Getting Started with Final Cut Pro: Beginners Tutorial

We're gonna go through all the basics of Final Cut Pro. I'm gonna make it really easy for you, but we're also gonna build habits so you can edit professional videos down the line. My name is Tyler Stallman. Let's get started. So first, a tour of the interface. Here's an existing project that's already underway. Over here on the left, you're gonna notice a bunch of beautiful footage. By the way, as we look through this, I can't take credit for these shots. These are courtesy of Stoxy United, sponsor of today's video, and more about Stoxy later. Over here in your browser, you've got everything you might end up using in your project. So I've already loaded this in. I'll show you how to do that in a sec, but just to give you a sense of, this is where you preview it. This is just like the staging ground of like figuring out what you've got. I've also got music later in here. Everything goes in the browser, and that's where you preview stuff. And by the way, if you can't see enough of what you're looking at, you can resize all these areas by grabbing the between lines. You can also press the command minus, command plus to zoom in and out and make these clips bigger or smaller. And there's a couple of tabs on the browser that opens up your libraries. So in here, I've got a few other projects open. So this is a completed commercial project for a skincare brand that we did. It gives you a better sense of what a completed timeline might look like. But we're not there yet. So we're gonna go back into our Final Cut for Beginners project and close the libraries for now. Here in the middle, this is our viewer that is currently showing us our beautiful stock footage. And that's just gonna play whatever you have selected. So right now it's playing the bottom of the screen. If I click over here in the browser again, we're gonna start seeing stuff from the browser. By the way, see, I'm just like moving my mouse and it's scrubbing around through the clip. If you don't like that, some people find it confusing to move around that quickly. You can press S, that turns off scrubbing and now you won't get that effect as your mouse moves around the screen. Instead, you'd have to like click and drag. So yeah, I'm gonna keep it on and press S again. And now wherever my mouse is on a clip, it'll show me that exact frame here in the viewer. Moving to the right of the screen, we've got the inspector. Right now it's showing us color adjustments we can make on this. But there's all sorts of stuff in here. Again, tabs will show us the way. This one gives us different things like opacity, if you wanna change how much you see through a clip or the zoom amount. Basically all the properties about a clip are over here in the inspector. And you can switch between different things. Like right now this would transform the clip and this will show me specific details about it. I can get more details down here. There's a lot to see. Don't get overwhelmed. You don't need to worry about it much yet. The first things we'll, we'll leave it on the video inspector tab to start with. And then down here below at the bottom, this is our timeline. This is what editing is. It's putting a bunch of clips in a row so that they play back as a sequence. It's not just one long clip. We've got some different layers of them on top of each other. We've got music on the bottom. And I'll show you how to use it in two seconds. But for now we'll just keep scrubbing back and forth because I like seeing this footage. But also worth knowing is that wherever you've clicked last, you'll see this very subtle blue border. And that's how you know which of these panels is selected. So right now you can tell it's a timeline. If I click the viewer, a little bit of a bluish purple up here at the top, I click the inspector. Depending which panel is selected, different keys and shortcuts will do different things in that area. So for example, a basic shortcut you could have guessed. If I click on the inspector and I press command plus, it will zoom in and minus will zoom out. If I do that over here in the browser, it'll do the same thing. It'll zoom in and out of my clips. So that's the overall interface structure of Final Cut Pro. And I might be moving a little bit quickly, but don't worry. I will show you how we put this all together. And if it's overwhelming, just re-watch this video once you're done with it because there's a lot of details in here and I know it's hard to absorb in real time. But I wanna keep this video short enough that you have time to watch it twice. Okay, so let's put this all together now. Let's leave Final Cut for a second, go back to the Finder and set this all up from scratch. So first I'm gonna use an external disk. If you're using your internal, you might fill it up really quickly. So an external SSD is always helpful. And I'm gonna create a new folder, call it Final Cut Pro Getting Started. And inside of there, I'm gonna create a folder called video and another one called audio. And sometimes I need one called images too. Whatever kinds of media, that's how I sort things. But the sorting, you gotta kind of do it in the Finder before you've set everything else up. So now we go and we launch Final Cut Pro. And this is what it's gonna look like when you haven't done anything yet, just a pretty big blank screen. We're gonna go File, New, Library. I've explained libraries in a previous video and why I use a different library for every single project. Unless all the videos share footage, but usually new library, every project, that video will help a lot. The link is in the description below. And I usually name it the same thing as the folder. And let's minimize Final Cut and look at what that did. So now there is a library inside of our project folder. And this is how I kind of organize things. Before we customize the library or build anything, there's one preference I recommend changing based on the way that I edit. And that's in the import section of preferences. I'm gonna change it to leave files in place. So that allows all of those folders we just created to stay organized the way that you made them. If you do copy to library, it will make duplicate files inside of a library file. And Apple says it's easier. I find it a little harder to let Apple manage your media. So we're gonna leave files in place. Oh, and while I'm in preferences, I just want to point out in the playback section, this background render option. This is kind of significant for how Final Cut works and how it's so fast. Whenever you stop working, Final Cut just starts to render your video so that when you export it, it's like ready to go. This can slow down your machine if your machine is really like overtaxed because it's rendering all the time. But if you have a reasonably fast machine, then your final export is super speedy. So try to keep it on if you can. If you find your machine slowing down, you can turn it off. It depends. I just want to point this out for later. I'm gonna leave it on, back to editing. So now let's get some videos in here. I'm gonna go back to the finder where I was a moment ago. And here are the videos that I downloaded from Stoxy. I'm just gonna select them all. And again, file management starts in the finder and I'm gonna drag them to the video folder that I created. So now I know where they all are. It doesn't really matter what they're named. I don't have to worry about any of that. Now let's go back into Final Cut. And there's two ways to do this. One, you can click import, which it's good to see this import dialogue because it shows you all the options and all the preferences you could use. Looks a little more complicated. I'll show you the easy way in a sec. But again, same thing that I don't want to copy to library. That could create duplicates. I'm gonna leave files in place. I'm just gonna navigate to it with some external drive. Here you can see a preview of everything you're about to import. Lots of preferences over here on the right. Good to know this in the future. We're not gonna use it today. So instead, I'm actually gonna close this import dialogue, go back to the finder, and I'm gonna click and drag this whole video folder onto this date. Now we haven't talked about the date yet, but the date is just the default name for an event. An event is a folder. This is a place where people can get confused. So an event in Final Cut Pro is effectively just a folder. I usually only actually have one event per project. I don't even rename it, so I'm gonna just leave that what it is. And inside, you'll notice it created a keyword. This little key is the keyword is the name of the folder I imported. So now when I go back to the finder and click and drag my audio folder to the same place, I have all my audio is keyworded. Now our browser has a bunch of media to work with, but our timeline, it's still empty down here. So you either click new project or it's good to know where it is, file, new project. And I usually name my projects the same thing as the library unless I have different versions of edits or something. Project is basically a timeline. Final Cut made some of their naming of this stuff a little bit confusing. I think some people think of the library as projects and some people think of projects as timelines. The names are a little confusing. So just look at the way that I use them. This project is the timeline we're about to create. So there are some preferences to look at here. Right now, I was about to create a vertical video. That's not what this is. This is 4K footage. And I'm gonna be doing it at 24 frames per second, rounded down. And those are the only things you really need to look at here is the actual resolution. Make sure it matches whatever it is you shot and that the frame rate, again, is like similar to what you're using. The rest of this, you don't really have to worry about it most of the time. You can also use automatic settings, which will do it based on what you import in the timeline. But I always like to customize it and we say, okay. And now we have a timeline at the bottom. Hopefully you're with me so far. So now if I am looking at the library, you can see there is a project in our library. There's no footage in a project yet. And now watch as I create the fastest edit ever. So I'm just gonna select all and I'm going to drag it all into the timeline. And because the Stoxy footage looks so good, I don't have to do anything else. And it kind of looks like a movie already. And to make it faster here, I'll do this like change duration and make everything half a second. Okay, and now we've got a very cool edit. Do you know about Stoxy already? Because they're awesome. Not just for sponsoring this video, but they're a community of filmmakers and photographers, including yours truly, that provide really good quality art that's easy for you to license for your next project. So that means it's royalty free, very stress free. You can basically use it for anything without getting worried about whether it's covered by the license or not. But if you need, they do also have extended licenses, market freezes and exclusivity. So, you know, you can just talk to them about whatever your specific needs are, but the basic license covers most things. The search is easy to use and Stoxy has powerful discovery tools. So it's easy to find exactly the shots that you're looking for, for your project, whatever it is. The quality of work there is really next level. One cool feature is that they shoot in like narrative sequences a lot of the time. So you'll be able to find multiple shots to tell a complete story. So it's not just one-offs, like shots can link together and keep some kind of common style, location or characters throughout your footage. And Stoxy's contributors are a community unlike any other. It's a cooperative. So everybody actually has a say in how the companies run. And that means that it's really allowed it to thrive. And that's why when I call them artists, I mean it. And it's not all the cool trendy lifestyle stuff I showed you here. You can also check them out to find great business, office environments or landscapes. Just head over to Stoxy, click the link in the description below. And thanks Stoxy for sponsoring this video. I really like what you do. Now back to final cut. All right, now let's set it for real. That was a bit of a cheat throwing it all my timeline. Let's delete all that, select all, delete. Now we're gonna go back to the browser and select some good moments that we like. So one way you could do that is just by mousing over things. Again, we have the scrub tool on. I could just move and I could just click and drag and that selects the area that I wanna use. And I could either drag that down to the timeline or I told you I was gonna build some good habits for you guys. We're gonna click on it, make sure it's yellow and then press E. That is the key that will drop it to the end of the timeline. It's usually how I'm adding clips into it. And if you're not the kind of person that uses shortcuts, now's the time to start. You should really be using shortcuts. So I'll keep telling them to you. If navigating and if you haven't figured out how to navigate the browser yet, again, I've got the scrubber thing on. So I just move through it till I like a moment. Maybe I wanna turn around here. So right at the turnaround, I could press play and that'll preview it in real time. She's looking around. Okay, cool. So maybe that's what I wanna use. The other way to insert things is as you're playing, you can press the I key for in. And when you're done, press O and that section is now selected. So in and out is the range of the clip that's gonna be used. And now when I press the E key again, that'll drop it to the end of the timeline. And even if I move my play head, like if I move the play head forward, I'm gonna use the next clip here and I say in and I say out and then I press E, it still jumps to the end of the timeline. A tip I've mentioned in other videos is that as you're previewing stuff over here, it can be really helpful to, instead of just adding it directly to the timeline, press your in and out and then press the F key. Do you see how there's a little green line here? That means it's been favorited. So later I could go back and I could sort by all my favorites and then you can just refer back to like all the favorite moments of the whole shoot that you've got. But that's a little advanced for now. For now, we'll just keep dropping into the timeline. As you're playing through your browser, when you hit the space bar, it will actually just keep playing from one clip to the other. So in our case, again, this looks sort of edited as it just plays through. If it's not playing from one to the other, there is something called loop. By the way, I forget where things are in menu sometimes. So you can always click help and I'm gonna look for loop. Oh, there it is. It's in playback, loop, or more importantly, the shortcut for it is command L. So that will just keep playing the same clip over and over when it gets to the end, you can see it's just looped. I prefer to keep it on playing from one clip to the next. Now let's skip ahead. I'm gonna look at the timeline that I already edited. And now it looks a little different. You can see there are some layers. So a very important concept in Final Cut that there is something called a primary timeline, which is designated by this darker strip here in the overall timeline. And that's really where you start. Like in a basic edit like this, you could do everything with just the primary timeline and you don't have to start having stacks of different clips on top of each other. By the way, if you're coming from a different video editing software, this is probably what's gonna trip you up more than anything, is the magnetic timeline. But if you're new to video editing, this is the thing that will make you never wanna leave Final Cut Pro, because magnetic timeline is the best. I do see YouTube videos showing people how to disable the magnetic timeline. If you're doing that, stop using Final Cut. It's like the whole point of the reason that it's so quick to work with. Like Final Cut isn't just fast because it's optimized for Mac hardware, it's fast because the metaphors accelerate your workflow and have you build up momentum as you go. It kind of wants you to make the next edit as soon as possible and pushes you towards it. And I always appreciate that. So I can always finish an edit faster in Final Cut than in any other software. So thanks Final Cut. Now magnetic timeline, what am I talking about? That's Apple's marketing term for the fact that if I pull this out, you can see things either snap together or snap open. It either makes space for or closes the space of any clip that I add to it. Now you're probably like, why would that be confusing to anybody? That seems so simple. Well, here, I'm gonna add a piece of music underneath it. You know, here's probably the main thing that trips people up with magnetic timeline. Music is now, you know, it just like plays through the whole clip as things go by. It just keeps playing. And if I grab this first clip and move it, music comes with it. This is very different from how other editors work. And basically, as things get stacked on top of each other, they create these tiny little lines. So you can see this one is going down, the music, it's going up. If you're ever grabbing clips and moving them and they're connected in a way you don't want, it's really easy to change it. You just have to remember the shortcut, which is Command, Option, hold those down, and then just click on wherever it is you wanna move the connection to. So I'm gonna click on the music, and now the connection has moved to this other clip. Or in the case of this B-roll, I could, you know, these connect a little bit more, right? This person might be walking, these aren't the same shoes. Okay, but if I wanna connect these, I can Command, Option, click, and now the line is connected there. So those two are together. This makes it so much easier to not make mistakes when you're editing in Final Cut. And it's the hardest thing for me to go back to, let's say, Resolve or Premiere, is that you can make a change earlier in your edit, and it kind of breaks everything later in your edit. Whereas Final Cut keeps everything together, and you can keep moving quickly and just trust the software to not let things fall apart. Anyway, this is like why I keep using Final Cut forever, because the metaphor just makes a lot of sense to my brain. So right now, the length of the clips that are playing, like their duration, was set by the in and out points that we originally established, but after we've added them all to the timeline, we probably wanna make some changes. Now, I have a special way of doing that that I didn't learn for a little while, and so I'm gonna pass it along to you. Well, first, one little thing. The music doesn't take up the whole length of the video right now, so here's one way to do it. This is the first way I learned, is you just can click and grab the end of any clip or any piece of music, and drag it to the length that you wanna use. You're probably gonna keep using that forever. It is always useful, but it's definitely not the fastest way to do things. Usually, I've added too much of clips, like they're longer than I want them to be, and I wanna trim them down. So let's say that bike shot, I want it to be a little bit shorter. So I click on the clip, and I look at where the playhead is, and when I press Option, right square bracket, kind of an obscure shortcut, but it will trim everything to the right of where the playhead was on that selected clip. And then I could also do that at the beginning, and I could press Option, left square bracket, and it trims everything to the left. This is called the ripple delete, because the changes ripple through the rest of the timeline, like everything else slips into place as I remove that little section. In fact, I use it so much that I like to go into the commands, and I customize them, and the only customization I do is I make it so that just pressing that square bracket, that does the trim instead of needing the Option key. By the way, my philosophy on customizing keys in general is don't do it too much, because you're gonna go on somebody else's computer someday, and you won't know how to use it. So I just make a few small changes, like removing those modifiers. So now we've tightened up our edit, and it plays back at a speed that we like. We can kind of finish it, right? Let's tweak the things at the end, and make it exactly what we want. Okay, so for example, this shot, I believe this is actually shot on film, and it just doesn't quite match our other stuff. So I'm gonna use the inspector layer to make a few changes to this so that it is more in line with the others. I don't wanna remove it. So I make sure that it's selected. There'll be that yellow border around it. And then inside the inspector, I can do a few things. First, you can see that there are black borders on this, because this is a four by three ratio. That's the super eight. I think you can see the cameraman. Yeah, there's a cameraman in here. So it is propped in a different way than the rest of the footage. So to make it match, I'm gonna click on the zoom slider and drag it until I've lost those edges, which is kind of boring. I'm like cutting out the cool film stuff, but just for this example, I can still see some on the left there, so I'm gonna go just a little bit more. That is not actually making it any better, but it does match now. Other things we might want to make match commonly are the colors. So we're gonna click on this little color inspector tab right now, and I've got a different default here. If you wanna check this out, you can go in your preferences, and you can get a variety of defaults depending on what you choose as your color correction default thing. I don't like the color board. Color wheels are standard. Like that's the industry standard. So I changed that so that this is what I see at first. And this is looking very blue compared to everything. I mean, this is quite a blue shot. So I'm gonna start by grabbing my mid-tones, warm them up a whole bunch. I'm gonna just look at it like next to the shots beside it. It just feels more at home. It's a little less at a place. Also maybe a little darker mid-tones. And next in the inspector tab, we gotta know about the audio. I've only got music in here. None of these clips have their own audio. So I'm gonna click on the music to show it to you. And the most important thing is volume. I mean, do I need to tell you that? You can just move it up and down, but you've gotta click on the audio thing to know about that. Also, there are effects that you can add. So for example, in addition to just turning it down, sometimes you might want to like uniformly raise or lower the whole volume. Inside of this button here are all of the effects. So I know there's a plugin called Gain. Gain is just like volume. You can drag this over here and I can say, okay, everything gets turned down by whatever. Mostly I'm just trying to show you that all the effects are over here. So you can also apply video effects. So for example, there's a bunch of color stuff that's very helpful here. You can put LUTs on top. So if I click and drag that onto here, now in the inspector, I can see some LUT options and I'm gonna apply one of my LUTs, which you can download if you want. And it just gives it a bit of a film look to kind of match that other film shot. There's tons of effects in here. Dig around, see what you can find. But then also right beside it, there are transitions. Try to keep your transitions kind of basic. Don't go crazy with them. That's like an editing tip, but we are gonna use one here. We are gonna fade out to black at the end. Using fade to color, I can grab these small edges to make it longer or shorter. Click on it. I've got to set my midpoint to the end. Otherwise it would start to fade halfway through the clip or finish fading halfway through the clip. So I want to finish fading at the end of the clip. And now I play it and it fades to black. Now, before you rewind this video and start watching from the beginning, I'm gonna tell you one more important tip. Like this is actually quite important and can slow people down a lot if they don't get it with Final Cut. Final Cut creates these big cache files. That's what the rendering was doing. Remember when we were in the preferences and we disabled or enabled, depending on how you work, background render? That's creating those giant cache files. So we click on our library. You can see, for example, that it is in the library. There is 1.4 gigs. It's not very big yet, but this can grow a lot, like hundreds of gigs eventually. To keep everything organized, again, this is with the library selected. Go to storage locations and modify settings. For the media, I'm just gonna choose the root folder for the whole project. And then for cache, I'm gonna choose that same folder. And now when I go back to the finder, this is the cache file and you can see how big it is. It's not actually that big. But now you can just quickly delete it if you ever need to make room for things. That cache is just speeding up Final Cut. It's not necessary for the edit, but it can be enormous. So it's good to know where to find it and how to delete it. You can also, if you've kept it in your library, go to file, delete generated library files, and there's some options here to delete cache and other stuff. Now I know that was a lot, but I've got a playlist that will walk you through a whole bunch of other editing tips to make this easy for you. Editing should be fun. It shouldn't be too hard. A lot of the reason I like Final Cut Pro is because it keeps it fun. Thanks for watching, guys. I'll see you in the next video.