If you are a beginner in Final Cut Pro or you know your way around the editor quite well but
you want to get faster than this is the video for you because I'm going to give you two reasons why
you need to get faster and 15 practical keyboard shortcuts on how you can get faster now reason
number one is quite obvious is that you are saving time everyone wants to save time time is the most
valuable thing that we have on the planet Earth and reason number two is that time is money so if
you can become a faster editor you can make more money for example if you pick up a new client and
you charge them a reasonable thirty dollars per hour for editing and you budget about 10 hours
that's 300 so say the first job you take all 10 hours Great you made 300 bucks but if you get
faster you're not going to tell that client by the way I'm faster you should pay me less only
five hours this time no you are going to charge the same amount but you're going to be a faster
editor and do it in five hours therefore you just upped your hourly rate significantly because you
became faster at editing so let's dive into the 15 keyboard shortcuts that I've used consistently
over the last 10 years to make me a faster editor some of these keyboard shortcuts are native to
Final Cut Pro so I'm going to show you those but some of them I have changed for myself so to get
to those keyboard shortcuts you're going to come up here to the Final Cut Pro button you're going
to go into commands and customize so from here you can actually learn all of the already set
keyboard shortcuts but for the few of them we're going to adapt and change them ourselves and this
is the panel in which you want to do it if you want to change your custom keyboard and as you
find the tools that you use the most in Final Cut I highly recommend coming in here and adapting
your keyboard to make it easier for you and get faster so the first tip here is your in and out
points you're going to use the I and the o on the keyboard now practically speaking we have some
a-roll here so I'm going to come to the beginning of a waveform move over to the end of the waveform
hit o so now that you have your in and out points set another trick you can do in point number two
is the F key so this is setting your favorites so if you just hit F on the keyboard you'll see
this little green line show up here so this is super helpful when you're scanning through your
b-roll you can see I have all these little green points set up on my footage this is footage that
I can use so next time when I come into the editor you come up to this little spot here
dive into your favorites and it's only going to have your favorite b-roll selected this keeps you
from having to cycle through your footage all the time to find the footage you like this is all the
good stuff right here once you have your favorite Clips selected we're going to come up here and we
want to drop our a-roll down onto the timeline so there's three ways you can do that and that
is with the Q the W and the E key they all do different things so the E key drops your clip
at the end of your timeline so if I hit e again it's going to drop it again at the end the W key
drops it wherever you you have your inspector on the timeline so if we come in between the clips
here and I hit W it's going to drop the clip in between and the next one is Q if you want to put
something on top of your a-roll so say we want to take some of this b-roll and drop it on top
we can just then hit q and that's going to put it on top of our timeline so that is q w and E and
you can use them all interchangeably and it makes you a really fast editor if you want to put your
b-roll on top of your footage and you've already got your select so you know you can just drop
these on top and it makes you super quick now that leads me into the next tip which is how to create
key frames so practically if you have a-roll you want your music to tuck under your voice so I'm
going to hold option or alt on your keyboard and we're just going to create keyframes so once you
hold option and click it's going to create those keyframes so from here I can then drag the audio
down and move those keyframes to wherever I need to drop it under the audio so another thing to
make you even faster faster in creating those keyframes is let's say you've got a whole bunch
of b-roll on the end that you want to use and you want to bring the music back up over that
b-roll you can hit r on your keyboard which opens up the range tool so then we're going to take the
range tool and drag it all the way across this b-roll and from there we can actually just drag
this audio back up and it's going to create those keyframes for us on either end then you
hit a again to get back to your regular Mouse your pointer or whatever and then you can drag around
those keyframes so that's a little bit faster than hitting option and you have to like perfectly hit
that line and then drag them around that range tool will create those keyframes for you super
fast the next tool is a pretty standard one and that's the blade tool so if these clips are too
long oftentimes they'll hit B that'll bring up your blade tool and you can start cutting these
then a and moving these around deleting them how I tend to cut is by either holding option b so
I don't have to go to the blade tool that way that keeps me on my cursor I don't have to keep
switching between tools or practically speaking if you want to hit your marks on a certain point
and you want to cut your clip here I hold option and then this little forward bracket or something
like that I think they're called you can again select these to whatever you want but option
out is then this button so you have your ins and outs so you can set your in points here and then
bracket them and your out points and bracket them again so then you're cutting the forward end and
the back end and then creating your clip in the middle so now let's say you've cut those clips
to the music and it's perfectly timed exactly where you want it but maybe it's not the part
of the clip that you want this is my favorite tool and this is the I believe it's called the
trim tool but you hit the t button and then you can drag this clip back and forth so it doesn't
change the timing but it changes what you see inside of that clip which is so helpful and your
timing stay the same and you can just move these clips back and forth as you need and as you can
see it splits it up so into two screens so you can see what's happening at the end point and what's
happening at the end point of that clip now one of the features in Final Cut Pro is the magnetic
timeline so you drop a clip on and you want it to align perfectly with one of these clips you can
see that that yellow marker comes up and that is it magnetizing to a certain clip but there's also
a lot of times that you don't want any of these clips to magnetize so what you do is you hit n
and this unsticks the magnetic timeline and then you can drag it wherever you want Click N again
and then it will magnetize to wherever you want it to magnetize to so as I'm just kind of fiddling
around the footage here I'm coming up with even more tips so I hope you guys have a pen and paper
in or writing these down shift Z is so helpful and I use it all the time what that does is it
takes your whole timeline whether you're zoomed out you hit shift Z and it just puts your whole
timeline back and extends it throughout there command minus will make your timeline shorter
and command plus will expand it based on where your key is so if it's there it's going to zoom
in there if it's over here you're going to zoom in over there so wherever you have that placeholder
is that's where it's going to zoom in then shift Z will open it back up to the whole timeline and
give you an overview so in regards to moving around your timeline quickly if you use these
left arrow keys here this is going to move your selected clip left and right accordingly and if
you hold shift and use these buttons it's going to move at 20 frames so that's how you can delicately
move Clips around or quickly shift and move them over if you need to move them over delicately this
just keeps you from having to drag and if you want to move it magnetically and then just move
it a couple frames over that's another way to do it as well another quick thing that I use all the
time is creating space in the timeline so the way that it is set up in Final Cut Pro is option W and
that will create a little space in your timeline here if you want a break underneath your b-roll
for example and you just want to push some stuff around you can do that by creating option W now
a quick hack that I've set up is I'm often using background generators so I've set that up to be
option Q otherwise you have to come up here into this tab then come all the way down to generators
and then find the generator that you want I'm always using either a white or a black backdrop
and that is this custom one here so I've set that custom backdrop to my default generator and then
I've set that to option Q in my quick preferences now if you're wanting to move around your timeline
quickly as well you can use the arrow keys so up and down on your arrow keys is going to move you
to the next I guess we'll call it moment in your timeline but it's always going to land on a end or
beginning of a clip or a keyframe so practically speaking if you're on the timeline and you want
to add a clip in between this one you can move over to it using the up or down arrow keys and
then have a clip selected in your timeline and hit W and we will then put our clip in between
those two clips one of the things that I use all the time is color wheels color are curves
and Hue color saturation panels so I have those preset instead of coming up here to this panel
and having to click these grab a color wheels instead what I've done is I've changed my quick
commands to be Ctrl C for our color wheels Ctrl X gives me color curves and control h gives me
Hue and a saturation panel because I'm using these all the time to color grade my footage this is a
way faster way than clicking and dragging through here means you don't have to do those like finite
details or moving your mouse around we know we're going to use them so that's a quick way of doing
that another way that I've gotten faster in color grading is because I'm using the same camera all
of the time I've got a preset for v-log to rec 709 it has my custom Lut already attached for rec 709
and Lumix and my color wheels and color curves that I often use then you just can quickly dive
into these things and correct the colors as you need with your camera so to create those you just
save effect presets once you have those dialed in I think I've given you guys a lot more than
15 tips here so if there was a lot there make sure to go back grab your notepad and write these down
or just play through the video again because that helps the YouTube algorithm So speaking
of which if you did enjoy this if you learned something new please hit that like button for
me comment down below which tip maybe was your favorite and otherwise guys I appreciate your
time a lot consider subscribing if you want more content like this and you might like this video
here but truly thank you I appreciate your time and I'll see you in the next video peace [Music]