Creating a video with Final cut pro

Creating a video in Final Cut Pro for your first time can seem like a daunting task so, I’d like to share some of my basic experience with you.

After you’ve opened Final Cut Pro you will want to do is import the footage you would like to edit. Go to FIle>Import>Media. What you import doesn’t need to be video, still pictures, music, and possibly other visuals could be needed in your project. You can use this method to import almost anything into Final Cut Pro.

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Once this is finished the media will appear in the Event Library. This is how you organize all of your media from all of your projects. There are several different ways to organize the event library. Experiment and find out what works best for you biased on the needs of your current project. You can now click on the clips in your library and they will appear with a yellow box around them and a vertical line. I’ll explain the yellow box in a moment but the vertical line is the “scrub bar”, it’s purpose is to represent the current frame you are viewing.

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You should now be able to watch your clips in the “Viewer” The viewer is the large box in the middle of the program. Since you currently have a clip selected the viewer should be displaying the point in the clip that your scrub bar is currently on. Pressing the space bar will allow you to play the clip from this point. Now back to the yellow box. When you are ready to begin assembling your clips into a video, the yellow box represents what part of the clip you are going to use. You can use the clip in it’s entirety or you can shorten it by dragging either side of the box until you have selected what you’d like to start working with.

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Then, you can drag what you’ve selected into the lower third of the program. This is the “Timeline” Once your clip is here you’ll find that you can still view it similarly to in the Library but now you’ve got much more control and you can begin to add more clips and make a sequence. You can also add music and photographs. You can move the clips around in any order you like and you can even layer clips on top of each other. This works similarly to photoshop. If part of a video is opaque then the video underneath it in the timeline with show through.

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Next time, I’m going to start talking about editing and how you can start using your timeline to create interesting and exciting videos.

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