, under the category
of Video.
One of them you'll find here is Stock Footage.
If you don't have access to a camera crew, instead, you can just pay a fee per shot,
and license a piece of footage.
For example, when you watch television these days … Now granted, I'm in the United States
here, and I have a feeling we see different ads than those of you who live around the
world … It does definitely feel like, these days, every single commercial is for a drug.
If you've seen these commercials, the subject matter never really has a lot to do with whatever
the drug is.
I swear that at least some of these guys are just going onto websites like VideoHive, and
just like punching in “Kids.”
They just get different shots of kids, and then they put some sort of a narrative to
the background, and they just … That's how they make the entire commercial, is it's just
all licensed pieces of stock footage.
If you need that shot of a family at a restaurant, this can be a really good place to go to get
any of those, whatever kind of shots you need.
Now, the other aspect here that I want to show you is the different abilities that you
have within After Effects.
Granted, this class is all about Final Cut Pro, why would I even bring this up?
Well, here's the thing, there are a bunch of other pieces of software that are out there
that do special effects.
For example, if you want your logo to fly into the screen, and distort, and do some
sort of cute little animation thing to get their attention, that kind of shot is typically
referred to as a Stinger.
While you may not have either After Effects, or the knowledge of how to put that kind of
an animation together, one of the things I want to show you how to do is how to combine
this website with another website, in order to get someone else to animate it for you.
Let me just give you a sample here.
I'm going to go here, into VideoHive, and I'm just going to type in the word “logo.”
Let's just see what pops up here.
All right, we've got a bunch of different options here.
Let me go into this Cyberpunk logo.
Let's just see what this looks like.
What this is, basically, just demonstrating to us is that any text that you see there
can be swapped out instantly.
You put either your logo, or you can put text there, and they're kind of giving you different
versions here.
Pretty cool.
That effect, depending on what your use is of it, I think it's usually right around $19,
somewhere around thereabouts.
These are all just different demonstration versions of that effect.
Yeah, there you go, $18 for a regular license.
One thing you just have to check out here is there is a difference between a regular
license, and an extended license.
When you do that, the price is going to go up; just be aware of that, because you can
license it for a single project, or just kind of unlimited.
Now, if you decide to get something like this, and you're done with it, where do you go to
actually get that animated for you?
This is where you can check out Fivrr.com.
Then, from this website … This is one of those websites where you can go to pay people
to do stuff for you.
You'll see they even have a Video and Animation section here.
My advice is, when you go here, under the search, I would actually type in the word
“VideoHive,” because enough people make requests that you will see several of these
pop up here.
Another piece of advice, if you decide to pursue this method, when you do a search on
Fiverr, make sure you always change it from relevance to best-selling, that way you just
get people who are a little bit higher rated.
If you have someone who has a perfect five-star rating, and has done, let's see, over a thousand
projects, that's probably a pretty good indication that they know what they're doing, and they're
going to turnaround your product relatively quickly.
The next resource I have for all of you is one for if you ever need background music.
This is my good friend, Adi Goldstein's website.
The name of the website is AGSoundtrax.
Note that it's soundtracks with an “X” dot com.
Also, this is where you're going to be glad that we're buddies, because I got you all
a little coupon code.
If you use the coupon code “DavidC25,” you'll get 25 percent off.
I can't even tell you, at this point, how many times I am watching TV, and I hear this
guy's music in the background for a commercial.
Adi has had tremendous success; has worked with political campaigns; has worked with
a whole bunch of different people out there.
I cannot highly enough recommend his stuff.
If you check out his website, again, it's AGSoundtrax.com, use my little coupon code,
“DavidC25,” for 25 percent off.
Another resource for music, this is an offshoot of Envato.
This is AudioJungle.net.
I've had mixed results with AudioJungle.
There's a few gems in there.
Sometimes, you just have to really dig through it to kind of find exactly what you need.
Usually, with AudioJungle, I find my end price tends to be around … Mine tends to be around
$19, but the important thing to know is that when you're buying rights to music, you need
to tell them what the project is for.
It's going to be one price, if your video is going to end up on YouTube.
It's going to be another price, if you want to put it in an actual movie, obviously.
Just be prepared for that, I suppose.
The last resource that I want to show you today is this service that I've been using
for a little bit over a year, called Envato Elements.
Now, I need to explain a little bit about how this service works.
You can either buy a membership on a month-to-month plan … I think I was playing paying maybe
somewhere around $29, something like that; I don't remember exactly.
Or you can do an annual plan, where you just prepay, of course, for the whole year.
What's important that you should know about this service, this service has tons of different
resources that content creators constantly need, like graphics, fonts, photos, all sorts
of different stuff.
What you need to understand is that the license for any of these products that you download,
it's a lifetime license.
That does mean that, theoretically, you could get a one-month membership, download a whole
bunch of different stuff, and then cancel, and you'd still be able to use all those different
things that you've downloaded in that month.
Now, that was actually my original intention, and then I just started monitoring how much
new content they would constantly be introducing, and it really helped me, as someone who is
not particularly talented in the graphic-design department.
I have really come to use this website as a constant resource.
As I mentioned already, one of the things you can get, which is really great, are all
these very creative, and beautiful fonts.
For me, it's not even just the fonts, it's the way that they pair the fonts with the
background images.
It can just really help you, in terms of style; just as far as getting ideas … Because,
while all of these fonts don't come with the images in the background, then I could just
go up here, and I could search for whatever that background image is, and I can combine
resources together to help me create content.
Fonts is a major aspect that I use within this service, but another big one is photos.
If I go here, actually, under the Browse tab, you'll see all the different types of assets
that you have access to, including photos, graphics, add-ons.
These would be for things like Photoshop, as an example.
Fonts, graphic templates, presentation templates.
For those of you out there, who, in addition to whatever it is you're doing, if you do
PowerPoint presentations, the number-one piece of advice I can give you is don't use any
template that comes with your computer.
Go third-party.
These guys have a ton of them.
Web templates for things other than … Other than WordPress; that's up here.
CMS templates, and 3D models.
Whatever your industry is, my advice to you would be just to maybe consider checking out
this service.
Just type in maybe the name of your business, what type of business it is there, and just
see what comes up.
You never know what resources they may have that could really help benefit you, not just
in any work you might do in video work, but I also think, especially, in creating any
images that you might need for things like social media.
It's a great service.
I hope you like it if you do.
I do appreciate if you use my link.
Thank you for watching, everyone.
Like I said at the beginning, a lot of love went into creating this class.
I do hope you enjoyed it.
Please leave me a comment down below, if you don't mind.
Also, I do appreciate it if you hit that little thumbs-up/Like button.
If you haven't done so, please also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
That about does it for me today, everyone.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll see you next time.
This is David A. Cox with Tech Talk America.
Class dismissed.