- Are you editing in Final Cut Pro
and looking for the easiest way to speed up your workflow
and create better videos faster?
In this video, I'm gonna run through my top five
editing tips for Final Cut Pro.
(techno music)
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video.
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in this video, you can find linked in the description below.
So, let's jump into it.
Final Cut Pro is an awesome option
when it comes to video editing software.
Personally, I use it all the time,
and that's actually how I'm editing these YouTube videos.
As far as editing efficiency is concerned,
it's really hard to beat once you have
the right workflow in place.
Final Cut Pro is incredibly well-optimized for Mac
and Intel-based CPUs, which I absolutely love,
but to get your editing even faster
and easily boost the quality of your videos,
in this video, I'm gonna cover my top five
Final Cut Pro tips that you can implement right now.
And stick around to the end, 'cause I'll show you
how you can get free access to our advanced guide,
running through the ultimate process
for editing videos faster
no matter what software you're using.
First off, in video editing,
there's always lots of different ways
to essentially do the same thing.
Some people would prefer to use the mouse
and do everything clicking and dragging.
Other people will edit using purely the keyboard
and learning all the keyboard shortcuts.
So, what's gonna be the quickest for you
will really come down to how you like to edit,
but there are two keyboard shortcuts
that I think that you definitely need to know,
if you don't already, that will dramatically increase
your editing speed.
Now, these two shortcuts are called trim top and trim tail,
and these are gonna save you what would be,
essentially, three or four steps with a mouse click
with one keyboard press,
and the two keyboard shortcuts are
option, square bracket left
and option, square bracket right,
so essentially, what these keyboard shortcuts
will allow you to do is, from your playback head,
when you press ALT, square bracket left or trim top,
it's going to make a cut in your timeline
where that playback head indicator is,
your timeline marker, back to the previous cut
in your timeline, so back towards the left,
and it will delete whatever's in the middle,
and it will remove it from your timeline and close the gap,
all with that one keyboard shortcut.
And exactly the same, then, for trim tail,
so option, square bracket right
is going to make a cut in your timeline
where your playback indicator is
and remove everything to the right
up until the next cut in your timeline,
so it's gonna make a cut and it's going to lift
and extract everything that's in between the two cuts
in your timeline, remove it, and close up the gap.
Now, to do this with a mouse, that's a few different clicks.
One to make a cut in the timeline,
one to select the clips and to delete them,
and another one to close up the gap.
Obviously, that's a little dependent on
how you've got your timeline set up,
but the principle here is that it's gonna save you
a heap of time because it'll allow you to chop down
a huge amount of footage to something small and manageable
really quick, if you can just skim through your timeline,
remove everything back to a previous point
or back to a future cut in your timeline,
so trim top and trim tail.
The second tip I've got for you is around
volume level adjustment, so typically,
if you just wanna raise or lower the volume
for a certain section or a small amount of your timeline
or of a clip, then you'll have to go through
and mark key frames, raise the volume to that point,
and then use key frames again to lower it back down,
and really the whole key frame thing,
while it works, it's a little fiddly.
There's a quick tool in Final Cut that allows you
to do this really, really quickly,
and it's called the range selector,
so if you press R on the keyboard, you'll get the different
range selector cursor that appears.
You can draw out the section on your clip
that you wanna make louder or quieter,
and that'll automatically add the key frames
in there for you, but the coolest part about this
is that it's not just adding a hard cut.
It's actually adding in key frames that are slightly in,
so it's gonna give you a fade-in and a fade-out
to that different volume level, or a transition up and down
from the different volume levels,
so that's something that's really, really cool,
and it saves you a heap of time in your editing,
going and playing around
and adjusting all the key frames manually.
Tip number three is all about motion titles.
Now, we did do a video a little while back,
and I'll put a link up in the cards now
showing you how you can create awesome titles,
animated titles, animated graphics for your videos,
and customize everything directly from within final cut,
so no need to have Apple Motion or Adobe After Effects
and render everything out and then bring it in.
You can do all the editing of these awesome graphics
and titles directly in your timeline,
so if you're not using motion titles or templates
from places like Video Hive in your Final Cut editing,
then you're really missing out,
because what you can do is so powerful,
and really looks really professional,
and it's so easy, so make sure you check out that video,
but also make sure that you're using motion titles
or motion templates in your Final Cut editing.
Tip number four is all about color correction.
Now, this is something that I didn't realize
was a big time saver until I was watching someone
edit in Final Cut rather recently,
and the process for applying the color correction
filter effect was what most people would logically do,
which is go to effects, grab that color correction effect,
click and drag it onto your timeline,
and then edit the colors from there up in the color board,
so that's a lot of steps just to be able to color correct
a clip in your timeline, and what I was watching is
he was doing that for every single clip
that he wanted to color correct.
Now, you're probably thinking here that you could do it once
and copy and paste that effect across your entire timeline,
and yes, you definitely could,
but if you wanna go through each individual clip
and apply a different color correction to each of them,
then the easiest way to do that is to press
the keyboard shortcuts command, six.
Now, what command, six will do is open up the color board,
or essentially, it's dropping the color correction effect
onto whichever clip you've got selected on the timeline,
and give you direct access to make color adjustments
on the fly, so if you're scrubbing through your timeline
and you press command, six, making color adjustments
at that point will make any adjustments to the clips
that you've got selected on your timeline,
so you'll save a heap of time going into effects
and applying that color correction effect
to each individual clip, whereas now, you don't need to.
As long as you've got that color board open,
using command, six,
then you can adjust your clips on the fly.
So, if you're someone that already color corrects this way
and you might be thinking yep, that's not a real big tip,
it is a huge time saver for anyone that is not
doing it that way, and I can guarantee you
that there's a lot of people out there that aren't
color correcting that way or aren't using that tool
and are manually applying their effects
to each individual clips,
and that leads us to tip number five.
Now, tip number five is all about
export settings and presets inside of Final Cut.
Now, when we move from Adobe Premier to Final Cut
for these YouTube videos, we got quite a few comments
about the drop in quality of our videos,
yet we were still using the same camera.
We were still using the same quality settings.
We're still shooting in 4K, editing in 4K.
The difference was we were using the Premier presets before
and we're using the Final Cut presets now for YouTube,
and the Final Cut presets for YouTube are much,
much lower bitrates than they are in Adobe Premier,
so my tip here is if you wanna export your videos
at a higher quality for YouTube,
now that also means that you will have
a larger file size as well,
but I would suggest that you don't use
the built-in preset in Final Cut for YouTube,
at least at the time of filming this video.
There could be a new update that comes out tomorrow
that totally changes all of that, but for now,
the preset quality isn't as good as, say,
the built-in one in Adobe Premier.
So, what I do, my work flow in Final Cut,
is I export a master file, so it's a much bigger file,
but the quality is much, much better.
So my workflow from there is that I'll actually
just upload that larger file to YouTube.
Now, I'm lucky enough to have fairly decent internet
here in Australia, which is a weird thing,
but if you don't have good enough internet
or you still want a smaller file,
then use Handbrake or use Compressor
to compress the file afterwards,
but to get it out of Final Cut, use the master file,
and don't just use the built-in YouTube preset
for best results.
Okay, so there's my top five tips for creating
better videos and doing it faster in Final Cut Pro.
Now, if you're looking to take your editing
to the next level again,
and eliminate a huge amount of rework
and wasted time in your editing process,
then definitely check out our free guide
that we've put together, running through,
step by step, the ultimate video editing process
to prevent issues and save a huge amount of time editing.
It's called the Primal Video Method,
and you can get access to it using the link
on the screen now, or below in the description.
I'll see you soon.