In today’s video,
we’ll take a look at re-timing clips in Final Cut Pro,
including speeding up your clips,
slowing them down,
and even setting more than one speed
in a single clip using Speed Ramping.
Hey guys, what’s up.
My name is Serge and welcome back to my channel.
First, let’s take a look
at how you can speed up your video clips,
and it’s really simple.
Select the clip you want to speed up in your timeline,
and open the re-time drop down menu
at the bottom of the viewer.
Hover over Fast,
and select one of the speed options.
Selecting 4x will play your clip back
at four times the original speed.
Alternately, you can change the speed
of your clip right in the timeline.
With the clip selected, pressing Command R
on your keyboard will toggle the re-time menu
on your clip on and off.
You can change the speed of your clip
by either clicking the arrow in the re-time bar
and selecting one of the presets,
or by dragging the re-time handle
at the end of your clip.
Let’s go back to the re-time menu in the timeline.
Besides the included speed presets,
you also have a custom option.
Selecting this option opens up a re-time popup.
Here, you can reverse your clip,
set your speed by entering a specific playback rate,
or enter the length you want your clip to be.
So, if we enter 5 seconds for our 20 second clip,
Final Cut Pro adjusts the playback rate
to condense our clip to exactly 5 seconds.
So, thats how you speed up clips, not much to it.
Slowing down clips,
while retaining smoothness and quality,
is a little more complicated.
If we simply take a clip,
set the speed to 50,
and play it back,
as you can see the playback is very choppy.
If we slow it down even more, it gets even worse.
Thats because the source clip
is the same frame rate as the project,
in this case 24 frames per second.
If we slow it down,
Final Cut Pro just duplicates the frames,
resulting in choppy playback.
To get smooth slow motion,
you need to film your clips at higher frame rates.
Our next clip was filmed at 60 frames per second,
so in a 24 frame per second timeline,
we have quite a bit of room to play with.
If you want to slow your clip down as much as you can,
but don’t want to do math,
Final Cut Pro has an automatic speed option.
With your clip selected,
from the re-time dropdown menu,
select Automatic Speed.
Final Cut Pro adjusts the speed of your clip
to play back at your project frame rate.
A 60 frame per second clip in a 24 frame per second timeline
can be slowed all the way down to 40 percent,
without having to duplicate any frames.
You can also slow down your clips manually
my doing the math.
Our next clip was filmed at 120 frames per second,
so if we do the math,
in a 24 frame per second timeline,
you can slow it all the way down to 20 percent.
With the clip selected,
press Command R to bring up the re-time bar,
and from the dropdown menu, select Custom.
In the speed rate box type in 20, and hit enter.
Click anywhere outside the popup to close it.
Now, if we play it back, even at 20 percent speed,
the playback is still nice and smooth.
So, if you need to slow down your clips,
make sure to shoot at a higher frame rate.
Next, let’s take a look at speed ramping clips.
What this does,
is allow you to playback a single clip at different speeds.
Let’s use the same clip as we did in our last example,
and slow down just a few specific parts.
Skim your timeline,
and place your playhead on the frame
where you want to slow down your clip.
Select your clip,
and from the retime menu,
select Blade Speed.
This splits your clip into two speed segments.
Move your skimmer to where you want
to go back to normal speed, and Blade Speed again,
this time by using the keyboard shortcut Shift B.
Zoom in on your timeline,
and change the speed of the middle segment to 20 percent.
This re-times the selected part of your clip,
and adds transitions to the start
and end of the selected part to ease in and out.
Click and drag the ends of these transitions to adjust the timing.
Let’s see what that looks like.
Re-timing clips and adding speed ramps
is a great way to set the pace of your video.
If you want to see some really cool examples of this,
check out Daniel Schiffer’s channel.
He uses speed ramps in a lot of his videos,
and makes them look amazing.
I’ll link it in the description below.
Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you back here next week.