- In this video,
I wanna go through four different things that I do
to speed up my editing workflow,
because when it comes to editing,
time is super important.
It seems to be that every client I work with
needs their projects faster,
and then creating content here on YouTube
it's all about just being consistent
and continually uploading.
Editing for me has always been one of those bottlenecks
where it just takes a lot of time to do,
so I've really thought through my process
and I've come up with different strategies
to speed up the workflow and just make it go a lot faster.
Originally this video had a sponsor,
but when I showed them the first cut,
they said they wanted me to redo the entire video.
So instead of remaking the video,
I decided just to cancel the sponsorship.
I'll use this as an opportunity
to tell you about a new course I just released,
it's a two-hour beginner's guide on Final Cut Pro.
And it goes through basically everything I do
when I edit my videos,
and some of the things I do to speed up my workflow.
You can watch this for free on Skillshare,
right now it's down below in the description.
If you've never signed up for Skillshare before,
you can get 30 days for free and you can watch the course,
and if you have a premium account,
you can start watching right away.
The first tip I have for you has to do with organization,
and you wanna organize all your files
before you even get into Final Cut Pro.
And the reason for this is you don't wanna have files
strung across your computer,
different hard drives, your downloads folder.
If you have assets everywhere,
then when it comes time to find something specific,
you're now digging through all of your different spots
where there's footage, or music, or audio.
And you end up losing things,
and just ends up becoming a mess.
Ideally, you'll have all of your assets
put into one folder,
and that folder is gonna be somewhere easily accessible.
When it comes to the folder structure for me,
I do everything based around projects.
I have a project number for every video that I work on,
and I also use the date,
so I'll have a folder that has the date,
the project number, and then a title.
And everything goes in that,
I'll make a folder labeled media,
in that media I'll have all my cameras,
I'll have my music, I'll have sound effects,
whatever I've collected for this project,
I'll put it all in here.
This is also where I put my Final Cut profile,
and I also put all of my exports,
and photos, and thumbnails,
basically everything for that video
or that project is in one folder.
And I use separate Final Cut profiles for every project.
And the reason that I make a Final Cut library
for each project is it just keeps everything cleaner
and simpler.
You go back to this folder,
it has everything in this folder,
and I'm never looking for assets anywhere on my computer.
And one other thing when it comes to organization is,
you wanna make sure that this folder is easily accessible
and you're not having to move it around all the time.
Whenever I start a project
and I'm adding assets into the folder,
I have it in three places duplicated.
I have it on my computer,
my main computer has four terabytes of internal hard drive,
that allows me to just edit off of the internal drive
rather than having a SSD plugged in.
Then I'll have a backup drive,
and a duplicate of that backup drive,
and I'll explain more about this system later in this video.
My second tip for you is to use plugins
to speed up your workflow.
There's a lot of things that you can do with plugins
and Final Cut Pro.
And for me, I've found that it really helps
in making sure I can edit faster.
One of the companies that I work with a lot
when it comes to my plugins is MotionVFX.
I use their mTuber, their mTutorial,
and some of the other text plugins
to just make motion graphics super simple and super fast.
You'll see them all the time in my videos,
I might have a hand cursor, or I might draw a box,
or I might just have like text pop-up,
or if I'm working with another creator,
you'll see a lower third pop-up,
and all of those are prebuilt.
I do some modifications with these plugins,
and a lot of times I'll save those modifications,
and you can do this by actually
opening the plugin in Motion.
You have to learn a little bit about Motion,
but you can change some of the settings over,
resave it into Final Cut.
And then you have a plugin that you've customized
and it's easy just to drag and drop onto your footage,
this saves you just a ton of time
having to redo things over and over.
Another plugin I use all the time in Final Cut is Zooms.
And you might think
you can just keep hitting those pretty quickly,
but having a plugin that allows you to do the zooms,
makes it so simple
that you just drop it on top of your footage
and it zooms in,
and it only takes an action or two
to get that zoom functional.
You just put it on your footage,
you put the amount that you want it to zoom,
and then you put the directionality
of where you want that clip to zoom into.
You don't have to deal with key framing your end points,
your out points,
and it's super easy to move around.
And also when you use these kinds of plugins,
you can put them on top of your footage
and effect multiple clips at the same time.
It just saves you a lot of time,
rather than using compound clips and key framing.
In the description there's gonna be a list
of the plugins that I personally use,
so if you like any of the graphics
that you've seen on my videos,
I'll put links to all of those in the description.
Also MotionVFX is doing a big sale right now,
and I'll include a link down below description to that.
MotionVFX is not the sponsor of this video,
they didn't pay me to say this,
I've worked with their plugins for a while,
they just sent me an email mentioning the sale.
So I thought I would share with all of you,
especially because we're talking about plugins
in this video.
My next tip for speeding up your editing workflow
is to build custom libraries
that are like a stock footage library.
This is something that I've been playing around with,
and it actually works super well.
And being able to organize your footage in a way
where you're not continually importing new footage
every project that you work on.
When I'm making my videos,
there's a lot of times where I dig into old libraries,
and I need footage from something
that is shot like six months ago.
I always find a use for different footage
depending on what project I'm working on,
and I found that you can actually
make Final Cut Pro libraries
as like a stock footage library.
I did this recently for my Alaska trip and my Utah trip
when I was working with the DJI Mavic 3,
and basically what I do is I upload all of my footage
into a library,
but I don't use that library for editing.
I categorize everything into events and into keywords,
and I don't import any of the footage into that library.
All of the footage stays on my external hard drives,
and the library is basically just a collection of footage.
When I'm working on a video,
I can open up that library as a secondary library,
scroll through, find some shots that I wanna use,
and just pull them into the timeline
I'm currently working on.
Final Cut allows you to move clips between libraries
without actually moving the clip
because you're referencing the clip
on the external hard drive,
all you're doing is grabbing the shot
and bringing it into your library.
What this does is it allows me to organize
all of my footage once in these bigger libraries,
and I only need to open up those libraries
if I need to go back and grab some footage
from those shoots.
Before I was using this library method,
I would go in my finder and try to find shots,
and a lot of times those don't play
just from the finder window,
so I'd have to import my entire camera library
into my new library.
It just would be a mess, it would take me a lot of time.
Another video I'm gonna work on
in the future is a complete breakdown
of how I'd use this library system,
and how I can access all of my footage
from years of filming in a super quick and concise way.
In the beginning of this video,
I was talking about hard drives a little bit.
So my fourth tip
for speeding up your workflow is not dealing
with hard drives after you're done editing.
And what I mean by that is you don't wanna have things
on a hard drive and then have to move that later.
So like,
say a month from now you need to clear up some space,
then you have to move your project files
over to another hard drive,
and then you have to create a backup of that.
And if you're someone who likes to keep all of your footage,
it becomes a mess super quick.
I have a system that I use
which just simplifies the whole process,
I never have to deal with moving footage more than once.
Everything is just super easy to find
so that if I ever need to go back,
I can easily grab different shots.
The way I use my hard drives is I have three copies
while I'm editing,
and two copies after I'm done editing.
Basically I'll have my edit drive,
this is the drive that I'm working off of.
My computer, I have four terabytes of space,
so I just use that as my working drive.
I have two backup drives,
these are bigger drives that I back up my data to.
When I import my footage,
I'll bring it onto my working drive,
and then I'll duplicate that onto both backup drives
just so I always have a backup in case something fails.
Once a project is done,
I collect all my assets, I go to my project library,
I go through and I delete generated media files.
This is an important step to make your library much smaller,
and most of the time you're not gonna need these files
after you're done with a project.
And I'll take that folder
and I'll sync it to my backup drive,
so add all the additional assets and the project library
into that backup drive.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner,
and I basically create a duplicate drive
of that backup drive.
It may seem like a lot,
keeping two copies of everything that I do,
but I've had hard drives fail on me,
and I've been saved by having that backup hard drive.
I use three copies while I'm working on a project
and two when I'm done,
and I never touch those hard drives
after I've backed them up and I'm done with them.
I just keep adding to these drives,
and once they're full I buy new drives.
I don't worry about shuffling things around,
and I've found that when I'm working on bigger drives,
eventually I do need to move the data anyways.
I used a Synology system for awhile
and it ended up becoming a massive mess,
just because of the way
that the data was stored and the speeds.
And I ended up running out of space,
and then I either had to add space
or I had to take stuff off.
I've just found that the simplest way
to do this is to have two hard drives,
and just put the footage on it,
forget about it, store it away.
Hard drives do degrade over time anyways,
so I'm not gonna wanna be reusing drives
for years and years.
If a hard drive fails I can replace it,
and if both hard drives fail well,
that's the worst case scenario.
If you're new to Final Cut
or you just wanna have a refresher,
make sure you check out my two-hour course
over on Skillshare.
I'll put a link down below in the description
so you can go check that out.
And next,
I highly suggest you check out this video right here.
It goes through how you multicam and Final Cut Pro,
and learning this skill will help you speed up your workflow
when you're working with multiple cameras
or different sources at the same time.
I'll see you over there.