Hey I’m Dylan John and let’s cut out the fluff and dive right into these 5 tips.
Tip number 1, I find super helpful so my workspace doesn’t feel so claustrophobic. Let’s say you’re
editing and you extended your timeline to be large and your viewport and inspector window
have been compressed because you really would like to just see everything on the timeline.
Going into the inspector and then adjusting things, especially when you have lots of
different effects on the clip can be unbelievably difficult because of how compressed it is.
Here's the trick though. All you have to do is double tap the top of the inspector window and it’ll go
full screen to the bottom so you have way more real estate to adjust settings. I mean really,
we’re only ever editing on a specific section of the timeline, usually the middle,
so it’s not like extending this affects too much. Then you can just click it again
to bring it back to that normal size. So this way you can save yourself some time and energy by not
having to pull this down, make the adjustment in the inspector and then push it back up.
Tip number 2 I know is going to help quite a few of you, I hope. Let me know if it does. Let’s say
you have this clip that’s sandwiched between two transitions with media on top and sound effects
attached below it and you realize later that the clip doesn’t really fit. You don’t like it that much. You
probably get annoyed at how you can’t drag the clip out of the way to make way for another clip
and I see a lot of creators use gap clips on the primary storyline for this reason. But here’s the
solution. When you have the clip you’d like to replace the original with, just drag it
over that clip and let go. This menu pops up and you have a few different options you can choose.
Hit replace if you want the entire clip that you selected to take the original clips spot. Now
the potential issue with this is that because the clips are probably not the same length,
it’s going to extend or compress things. So if you don’t want any shifting like that to happen
I’d suggest choosing replace from start or replace from end.
What this does is it’ll replace the original clip,
starting from the first frame or the last frame you have selected in your library so that
everything stays in sync. If the clip is longer than the original, it’ll cut off the excess.
If it’s shorter, it will extend the media so it fits. And just a heads up that if you're selecting
part of your clip towards the end and you try to replace from start, this window will pop
up letting you know there’s not enough media to replace the original with. So in this instance,
you’d have to use replace from end or be okay with everything compressing.
I can hear some of you saying, ya but Dylan, what if I want to swap it for a clip that has already
been added to the timeline and has effects on it and stuff. You can’t replace the way that you
just mentioned. True. Here’s my workaround. First things first I’ll move the transitions.
And if you have nowhere to move them, what you can do is make cuts by pressing Command B and then
temporarily putting the transitions in those spots. Drag the clip you want to replace over
the original, trim either the start or end by pressing option left or option right bracket,
and then hit option command and down arrow. This blasts that clip down into the primary storyline
replacing the clip you had below it. Then I just drag over the transitions snug into place,
and because I can sometimes be a little OCD, I click the cut sections of my clip that I used
to hold the transitions, and press delete. This mends the cuts in your clip.
Chances are you’ve been annoyed at how when you’re scrolling through your media in your library,
there are all these selected ranges still up on your clips. And when you select a clip,
those ranges are automatically selected. It’s a little frustrating. The solution to clear a single
clip is to select it and press option X and if you really want to save time and clear
every clip, hit command A to select all of your clips and press option X. If these are
way too many shortcuts to remember, I’ll leave the link to my free Final Cut Pro cheat sheet
that you can download in the description to help you out with these shortcuts and a lot more.
If you’ve seen some of my other tutorials, you may remember that by holding the grave
key, this little orange icon will pop up,
and you can move about your clip freely, even if there’s sound effects,
other clips and titles attached to it. It’s basically one of the ways you can cancel out
the magnetic timeline if you’d like. However it’s pretty annoying that you have to hold the
key while moving the clip to do this. Well, you don’t. Hit the grave key and then hit command,
and now your ability to override connections will be activated until you turn it off by hitting the
grave key again. So you don’t have to hold that key anymore when you want to perform
that function. This is something I learned from my good buddies Matthew O’Brien and Brad from
Brad and Donna. It’s super helpful and helps free up your fingers quite a bit. And little
bonus tip kind of adding onto Tip number 2 that we learned. You can also drag that clip you want
to replace your clip next to the original, then click the original clip and hit the grave key
and then press delete. Everything attached will stay in the same spot and from here,
you can trim the clip if you’d like. However this only works if the clip is longer because you'd have to take off the transitions to extend out the shorter clip.
You may or may not know that by pressing the J key while on your timeline, your timeline will play in
reverse, the K key will pause, and the L key will play your timeline forward. But by holding down
the K key and then holding either the L or the J key, you can playback your timeline in slow
motion.
So you can possibly see how your transition looks, how your framing is. Whatever
you’d like to see in slow motion, you have that option. You can also fast reverse or
fast forward by pressing either J or L multiple times. And once again using the K key to pause.
If you enjoyed this video you will definitely enjoy my part 1 or 2 videos of things you’re doing wrong in
Final Cut Pro so check those out when you get the chance. And have a fantastic rest of your day.