Final Cut Pro Tutorial

[galexcd 0]

Hey everybody this is my second tutorial! Hooray! My first one kinda failed I think seeing as only one person replied, but whatever. This tutorial is for anybody who is interested in learning how to edit with final cut pro. This doesn't perfect your editing skills or anything, it will just tell you the basics on how to get started. When I started with final cut I had no tutorial and nobody to help me and I was LOST! But that was about 5 years ago. Anyway lets begin.

 

When you first open up final cut you may feel a little intimidated from all of the windows that come up. I will go over each one now.

The Browser

The Viewer

The Canvas

The Timeline

and The tools and Audio Meter

The browser is like a storage bin for all of your video clips. It helps you to organize all of your video so you can drag it down to the timeline whenever you need it.

The viewer lets you view certain clips and tweak them or change them. It is usually used for changing filters which will not be discussed in this tutorial. To put a video clip into the viewer just double click on it.The canvas displays whatever your playhead is over in the timeline. This is where you would watch your movie when you play it.The timeline is everything. This is where you drag all of your clips to and edit them in. It has multiple layers that work very similar to photoshop.The tools will be individually discussed later in the tutorial. The primary one is the selection tool which is the top one. (the mouse).

 

The audio meter shows you the final left and right channel and what the current db is of the frame the playhead is on.

 

I'll start by dragging some video clips to the browser. And it will appear in the browser.

To put it on the timeline, I can just drag it on, but I don't want the whole thing so I'm going to double click on it and it appears in the viewer. Then I set mark in and mark out points (with either i and o or / and *). There are also buttons to do this on the viewer itself. Once i set the points the mini timeline on the viewer looks like this:

From there I just drag the image from the viewer onto the timeline.

 

As I start dragging more video and audio clips onto the timeline the project begins to become more complex.

 

Before we go on I'd like to point out two buttons in the top right of the timeline.

 

The left button connects video and audio together so if you had a video clip with audio, and you dragged it onto the timeline, it would select and move them together on the timeline, otherwise they would be separate. The right button turns on snapping. In Final cut pro versions 3 and below, they were on top of each other, where the top one was snapping and the bottom one was connecting clips.

 

In the tools window there is the razor blade tool. This tool cuts clips so you can manipulate certain parts separately. Under this tool is a razor all tool which cuts all video and audio layers at the same place.

 

Most of the tools above the razor blade are just there to save time and can be done other ways.

The selection tool selects anything that is in the direction the arrow is pointing from the mouse in the track the mouse is in. When clicking and holding on the tool you have more arrows. If you hold down shift while selecting it will select all tracks.
The Sliding tools let you move through video without changing the clip. The way final cut pro works is it never changes or deletes any part of the video. Anything you cut out will still exist on your harddrive, and therefore, if you want to move the begining and end of a clip over to one direction use this tool and click and drag in the direction you want to drag it.

 

At the very bottom of the tool list is the pen tool.

This tool allows you to draw lines to set the transparency of a clip. To use it, first go to the bottom left of the timeline where you should see these two buttons:

I'll discuss the purpose of the left one in a moment. Click on the button on the right and lines will appear on all of the video and audio clips. The pen tool will let you put anchor points on these lines so you can change the transparency of a clip over time.

In audio clips this will change the volume.

 

As you can see I dragged the video clip up onto a new layer. If you are familiar with photoshop, final cut pro works the same. Whatever is transparent on the top layer the bottom layer will show through. As you can see the clip I have becoming less transparent, is on top of the other clips, so it would appear as a fade in.

 

The final thing I will talk about in this tutorial is animation of clips. First click on the right button in the lower left corner of the timeline, and all of the tracks will have spaces between them. To animate moving move the clip how you want to first and then add a keyframe by pressing the keyframe button, which can be found in either the viewer or the canvas.

If you are unable to manipulate the clip go under the menu located on the top right of either the canvas or the viewer and select either image & wireframe, or just wireframe.

After you add the keyframe a blue dot should appear where your playhead is. Then move your playhead where you want the animation to end and change the image again.