- Final Cut Pro has a lot of really advanced editing
techniques that I don't think a lot of people
are totally aware of.
And so today, I wanted to spend a couple of minutes
and teach you the basics of keyframe animation
in Final Cut Pro by showing you how to do a progress bar
across the bottom of a video.
And you see progress bars like this used a lot in videos
posted to social media where it's an easy way,
even without sound, to see how long the video is
and how much you've already gone through.
It basically is just a bar that goes across the bottom
of the screen for the duration of the video.
And the way to do that in Final Cut Pro is just to use
a generator and then some simple keyframe animation.
So before we get started, there are two things about
keyframe animation in Final Cut Pro that I think are really
important to understand.
And the first one is that whenever you move your mouse over
a setting in Final Cut and there is a diamond that appears
next to it, a diamond with a plus sign in the middle of it,
that means add a keyframe.
And when you realize that and you go through your menu,
it's shocking how many different settings you can keyframe
throughout Final Cut.
It gives you a ton of versatility.
If you're unfamiliar with why a keyframe is,
basically it's just a marker that tells the software
this specific element needs these specific settings
at this specific time.
And if you have multiple keyframes, the software will handle
the changes between those keyframes.
And the other thing you need to know about keyframes
in Final Cut Pro is that they're not immediately visible,
so in order to work with them, you need to right click on
your footage and select show video animation.
You can also just press control+V to turn that on and off.
And that will show you all of the keyframes
and all the animation in your footage.
So for the sake of this tutorial, I've selected just
a random clip from my last video, which is all about
the RODECaster Pro podcasting mixer that is really fun.
It's 30 seconds of footage and so we're gonna create
a 30 second progress bar.
And there are multiple ways to do this, so the way I'm
showing you is just my way of doing it which I find
really, really simple.
So the first thing is we will need to create
the progress bar.
And in order to do that, we can just go up to the generator
menu and select a custom generator and drag it on top
of the video clip that we're gonna use.
By default, it's a plain, black screen.
And so, you can change that to whatever color you want
your progress bar to be.
Typically you'd want a pretty bright color
that's easy to see.
Probably like white or since I like blue,
I'm gonna choose this cyan kinda blue.
And then, since your progress bar is a bar and not
the entire screen, you can just transform it to whatever
size you want and whatever position you want.
And for the sake of this tutorial, I'm gonna make
the generator pretty narrow and I'm gonna place it just at
the bottom of the screen to whatever width, or height I
guess, whatever thickness I want it to be.
So in the end, basically it's gonna look
something like that.
When the video is done, the bar will be all the way
at the end.
So all I'm gonna do is press control+V to show my video clip
animation on the generator, I'm gonna drag the generator so
that it fills up the entire clip, and what you'll notice
is now there's just a solid bar, so we need to animate it.
The simple way to do that is to go up into the inspector
and start playing with the transform keyframes.
So in order to make the progress bar move across the bottom
of the screen, we're going to add a keyframe to the position
setting under the transform options in the inspector.
So if you go up to inspector, you see transform,
and then there's position right there.
There's X and Y.
We're only gonna mess with X.
And if I change the value just by clicking and dragging,
you can see that it's moving the bar and it looks like it's
progressing across the screen.
When the clip is over,
this is where we want the bar to be.
I'm going to add a keyframe right there.
And then you'll notice in my video animation menu,
you can see a little blue diamond showed up,
that is that keyframe.
All I need to do then is drag the keyframe all the way
to the very end of the clip and it's gonna tell the computer
that at that point, that progress bar needs to be that wide.
And then once you've made one keyframe and you start
changing any settings, Final Cut will just add in another
keyframe automatically.
And so, when this progress br starts, we want it to be
totally off the screen.
And so no we've got these two keyframes.
If I move them really close together, the progress bar
is gonna move really fast across the bottom of the screen,
but that's not what we want.
That's not actually indicating any progress.
So I'm gonna drag the second keyframe all the way
to the beginning.
Sometimes you need to zoom in just to double check that
it is actually all the way over to the beginning.
Go all the way to the end, make sure this one is actually
to the end.
And so now when I play the video, you can see the progress
bar starts moving across the screen.
And because the keyframes are at one end of the clip
and the other, by the time the progress bar gets all the way
to the end of the video, it is actually the end
of the video clip.
And that's basically how you animate a progress
bar from scratch.
It's really, really simple so I wanted to show you how
to make a custom progress bar that you can use on your own,
but it also gives you an idea of the basics of keyframe
animation within Final Cut Pro.
You can keep it really simple like this or you can go
crazy and adjust all these different
settings with keyframes.
The options are kinda endless.
I'm always really impressed with Final Cut Pro
and I love how many advanced things you can do with it in
a really simple and really easy workflow.
So, let me know what you think.
If you have any questions, I'm happy to try my best
and help out.
Otherwise, thanks so much for your time and I'll see ya
in the next video.
Spinning around.
(hits table) Ooh!
(bouncy electronic music)