One of the reasons why Final Cut is such a great editing software is because of the speed
at which you can pump out videos.
But have you set up your Final Cut Pro to help you achieve that superhero speed?
The first thing you can do is utilize this tab to your advantage.
For photos, create an album in your phone and maybe put all the logos or png images
you use in there, then after you connect your phone and import, you’ll see that by going
into photos, you have that album with all the logos and stuff that you use.
For the music tab, every time you download a song from Artlist or wherever, make sure
it makes its way into the music application.
Usually you can do this by just clicking the song when you download it.
When you do that, you’ll notice that all your songs are in that tab, so you have quick
and easy access to music for your projects.
For Apple tv, open the application and drag all the overlays, film grain, stock video,
whatever you use in your projects, to this application and they’ll automatically show
up whenever you hop into Final Cut Pro.
And lastly, set up your sound effects folder so you have access to all of your purchased
and downloaded SFX directly within Final Cut Pro.
What you’ll do is make a main folder with all of your sound effects.
Right click and hit make alias.
This is basically a folder that’s attached to your main sound effect folder, so if you
add more sfx to the main folder, the alias folder will get them too.
Copy this by pressing Command C. Then go to your hard drive, usually Macintosh / Library
/ Audio / Apple Loops / Apple/ Final Cut Pro Sound Effects, and press Command V to paste
that alias folder you copied.
Now you’ll have all of your sound effects easily accessible within the software.
The next trick to help you become a speedy FCP superhero is to assign important functions
to one or two keys.
I honestly think this is one of the greatest things I’ve done to make me a faster editor.
If I want to set my clip or clips to automatic speed for slow motion, option forward slash.
If I want to make a cut, I just press B. If I want to lower or raise audio, all I do now
is hit minus or plus, if I want to solo select a clip I just press C, which is right next
to the default key to disable or mute, so they’re opposites in a way that are right
next to each other on the keyboard.
And the recent one, I just hit G to trim start and H to trim end.
This is a keyboard shortcut a subscriber suggested and holy hell has it made my life easier.
The default shortcut is option left or right bracket and in the not so distant past I had
this assigned this to only left and right bracket, but a subscriber suggested to switch
to G and H and it’s one of the best things I’ve done.
It may seem like you’re only shaving off a little bit of time, but that time really
adds up and it really will make your life editing easier.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how you set these up.
Let me preface by saying though, if you want to just download my custom keyboard shortcuts
so you don’t have to set this up manually you can.
I’ll leave a link in the description.
You’ll press option command k to bring up your keyboard shortcut editor, you’ll click
this drop down menu, select duplicate, type in the name you want.
Then you’ll use the search bar to find those functions to set them to a new key.
So we’ll type in solo to change the solo select function, select this, and hit the
key that you want, which for us is the C key.
Then reassign and delete the previous key if you want.
You don’t have to of course.
You could have two keys with the same function.
And just repeat this process for all the functions we went over.
Just a heads up that doing this does take the spot of certain functions, but none that
I feel are more important than the ones we’re replacing them with.
The next thing you can do to edit at superhero speed is to set up different workspaces to
speed up your workflow and make your FCP interface just look better in a short amount of time.
So check this out.
Let’s say when I color grade I usually have my video scopes up, by pressing Command 7.
I usually go with a 2 up layout with a vectorscope on top and the luma waveform on bottom.
I’ll usually start with my color wheels so I’ll press command 6 and make sure my
color wheels are selected.
Maybe I’ll make the scopes a little smaller so my viewport is bigger.
I’ll push down the timeline because we don’t really need to have that big when color grading.
And this I would say is my ideal color grading setup.
Instead of making FCP look like this every time, which would take way too long to set
up, go to window, workspaces, save workspace as, and I’ll label this Color Grading workspace.
Now every time I go into my workspaces and hit this, it’ll set FCP up exactly how I
want it.
Some of you are probably thinking, ya but, I don’t really like to color grade so that’s
not useful.
There’s tons of other options for useful layouts though.
Maybe one for editing audio, one for importing, organizing, and keywording media, and even
just a standard workspace for editing.
Last trick to make you a speedy Final Cut superhero is to use another one of the things
that makes FCP an amazing editing software and that’s keywords and smart collections.
Consider these like file cabinets and sticky notes for your media.
Let’s say you just imported a bunch of footage and you’re stressed at how much footage
you actually have.
You’re not sure how you’re going to remember what is what and where certain parts are.
Absolutely start doing this.
Select clips or parts of clips that maybe all have a specific motion.
Press command k, type in that motion, and hit enter.
Pretend what you’re doing is placing sticky notes on your clips.
Let’s say you have clips that you’d like to use for a sad moment, select those clips,
hit command K, type in sad or whatever, and press enter.
Now when you open up your event, you’ll see the keyword icon with all those keywords
you made.
They’re basically folders that have all of the clips or parts of clips that you sticky
noted with those words, so when you click on the folder you have those specific clips
all nice and neat and ready to use.
Smart collections are like master folders.
They allow you to incorporate multiple folders of specific sticky notes and other settings,
in one master folder.
So if you hit file, new library smart collection, and double click the setting icon, you can
create a smart collection of any clips or parts of clips that maybe have been selected
as favorites, and are unused, and let’s say have markers on them.
You can create a smart collection of clips that have specific keywords, were shot on
a certain date and are say synchronized clips.
This library doesn’t have enough categorized media for that one to work, but you get the
point.
Smart collections help keep you even more organized by allowing you to access really
specific footage faster.
This will undoubtedly help you to create projects quicker and ultimately turn you into a Final
Cut Pro superhero.