- It's been almost two years since I started my channel
here on YouTube, which is crazy to think about.
And in that time I've learned a lot about filming,
lighting, audio, and editing.
I started out using Premiere Pro on my PC,
and then I moved to LumaFusion on iPad,
and then finally, over to Final Cut Pro
when I went back to the Mac.
Well, after about a year with Final Cut Pro,
I finally standardized on a workflow that works for me
most of the time.
So I wanted to share with you how I edit
and organize my Final Cut projects.
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Hey, I'm Jerry and learning any new editing tool
takes some time and patience,
but with a little bit of practice,
you will find ways to improve your workflow.
Now, instead of doing a deep dive of how I edit a video
from start to finish with Final Cut Pro,
I'm assuming you have a little bit of experience
with Final Cut and that there are a couple of things
that I do that might make your life a little bit easier,
like creating templates from an organized event library,
editing multicam, where to get some music
and maybe even skipping the color grading.
So let's just start off with how I organize my libraries.
With a brand new Final Cut library,
you get some default events built-in.
The first one is a smart collection,
which will kind of organize your video
and audio for you separately.
We're gonna go ahead and keep that closed.
And then you get an event automatically for the date
that you create the library.
I don't generally use the built-in libraries.
So we're gonna go ahead and rename that
to something else.
For me, I like to categorize and organized mine
by the type of footage I'm taking.
So this one is gonna be the "A role",
and then I'm gonna create additional ones as well.
So we're gonna create another event for "B role"
if I can spell it correctly.
And I will create one more just for "C role",
because you never know how many different types of footage
I might have,
and then I'll usually keep one that's also called "other".
So I'll just make sure it's always at the bottom,
so I'll put a Z in front of it and other,
and that way I have these different areas
where I can put the footage that I need
and I can easily find it the way I want it organized.
Now, I'm also going to create an event called "assets"
or "A assets" so it's always at the top.
And that has things that I reuse in a lot of my videos.
It could be music, it could be PNG files, things like that.
So again "A assets" and that'll make sure
it's always at the top.
And here's the number of things that I call assets
that I wanna have in a number of my videos.
So I'm gonna drag a couple of them over.
One is YouTube audio and we'll get to music here
in just a little bit.
And then we're gonna have, let's see, images, PNG.
We'll add those to assets and I guess that's it now.
Oh, sounds. I'll add sounds as well.
So now you can see, I have sounds,
and I'll show you that a little bit later, YouTube audio,
this is YouTube music from the YouTube audio library,
and then of course I have images,
different PNGs that I might use frequently
for different things.
And the last thing I wanna add
is the project file inside of the "A role" folder.
And this is where you're going to be doing
all of your editing, bringing in all of footage, editing it,
and that's where your video is actually going to be.
We'll just leave that as untitled project for now.
Now the secret here is that you don't need to set this up
every time, you don't need to create this folder structure
every single time you start a new project with Final Cu.
You can actually save this library as a template
and use it for every video going forward.
So let me show you how I do that.
So inside your movies folder, inside your home folder,
you'll have that file.
The default location where Final Cut saves things.
And we'll just go ahead and rename that Final Cut Project
to let's say, FCP template.
And now what we can do is we can actually
just right click and hit compress FCP template,
and this'll take just a few seconds to compress.
And when it's done,
we can easily create new projects from that zip file.
So now we have our FCP template.zip.
If I wanna create a new project,
all I need to do is double click that.
It's going to extract it into a new file
and here we can rename it,
so let's say it's the M1X MacBook.
And no, I definitely don't have an M1X MacBook.
So now if we just double-click on our new project file,
it will open up.
As you can see, we are inside of our M1X MacBook project.
We have our assets that we already added before,
and we have all of our folders or events
that we created as well.
So we don't have to recreate those every single time,
which is awesome.
All right. So now we're gonna be importing some footage
off this SD card for the "A role",
and I'm going to be using the CalDigit SOHO Dock
to actually connect my SD cards and pull them in.
Final Cut Pro will automatically see
that you inserted an SD card
and ask you to import it.
And we're gonna select the file we want to import,
we're gonna select where it's going to go,
we're gonna put it in the "A role" and we'll click import,
and that's gonna take just a minute or two
to import that file fully into Final Cut Pro.
And when that's done,
I'm going to also import my "B role", my other camera
because I have two cameras.
I have my main camera and my secondary camera.
And then if I have other additional camera angles,
or maybe video recordings that are all in sync together,
that's all going to go into the "A role".
The "B role" footage,
the secondary footage that sits on top of the "A role"
that will go into my "B role" folder.
I also record my audio separately from a Zoom F6,
connected to an MKH-416 microphone,
which together those two are amazing.
And those are also going to get put
into the "A role" folder.
So the audio along with all of my "A role" camera angles
will all get edited together with multicam,
which I'll show you in just a second.
So now the audio file
along with my two "A role" camera angles
will be all edited together with multicam editing.
So we'll just right click the three of these together.
We're click new multicam clip,
and that's going to synchronize everything automatically
and put them all together of course.
And from there, we can simply do the rough edit cut
of the "A role" footage.
And we'll just go ahead
and reorganize these clips a little bit.
Close that, and now we can see our angles here.
So now you can see the different angles here
from the "A role" footage.
So two camera angles and separate audio
to get what will become the "A role" track.
Now, to quickly edit your rough cut of your "A role" video,
there's plenty of videos on YouTube about this really,
you really just wanna focus on the audio track, right?
You wanna look at the audio wavelengths
to be able to quickly edit what you're looking at, right.
To make it a little bit easier to see,
we'll go ahead and just so we can get the larger view
of the audio signal, the audio wavelengths down there,
and we'll make that larger as well.
Now we can actually see where it might be easier
to make our edits and our cuts.
And we'll change this.
We'll just hit the number one to change the angle
to that one or you can just click up here as well.
So if you're editing here,
let's say the video starts right here,
we'll delete everything behind it.
And we wanna switch angles right here,
we can just click up here to switch to that angle,
or we can hit the number two as well.
So if we wanna go back and forth between this clip
and that clip,
we can hit play and just tap the number one on the keyboard
or the number two to switch back and forth.
So I hit play and it's going,
I'll hit one and it switches angles
and I hit two and it switches angles.
And so I'll go through this entire thing,
cutting this up, getting rid of all of the stuff
I don't need to come up with a single rough cut
somewhere around 10 minutes or so.
(slow music)
So now with the edit of the "A role" rough cut
basically complete,
I wanna add some "B role" footage on top of it
to add some context about what I'm talking about.
So for example,
if I'm talking about the webcam on top of the iMac,
I probably wanna go ahead
and include some "B role" of showing that camera cutout
a little bit close up.
All right. So let's go ahead and close these angles
and we'll look at my bureau again.
And I know I have, there it is right there.
So I actually have a close up of the camera on the iMac.
So we'll just go ahead and select some of it
that I wanna take.
Maybe I just want that section right there,
and maybe I'm talking about the iMac camera right here.
So I'll just go ahead and remove the volume on that.
And now as it's playing through the "A role"
and I'm talking, it's going to show the cutout
on top of the iMac as I'm speaking.
Then maybe a little bit further on,
I wanna show how you can connect an external display
to the iMac M1, so I got some footage for that as well.
So if I wanna show how the iMac works
with an external display, I can find that video.
I can find the portion of the clip that I wanna use,
select it and drag it onto the video,
which is gonna be over here, I believe.
And great. So now when I hit play,
I'll be talking about how you can use the iMac
with an external display,
and it will actually show it on top of the "A role" as well.
So there you go.
I'm talking about the iMac
and I'll be dragging from the iMac screen
over to the external display.
Awesome. So that's my process of adding "B roles"
on top of my "A role" inside a Final Cut Pro.
One of the next things I do is I add the transitions
throughout the video if I need them.
I always have one at the beginning.
It always kind of starts like, "Hey, I'm Jerry."
And that was my transition.
So let me show you how I do that.
All right. So at the beginning of the video,
I always have that kind of first introduction
and then my name introduction like this.
- ...iMac even better. I'm Jerry.
- Great. So that's where it is.
And now I'm just going to go to the built-in transitions
in Final Cut Pro.
I'm going to go to the lights
and I'm going to drag this bloom over here,
and I'm gonna shorten this up to about 15 frames
and then you'll see, like, so.
- ...iMac even better. I'm Jerry.
- Awesome. Now to make it just a little bit better,
we're gonna go ahead and add that sound
that I always have on there as well,
the kind of iPhone sending message sounds.
We're just gonna drag that down here,
kind of go to right around the middle
and then I'm going to drag the audio wave,
so it's right there as well,
and we're gonna bring that down about 12 decibels
otherwise it's too loud,
but you can see how that works out right here.
- ...even better. I'm Jerry.
- And that's how I add simple transitions into my videos.
Now, if you wanna get really fancy with it,
there's all kinds of third party plugins
and different things you can buy
to work with Final Cut Pro.
MotionVFX has hundreds or thousands
of built-in like kits and transitions and effects
and all kinds of different things that you can buy.
They're not a sponsor, but I really like one of them
in particular called mTuber 2.
And mTuber 2 comes with a number of different little things,
but really the only ones that I use is the Zoom,
so I can zoom in and out of things.
And I also use these little animations
for like reminding people to subscribe.
So take this as a reminder to subscribe and hit the bell
and all that jazz.
In using the mTuber plugin is just as easy
as using the built-in Apple ones.
You drag what you want,
you can expand it or shrink it to fit the size
that you needed to do.
And this one is just going to zoom in,
so we're going to adjust that so that when I'm talking,
maybe it's emphasizing something really important
or maybe even funny, God forbid.
And when it's all set,
we'll just go ahead and go back and we'll hit play.
And you can see, as I'm talking,
it's going to zoom in nice and slow and smooth.
And then at the end it's going to zoom out.
And there's different settings you can configure
with each one of these
to customize it the way you want it to be.
Now, when I was talking about assets earlier,
I mentioned YouTube music.
So inside of the YouTube studio
down at the bottom, you have this audio library.
So there's thousands of songs that you can choose
to create your own music library for your own videos.
There's plenty of other paid services out there,
if you want different types of music,
but for my needs, I really just need a really light music
to kind of cover up some of the room noise
in the room underneath, you know what I'm saying,
underneath my recordings.
And so the YouTube audio library actually does
a pretty good job of it.
And actually it has some pretty decent stuff.
If you wanna go beyond how I use it,
you wanna use it for dramatic "B role"
or some kind of suspenseful transition
or some kind of buildup.
You can do that with the music on YouTube audio library
for free, so you can just scroll through
a whole list of different things.
You can find something that sounds interesting
and hit play and listen to it,
and then you can just go ahead and download it on the side,
down to your computer,
and you can add it to your videos or to your libraries
like I showed you earlier.
You can also search and filter by genre, mood, artist,
and duration to find just the type of thing
you're looking for.
So for example, if you're looking for something that is,
let's see, angry, angry or dark, that's what I want.
So we're gonna get something like that.
That's kind of ambient and dark,
and that probably fills in the background
of your music pretty well.
(dark music) Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
So once I know which music I'm going to use,
I'm going to just drag it down into here
and maybe I want these two
and we'll of course cut it off here
'cause that's where my video ends.
And then I'm going lower the volume down below
and you do whatever you need to do.
Of course, there's different configurations
and settings you can do for music to enhance your video
if that's what you want to do.
But for me, it's just, like I said,
very basic background music down to about -41.
So it just kind of plays in the background
to cover up some of my room noise.
And that's pretty much it for my editing of my videos.
Now you might be wondering about color grading
and things like that.
I actually don't do any color grading anymore.
I tried it for a long time, but I'm using an 8-bit camera,
actually two 8-bit cameras.
I have two Sony A Series, a6400,
and they shoot an 8-bit if I wanna use S-log
or something like that and I had a lot of issues,
I spent a lot more time trying to color grade my video,
they just getting it out the door.
I got tired of messing with that so far,
at least right now, that's not something I do.
I actually shoot with my Sony camera's
set with the color profile off.
So the colors that you're seeing
are actually the colors coming out of the camera
and I'm actually pretty happy with them.
The one thing I would recommend though,
is you make sure to set the white balance.
So different cameras are gonna set them
in a little bit different way.
I would get a gray card, something like that.
So you can actually set the white balance
to the light in your room
to make sure it's always consistent
and it doesn't change around
depending on the light of the room
or light coming through the window
or something like that.
So for me, I just wanna set the white balance,
let the camera worry about the color science,
and then I can focus on the other things.
But if you're interested in learning more
about color grading or more intricate techniques of editing,
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So that's pretty much the basics of how I edit
and organize videos using Final Cut Pro.
And I hope you found some of that helpful.
I'm coming up on the 2-year anniversary
of making my channel here on YouTube,
and so if you're interested in other processes
that I use to make videos or behind the scenes stuff,
let me know below.
I've made a number of different videos
on my channel from Macs and iPads to how tos
and software and even NAS stuff,
and the YouTube algorithm thinks that you're gonna love
this video right over here, so check that out.
Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it.
Hit subscribe if you want and I'll see you next time.