and today we’re talking all about Final Cut Pro X. I always like to reference the

date when I teach these classes, because as time goes on, things do change.

Today’s date is September 5th of 2015. We’re going to be covering a lot of different aspects

of Final Cut Pro. This is a very, very large piece of software to cover. My goal is to

give you all the information you need to get started. This is really designed for people

who are new to new-ish on the user level. If you haven’t already done so, you can

purchase Final Cut Pro X through the Mac App Store.

That would be—just go to the little Apple icon, go to App Store. You can purchase it

there. For anyone who complains about the price, I want to remind you that Final Cut

used to be $2,000. It has come down significantly since then. It's a great piece of software.

I use it all the time. I've been using different versions of it for over 10 years, now. I originally

trained myself in video editing when I was about 14 years old. Back in those days, it

was the Media 100 System, and then eventually, Final Cut, et cetera.

We're going to go over all that today. For those of you tuning in after we record this,

since we do have a live audience now, I want to give you a strong recommendation before

you play the rest of this class. In the description of this video, I’m giving you all a PDF

that I’ve made up for you. It has a ton of different shortcuts and hyperlinks for

product that I recommend for people getting into video production. My degree is in film

making, so this is something I have definitely had plenty of time to play with over the last

many years.

If you need recommendations as far as what kind of hard drive to keep your footage on—that’s

one of the things I tend to recommend. Keep your footage on an external hard drive. You

can see my recommendations there. There's all sorts of lighting and sound equipment,

different digital cameras that you can use. All that you’ll find, of course, in that

PDF. Look for that in the description.

First thing I want to talk about when you get into video editing—I have a very strong

recommendation— keep your footage organized and on an external hard drive. For those who

are curious, I'll drag it into the screen I am actually legit when I talk about this.

This is my little hard drive. I have a Drobo Mini. I stand by this product even though

it is more expensive than most. It has four hard drives in it. It is basically massaging

your data between four different drives. If one drive fails, you pop it out and pop in

a new one. It rebuilds everything. It is expandable. They're just awesome. There's a few versions

of the Drobo. The Drobo Mini is the one I like because it’s so easily portable, so

when I travel, which I’m doing more and more these days for business. It comes with

a bag. I can bring it with me. Definitely check that out.

What I’ve done today is— we're going to be creating a little video. It won't be of

significant content. I tagged a few video files to show you how to navigate this.

When you go into Final Cut it will look something like this. Your screen might look a little

different, you might not have that open, but I want to walk you through everything here.

Let's go through basic definitions. When you start Final Cut you'll need to create a few

things. I'll go to File and New. You'll see the three major items: Project, Event and

Library. These can be very confusing. Trust me. I've been confused by them in the past.

The project is straightforward. It’s whatever the edit is.

I might be doing this video for this and another video for that. Sometimes I do two different

versions of something that will be separate projects. Next, is the event. This is the

best way to describe it. Let's say you're shooting a movie. Each event might be a different

scene. You can pull footage from different events into one project. The library contains

multiple events. I know that can be a little confusing. I want to go over what that is.

The first thing we do when—because we’re starting new here, I’m going to create a

new project. I'm going to call this "Demo."

You can see up here that it has this little clapboard. If you're going through with multiple

projects, this is the icon you look for to double click to pull up the edit itself. What

it has done is create an event here that we can use to bring in our footage. Please keep

your footage on an external drive.

Normally, what you would do to bring in footage is you go to File and Import, and you would

just tell it where it is. If you have a digital camera, plug it in to Final Cut Pro for it

to go to that screen and ask which clips you want to bring in and where to put them. I'm

going to cheat a little here because this is a demo class. I have created some quick

clips here that I'll drag and drop here into this event, which another way that you can

technically do it.

I like to use different terminology than what Apple puts out to make it easier to follow.

I refer to this as my bin. It is everything, all the footage. I'm going to mute the audio.

This is all of my footage. As you skim over it with your cursor, you will see a preview

in the preview window at the top right corner. Now, the bottom portion here is the time line.

That is where the edit takes place. When you’re go through Apple's resources, if—you should

go through Apple’s resources— sometimes it’s referred to as timeline, sometimes

it’s storyline. They are, technically speaking, different. I'm trying to make this easier.

I am just going to use the word timeline today. For any experts who are wondering why I'm

using wrong terminology, it's because I'm trying not to confuse people here.

The first thing you'll do when you go through your footage is pull the best shots. If you're

curious and haven't heard of me before, I have this hobby of using an aerial drone.

I do a lot of drone films. If you're curious about them, you can go on Facebook and search

for "Droning Province town." That's where we are. You can find my videos there. I try

to put out a video each week if I'm fortunate enough, especially during the summer.

What you'll do is go through here to pick out your best shots. Bring them to your timeline.

I'll give you some shortcuts to make this easier. The first thing is when you're skimming

through footage and find the perfect place, you'll want to play it. Hitting the space

bar will play it. There is audio on this clip. This is the only shot not with the drone.

I'll wait for the perfect moment with some seagulls in here. At that point, I'll tell

it what my in point is. To mark the in point, hit the letter "I". Think in equals I.

You get that little yellow box. Now what I’m going to do is I'm going to play the footage

to figure out how long the shot will go. When I find the stopping point, I'll hit the letter

"O". O as in out point. It is showing me, of this clip, this part here, which I have

tagged as being a good shot. Now, I'm going to bring it into the time line. There's a

couple ways to do it. You can drag and drop it if you want. I like to use hotkeys and

shortcut keys.

There are three keys that work to do this. Personally, I only use one. For organization

purposes I find this to be better. Keep in mind that I don't shoot with actors, so I'm

not worried about things matching up correctly. The three letters are Q, W and E. For those

of you on an American keyboard, those are next to each other. The one that I use more

than anything is E because it puts it at the end of your project. You can see it’s now

right here at the end of my timeline. It's the first shot, so the end and beginning is

the same shot.

The other options here are W. I'll zoom in here. If you have a track pad, you can pinch

with your fingers, just like you would zoom in on Safari. If I use W, it will put it where

this little bar is. That is the playhead. That will interrupt the shot if it's not between

two shots. I'll do undo to clear it out. A good hot key to be aware of on the MAC is

undo, which is Command Z as in zebra. The other option is Q. Q is good for dealing with

interviews. I'll try to paint the picture.

You watch an interview with someone on camera. They go to what is called B Roll footage,

which is something else like them walking through a park. You still hear their audio.

This is an example where Q can be useful. Check it out. It puts it above the shot. If

this clip had no audio, you would still hear the audio from this shot here. I'll show you

how to tweak audio in a little bit. The big one I tend to use more than anything is E.

It puts it at the end of the project for me to manipulate later on.

In order for me to show you the editing I'll put in a few other shots. Let me find a good

shot. I for in point. Let’s hit play. Give it a few seconds of footage. Scroll down to

get a few other shots. The aerial drone is definitely one of the—no, I’d say the

coolest gadget that I own. For those who are curious, I use the Yuneec Q500. I'm going

to upgrade to the 4K camera.

Let's get some other footage. Let's get this shot with the shadow on the left side. I love

this shot here. This is a difficult shot to do without looking at the monitor. We got

a bunch of shots to play with which is always good. I'll get one more.

Perfect. We have our shots to work with. I want to show you how to trim clips. We'll

break these down to refine them. There's a few different ways to do this. I switch back

and forth depending on the kind of shot. First, look at the middle of my screen. There's an

arrow. That's what it is by default. You can trigger the arrow by tapping A. This is on

the cheat sheet I gave you. The other option is Blade. You are splicing the shot into two.

If I go through this shot and want it to end earlier, I can put the blade on this shot

and click. It will split this into two different clips. One example where that might be useful

is going to be covered later on. When you do a shot that you want to be fast and slow

it down, you take the original shot and splice it in two. Part becomes fast and the other

part is slow. Then, you don't have to do any transitions. It is just automatically going.

Let's undo that for now. The other way is to zoom in here to better see it. If you put

your cursor on the end of one clip, it will turn into that icon. What that means is if

I click there and drag to the left, it will bring that clip back, cutting into the final

frames of this video. See it is actually counting back the frames. If I move it to the right,

it shifts.

Now, I'm doing the same thing to the other clip on the other side. I'm cutting into it

so it starts later, like that. You can toggle between that by using the trim selector. I

don't find it necessary because your cursor is between two shots, so there is no need

to do it.

Zoom can be handy if you're on an iMac, using a traditional mouse. The reason I don't use

Zoom is because I have the track pad. I just pinch with my fingers to get into the shot.

For example, I can pull back all the way—that’s my whole project. I can pinch to zoom in,

you know—you can see how now I can see a much more detailed version of that particular

shot.

The other way you can do this is—if you look at the very bottom of my screen—see,

we have a little magnifying glass. There's a minus and plus. You can manually do it that

way, too, and a little trick here is if you put the playhead—if you click and put the

playhead, it’s going to know that you want to zoom in on that area. For fine tuning adjustments,

that is very handy.

There's another trick I like to do. I like to mark points. In my case, I do this with

audio. I'll bring in the audio file. I want to give you strong advice for those of you

creating content for YouTube or Facebook. I apologize if this sounds off topic. It is

important for you to know. If you don't know this and spend hours creating content, you

could be hit with an unfortunate reality. Let me explain how music works with YouTube

and Facebook. If you are putting background music on Facebook—if you do not own the

rights to it, they will take it down. There's not much ability to challenge that decision.

You really are forced to take it down.

If you do a photomontage with music by your favorite musician, don't do it. You want copyright

free music. There's a great resource in that I’ve given to all of you in that little

cheat sheet. I do request, if you don’t mind using the link that I give you in that

cheat sheet, it is an affiliate link. We get a little credit. It doesn't cost you anything.

It helps us keep these classes free without charging you anything to take them. That service

is called Audio Jungle.

I'll give a quick shout out to my favorite composer. The guy is named Brian Crutchfield.

He's a graduate of Berkley School of Music. He's awesome. He did the song in the background,

which I own copyright access to. When you want to bring in music there's two ways to

do it. You can either drag it and drop it right into your project just as you saw I

just did, or, if you look here, on the right side—see the little music note?

That, really more than anything, talks iTunes. It can talk to other folders, including Garage

Band. If you have it in iTunes you can bring it in through that method. I usually tend

to use copyright free music, so it’s usually in file form. I usually drag and drop it. 

In the case of YouTube, by the way, you can use copyrighted music. Points for me using

copyrighted and not copywritten. I always make that mistake. The big difference is that