- Final Cut Pro is my favorite video editing software.
I've used and taught Final Cut Pro
for the last seven years,
and I kinda love everything about it.
I know it gets sort of a lot of flack sometimes
for not being as professional.
But I think a lot of people who make that criticism
probably haven't used the software very recently.
And there's kind of an infinite number of ways
that you can use and enhance Final Cut Pro
to be even more efficient
and meet your needs more effectively.
So what I wanted to do today was share five things with you
that I think are going to be really, really helpful.
And if you use Final Cut Pro
or you're just starting out with Final Cut Pro,
they will make your life a lot easier.
So these are five Final Cut Pro quick tips
that I use in literally pretty much every project
that I make with Final Cut Pro.
My first tip has to do with audio,
which is often overlooked when people start making videos.
And the truth is, audio is half of video.
So if you go into Final Cut Pro
and you make a very simple command,
if you press shift command eight
what you will see on the right side of the screen
is that your audio meters will start to pop up.
And you can expand and shrink your audio meters
to your preference.
I usually like to keep 'em pretty narrow over on the side.
But I always, 100% of the time, have them on.
And there's a lot of science that can go into audio levels,
but in general, the rule of thumb,
is that you wanna keep your main audio levels
between negative 12 and negative six.
That's gonna give the viewer a really consistent,
high-quality experience.
If you go past zero you're gonna start clipping
and your audio's gonna sound distorted,
and you're never gonna be able to fix it.
And if your audio's too low and you try
to increase the volume it's gonna introduce
a whole bunch of noise and it's never gonna sound good.
So never forget about your audio levels,
and I would suggest never editing a video
without your audio meters present.
And again, that is just shift command eight
to turn that on and off.
My second tip is all about precision editing,
and that's frame nudging and frame trimming.
So when you're editing your clips
and you want things to really sync up with music
or you're trying to match up audio and video
I see a lot of people, especially students
when they're starting out with Final Cut Pro,
tend to struggle when they're just trying to line it up
by hand using the mouse or whatever.
And that's really really difficult.
But if you use the comma and the period keys,
you can nudge things back and forth one frame at a time.
If you're editing a video and you're trying
to sync up some clips to a specific song,
so right now there's a snare hit right around this point
where these two clips meet,
but they're not cutting on it yet.
(light music)
It's a little bit off.
So if I just select the edge of that clip
and then use the period key to nudge over a few frames,
I can then sync it up exactly how I want it.
(light music)
Then you can also do that with,
if you have maybe a B roll clip or an audio clip,
and you want it to match up perfectly,
you can use those same comma and period keys to nudge things
back and forth so that they line up perfectly.
Those little frame perfections here and there
really add up to make a much higher quality product overall.
You might think that people don't really notice it
and no one's probably ever going to compliment you
on how perfect your frame precision is,
but it all does come together to create an overall piece
that people do notice the quality of.
One of the most frustrating but kind of rewarding things
about video editing is when you do everything right
and you put so much work into it,
then people don't notice it.
So it's kind of like the less that your viewer notices
the more that you did right.
'Cause you want them to be immersed
in the video and the story.
You don't want them to be distracted
by the technical stuff that went into it.
And my third tip has to do with effects.
Sometimes you might have some color grading
or a preset or a LUT or a filter or a letterboxing,
some kind of effect that you want to apply
to a bunch of different clips.
And sometimes you might have a montage or a whole project
that has like dozens and dozens of clips,
and you're clicking and dragging one by one
to get them all on there.
And I'm kind of embarrassed to admit how long it took me
to figure out this trick,
so I'm gonna share that with you right now.
So in this project here which was a vlog I made
in Reykjavik, Iceland last summer.
I stopped talking.
The graffiti so it's really interesting.
(light relaxed music)
And then the music kicks in and there's a montage.
One thing that I like to do is to letterbox my montages
'cause it just sort of separates them
from the other parts of a vlog,
but instead of adding letterbox one to one,
you just open up your effects,
I'm gonna find letterbox, there it is,
and then all I need to do is find the clips
that I want to letterbox, highlight those clips,
double click on the letterbox effect,
and now it will have applied it
to all the clips all at once.
And you could do this by merging the clips all together
in a compound clip and adding one letterbox,
but I like to be able to go individually through the clips,
one by one, and not only set the aspect ratio,
but also adjust the offset so I can frame each clip
and make sure they look as good as possible.
I don't like to just add a one letterbox setting
to my whole video because oftentimes it makes things
look worse and it doesn't make them look better,
but this'll work with any effect,
not just letterboxing.
It's really, really helpful when you have a lotta clips
that you wanna add a color grade to.
And you make your preset and then you can just quickly
add it to a whole bunch of different clips.
And tip number four is all about compound clips.
So if you have multiple pieces of media on your timeline,
whether it's video, audio, a whole bunch of whatever,
and you wanna smash them all into one brand new thing
that you can edit singularly,
that is called a compound clip.
And it's super easy to do that.
All you need to do is highlight the things
that you wanna merge and then you can either right click
and select compound clip or you can press alt g
and it will create a new compound clip.
You can give it a name if you want,
and then there you go, you've got your new clip.
That's a pretty simple trick
that in and of itself is helpful.
But where compound clips become really, really helpful
is sometimes when you need to boost your audio a little bit
because maybe you didn't have your audio meters up
and the levels are a little bit too low
and you're trying to adjust things.
So when it comes to dealing with audio that's too low,
I have an example clip that I filmed when I was
making a video about ND filters for your phone,
and I filmed this whole clip talking about the filters,
but as you can see when I play it,
even when the volume's up, the level's really low.
It's between negative 30 and negative 20.
So sometimes you find yourself
in those situations in Final Cut.
It's really easy to just raise your audio up.
You can go 12 decibels higher.
But in a clip like this,
and even though it is kind of a hassle
to have to carry more things with you,
that's still a little too quiet.
As you can see when I play it,
the audio meter's still bouncing
between negative 20 and negative 12.
I would like it to be higher above 12,
maybe closer to negative six.
But Final Cut won't let me increase the level anymore.
What I can do is I can go into the equalizer
and add in some gain but that gets kinda complex
and adds in a lot of noise.
Here's a really, really quick and simple way
that you can boost your audio even further
in those emergency cases when you need to.
And only use this in an emergency,
I wouldn't use it all the time.
And to do that all you need to do
once you've increased your levels
to the maximum amount that Final Cut will let you,
you just create a compound clip.
And when you create a compound clip
it sets the levels back to zero,
but it saves them at the volume you had adjusted them to.
So now I have 12 more decibels
that I can increase that audio to
and you can see the waveforms are getting
much, much bigger and it's looking much more audible.
Out of your phone if you're trying to film with your phone.
It's pretty impressive what these small cameras can do.
And right now the audio's exactly where I want it.
It's right between 12 and six.
It's gonna be nice and clear.
It's not too loud, it's not too quiet.
That's not gonna work magic on totally damaged clips,
but every once in a while it can really save you.
And finally my last tip has less to do
with the Final Cut Pro software itself,
and more with how you manage your workflow.
So every video that I've made for this YouTube channel
and everything that I've done for my actual day job
in the past five years has been edited
on a 2013, 13-inch MacBook Pro,
and this is like the mid-level model.
I think it cost about $1300 new.
So it was not the most powerful computer in the world.
I got it way before I started a YouTube channel.
But everything, all hundred and something videos
on this channel were made on this computer.
And it still runs great.
I haven't done any modifications.
It has eight gigabytes of RAM
and a 256 gigabyte SSD internal hard drive.
And it's got a 2.4 gigahertz i5 processor.
So it's a good computer, I love this computer.
I have tried to upgrade twice over the years
to like new touch bar MacBook Pros,
but I spent so much money on 'em
and they're really not that much better
than this computer and part of the reason for that
is because of the way I've chosen to manage my data
and all of my media files on this computer.
Things are only on here for editing.
The rest of the time everything
lives on external hard drives.
And these are a couple of four terabyte
traditional hard drives.
But if you can get an SSD drive, a solid state drive,
it's even faster.
And that's going to help your workflow tremendously.
So whenever I'm done filming anything,
I take my camera's memory card, I put it in my computer,
'cause the old computer still has an SD card slot, too,
which is kinda nice,
and then I just take all the raw footage
and put it in a new folder on an external hard drive.
So my Final Cut Pro library,
where all of my clips and all of my projects
and all of my important stuff is stored,
is not on my actual computer,
it's on an external hard drive.
And that makes a huge difference
because it keeps all that stuff off of the computer,
lets the computer run as fast as it's capable of running,
and then everything is saved on a hard drive.
With the cost of external storage being so cheap now,
it's a really good idea to store
all of your project libraries, all of your files,
all of your raw media, on an external hard drive
and keep those as backups.
And that's gonna help your actual
editing computer run a lot faster.
The fact that this is a pretty base model computer
from five years ago and it still works great
to do all the stuff I need it to do every day,
I even use it alongside an iMac Pro at work every day,
and honestly, I don't notice
that much of a difference in speed.
So it's not necessarily the power of your computer
when it comes to video editing,
it's how you manage your media.
So this tip might not be Final Cut Pro specific,
but if you start implementing
smart and purposeful media management
into your Final Cut Pro workflow,
your life is gonna be a lot easier.
And then what video would be complete without a bonus tip?
So here's a quick bonus tip that you might actually
not be aware of, which is if you're trying to incorporate
still images into a video or maybe you've shot
a stop motion project where you
shot everything on still images,
Final Cut Pro can actually accept native raw files.
So here I have a raw image from my Canon 6D Mark II,
and I can drag that into Final Cut,
and the program will just accept that raw file
and I can use it and move it and edit it
just like I would any still image in a project.
This is actually an image of the computer lab
part of my classroom when the building
was still under construction,
but once you have the raw file imported into Final Cut
you can go in and still adjust all of the settings,
not necessarily with the same precision you would have
in a program like Lightroom or Photoshop,
but you can make some pretty good corrections on it.
You don't need any other software
and you don't need to convert anything beforehand.
You can just bring raw image files directly in
to Final Cut Pro and I think that's pretty awesome.
So I hope this was helpful for you,
and I hope at least one of these five tips
will help improve your workflow and your editing experience
with Final Cut Pro because like I said
at the beginning of the video,
I really love this software.
It's genuinely a joy to use and I'm a huge fan of it,
and I kinda feel like it's the underdog
in the video editing software space,
and so I wanna stick up for it whenever I can
and fight for Final Cut Pro
because I think it's pro-tty good.
(video game-like music)