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Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Basic Editing

Lesson 4 from: Final Cut Pro X Bootcamp

Abba Shapiro

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Basic Editing

Lesson 4 from: Final Cut Pro X Bootcamp

Abba Shapiro

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Lesson Info

4. Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Basic Editing

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

12:34
2

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Navigating the Interface

32:32
3

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Project Timeline

18:23
4

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Basic Editing

16:07
5

Refining Your Edit Introduction

15:15
6

Refining Your Edit: Trimming

37:06
7

Refining Your Edit: J and L Cuts

09:00
8

Refining Your Edit: Roll and Overwrite Edits

06:25

Lesson Info

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Basic Editing

Now you see the finished product. Let's let's do some editing. Um, we're going to just do the basics right now. Just get a feel for thing tomorrow. We're really going to get in and do some serious editing. Uh, so I'm gonna create a brand new project. How do what? I create a gnat brand new project. I tested you. It's like a document was two keyboard shortcut command And you guys six out of six. If they didn't look at the audience six out of six. Commander, it makes a new program. If you don't remember that, you can always just go right up to the menu under file. New new project commanding. Okay, so I'm starting with a new blank. Timeline will talk more about this, but this is gonna be start a za Matter of fact, if you get the footage, this is how you make one. I already have created a brand new starting project for lesson one of blank win. Okay, so if you if you download the media that's there, but otherwise command and makes a new project, so we're ready to start editing and let's look...

at how you add it so The first thing I want to do is I want to cut that opening dance image. I want to show you what that is again. And look, remember that, but nice of you can go to the previous project. There we go. We could take advantage of that. Shortcuts for everything. I'm not going through all the keyboard shortcuts that you because your brains will explode even more. I'm gonna jump to the beginning of my timeline. The home key, our function and one function function left arrow on. A laptop will take you right to the beginning of your sequence. Okay, So it's these three shots, okay? White shot establishing where she is close up of the upper body as she turns close above her feet. So gonna come back, jump to my other show. I know all of this. I don't know where this footage is, but I know one thing. I know she was wearing something that was white. She had a white 22 on. Let's see if I did a keyboard shortcut for white to to Bingo. There we go. So I can quickly find all the shots with the white to to I can skim through it Up. There's the close up of the feet. There's the upper body. There's the full wide shot. Okay, so now I'm ready to start bringing this and I want to start with a wide shot, and I want to select what part of the clip I want to bring in. And this is the in point point. Okay, so I'm picking a range of videos. The idea is what? When you shoot video, you want to shoot more than you need. You don't want to turn the camera off right When the action ends, you might need that extra handle that extra stuff. You want to roll it before the action starts? The next thing is, I'm gonna pick that range. But I'm not gonna be super specific on exactly what frame, because the whole idea is I want to start creating my story, and then I can refined it and trim off the extra frames or add the extra frames as needed. I just want to get the general idea. So the way final cut works is I could go over to this clip and I can look at this one of two ways I can look at this as my filmstrip American Zoom in or if I wanted to I'm gonna hit this little button right here. I can look at it as a traditional list. Okay, so I confined things and there's that clip. OK, so I want to go to the close up of the of the feet. There we go. That's the spin. Now, I've already marked this. I'm gonna remove that. And all I have to do is when I want to pick a range of a clip. I can kind of see what she's doing here is I skim over it. If I skim and at the very beginning I click and just drag it creates a yellow box and that's the range of information. That's a range of the clip. So we see the beginning frame and then I can see you're kicking. That sounds good. I can also see a little tool tip how long it is, and this is about 89 seconds. So once I've selected this, I want to go ahead and bring it down into my sequence into my project. And I could just grab that middle area and drag it right down and let go. And that puts the clip into my main story line and I can go ahead and I can play them. OK, so that's our first clip they're working with. We made our first at it. Okay, Now I want to go where? I want to get a close up, right? So I can go here. I can find it where it is. I can click through it. By the way, I could use the up and down arrow keys to very quickly. Go through with the list. This way. Um, I'm going to switch back to the filmstrip view because I want you to see either way works really easily. So I want to go to the upper body. And again, it remembers the beautiful thing about final cut. It remembers the last in and out point the last edit point that you selected. So if you go back, it still is there. If I make a new edit point like for instance, I dragged this in, I could just grab a new area. Now I have a new internap. So it's nice is persistently remember. So I did have a remember my other one, but okay, so What's the last action here? Okay, I want to get her asked U turns. Okay, so I'm gonna pick it up in the turn, can skim through. If I want more detail, I can zoom in. Right. We learned I could zoom in here. I'll tell you. Keyboard shortcut worthwhile to have command plus and command minus the plus is actually above the equal ski. But you can use this in here and in here to zoom in for more detail and zoom out for less detail. So if I go command plus this window active, there we go. It starts spreading it. As a matter of fact, I you can see I'm seeing a lot more detail here so I could beam or critical about what area I'm gonna grab. So we're gonna get it right as she turns. And if I run out of space here, it just goes to the upper Rose matter. Fact. You can see if there's a jacket edge. It means it just continues on the previous line. We're working with a relatively light resolution here. Low resolution. So there's your hand comes up on there's the turn, and I'll just grab a range here. So I just want the turn, and I can drag that and I bring it down because final cut has something called a magnetic timeline. No matter where I drag it, it's gonna snap to the end of that clip so I don't have a big gap, Okay? There's ways I could bring something in that I want later, but that's more of an advanced editing technique will get to for right now, I want everything to be continuous. So now I have the second clip. Let's go ahead for the third clip in, and we're going to use a keyboard shortcut for that. So now I just want the closer by the feet. Okay. There she turned. These were three cameras running at the same time, So I'm gonna grab the turn a little bit of kick. So now what I want to do is I want to throw it to the end of this. Okay? So I'm gonna start using one of these buttons here, and there's something called an append at it. The key Bush. Look at his e. I remembered as the extend edit. Okay. And if I hit the letter E whatever I have selected their will now drop in want to my storyline right after the last clip. And this is a really efficient way to just slug things onto your timeline to start figuring out your story. You know, you don't have to go down, move the play head to the end. You're good to go. So I just had e gonna undo that command z and do that again. You'll see I have this selected. I just hit e. It's on a pendant it. And now I have three clips. We learned how to zoom in with command plus and command minus appear works down here to I want to see this in more detail. Command Plus have to have that as the active window. There we go. I'm zooming in, zooming out, so that's really useful. There's also a great thing. Third key Bush keyboard shortcut. You should remember Shift Z. It's fit toe window. So if I'm zoomed out of zoomed in too much and I had shifty and I do this all the time, I can see everything as big as it needs to be If I don't need this, remember we were looking at this If you have a window opening. You need more real estate. You close it? I just clicked on the trip. The transitions. So now I have my three clips. Okay, this clip one, there's the turn. Its repeated. And did I bring the feed in? What did I? Excellent. Deleted. Well, luckily, there's that persistent vision, so I'm gonna go back here. Guess what? Shift Z again. My mistakes are your learning opportunities shifts the up here. Look at that. Now, these are all just one frame. See how useful these circuits are? I have this selected. Oh, that's my problem is I didn't grab the feet, okay? It remembered gonna go a patent even though I didn't know where my play head was. It put it at the end, and now I would start trimming. So we're gonna do just a couple quick trims here to get going. And it will really dig deep into editing in the next lesson. So I want to get it right. As she turns, she's turning right there. And then she turns again, right? Trim off. This it's really easy. All I have to do is find the end of the clip and drag it back until I see that turn point. That's what I love about. Final Cut is that once you get some basic stuff, it's obviously Oh, yeah, I want to trim off the end. I simply grab the end. The arrow other is the little yellow thing points to the left, and I'm going to drag it back and you'll notice that my image updates in that upper right hand window so I could see exactly when she starts doing the turn. So I got to write their mid turn, go to the next clip. She repeats the action a little bit, have a little bit too much at the head. So I grabbed the other side and I'm just going to drag that a little bit over to the right and see to match action. She's halfway through the spin. Let's see how that looks. It's pretty good, pretty good. It's close. We could finesse it, but that's the whole idea between it, and I could do the same thing again here. Okay, I see that she's turned and she starts moving her leg as soon as I see motion. I'm good to trim that end, and now I want to cut to the leg in motion. Okay, Trick is when editing always try to cut on the action and people won't see the editor. Of course, once we put music and let's go ahead and very quickly add a connected clips that you can see what that is, So I want to go ahead and bring in music. As a matter of fact, it will override this. So I'm gonna hit music and I'm gonna pick a nice cut here. I can listen to this. What? Something. A little pep. Yeah, I like that sentence. If you listen to this, this is what we heard earlier. I can simply take that and drag it down. Or I could go ahead and put my play it at the beginning and do what's called a connected clip and we'll repeat this again tomorrow. But ah, connected clip will now attached to the 1st 1 The keyboard shortcut is cute. There's also a button. Think of Q with a little tail as that tail can stick itself onto another clip. And the beautiful thing about final cut is if I go ahead and I move that clip, the connected clip will move with it. That's the cool thing. Other nominator editors never did this. If you move the clip, everything above it would just stay there and suddenly like, Oh, I don't have a title. Well, if you put a person in and they're speaking and you give them a lower third title and then you move the person now the title stays with them so you don't get screwed up. So in this case, if I move the dancer this to later part of show, the music will live with it. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna hit the Q K. And this is a long kind of music. Shifty. So I could say, Look, that have my music I want at the beginning. So let's go ahead. Just trim off that and we're gonna go ahead and hit shift C to see the whole line. And let's see how that looks with the music. Grab the wrong car. It's very ominous. I don't know what just happened to my music. Let me go ahead and try that again. Maybe it's hunted. Appear will pick the range. I'm going to just play the beginning. That sounds good. Under without evil stuff came from. Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and pick out I'm gonna do. I'm gonna cut off everything to the right. So it starts at an endpoint. The endpoint of my range should be an out point out. What you think people shortcut to market in point in point is this big finish in point? Is I out? Point is C note your questions. Okay, I hit the okay. It's nice and small. Move my play head to the very beginning of the show, and then I'm going to hit que Okay, that's a connect edit. It was still longer than my show, but let's see if she's possessed. Now. You know what that is? That's the music in the studio. She was She was dancing to possessed music. So I'm going very quickly. Use the inspector. See, my mistakes of your benefits will learn how to do this a little bit later. But I can go ahead and I can turn off the audio in the studio, and this will make it a little bit louder. Okay, let's see what we got here. Now, on way, You can see right there hot and okay. And then you start tweeting. And so that's the whole idea behind editing. It's putting stuff. Just bring it in line, putting things above and below and then find tuning in. So what are the advantages of the French for second issue? What does 1 20 offer versus 25? So it's more of a shooting question, but deep dealing with, you know, it does raise him. I did say it would cover this. So the question is, what's the difference? Visually are aesthetically between 24 frames 25 30 frames 1620. Well, the new ultra high definition four K format. It's 60 frames and more frames per second allows you, theoretically, to get a more lifelike feel. But 24 frames, which is what a movie is, has more of that film feel? So some people like to shoot 24 because they like the the flow of fewer frames, and there's more blurring. Some people like the precision sports often or shot at 60 and 1 20 even if they're delivered at 30 because it allows you to slo mo and still get a crisp image. The nice thing is about Final cut is once you decide what flavor you want to export. You can just drop whatever flavor in it. So if I'm doing 30 frames a second, I can drop sixties. Then I could drop one twenties and I could drop 24 in. Final Cut will automatically do the conversion, and it just plays the way it should. So I don't necessarily have to make everything matched to work next week. When will you talk about setting a scratch disk? When will I talk about setting aside rash disk? I will do that on Tuesday, April 3rd from Las Vegas. No, I will talk about setting a scratch disk in less and three when we talk about ingesting. And just as a quick aside for those people who can't wait, you can either have all your media locally on your internal drive, either insider outside the library or you can have it on an external drive or an external server if you need a larger space. But you need to share that media got a couple of people asking. Barbara specifically asked this one why Final cut versus I movie. Okay, um, final cut is when you're ready to move to the next level by movie is very, very simplified, though they seem to have the same interface, and it kind of does a disservice to final Cut because it is way deeper then I movie by movie is designed to be bulletproof and not let the individual editing make as many mistakes. But to do that, it doesn't give you all the control that you might want. Um, a lot of times you want to do something, and I movie just doesn't one way because it doesn't break. Apple designed it that the average person can use it. And you can get that home movie out really easily without, you know, banging your head when you step into final cut. You're using the same tool that people used to cut corporate cut weddings. Cut theatrical films. There have been several theatrical films released this past year that were cut in final cut 10. So it's a very powerful program if you dig deep. But the nice thing is it could be a simple as you needed to be to get started

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Keyboard Shortcuts
Project Files - Dancer Media - Part 1 of 2 (Large Download 2.13 GB)
Project Files - Dancer Media - Part 2 of 2 (Large Download 1.88 GB)
Project Files - Green Screen

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Wonderful. This is the first time I've seen any of Abba's classes, and he's a great teacher. I've been watching the live sessions for the past few days and have picked up a ton of great tips that will indeed speed up my workflow in FCPX. He's a great teacher, and does a wonderful job of setting people at ease, ie. where he says things like, 'there's no trick questions', and times where he will click on something wrong, then he'll go back and show his mistake (pointing out his minor mistakes are actually a beneficial lesson). In all, wonderful wonderful wonderful. Thank you!

Lara
 

Fantastic teacher. I enjoyed every video, super worth it. I've been reluctant to jump into FCP X since it got upgraded from FCP. Now I feel confident to work with it again. Seems pretty self explanatory, but I am glad I watched the course. Abba covers pretty much everything you need to know. I also loved his personality, made me want to learn more each day.

Alan Pole
 

Absolutely brilliant. Abba gets to the point, is clear, organized and articulate, and lays it all out in a manner that quickly brings your confidence level from zero to hero. Highly recommend this to any photographer who wants to blog, build ads, or include video in their offering. I feel like an amazing new world has been provided to me. Thank you!

Student Work

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