Transcription
It's time to fall in love with the Final Cut Pro magnetic timeline. In this video, I'll show you how to work with clips to take advantage of all the functions that Final Cut offers. I'm Rafael, and welcome to the channel where our goal is to always fix it in camera and then finesse it in post. And I always appreciate the early thumbs up because there are many ways to adjust clips, but understand these few functions and you'll love the magnetic timeline in Final Cut Pro.
First, let's get some clips onto the timeline to work with. There are a few ways to do this. You can simply drag and drop, or you can use these buttons to place clips on your timeline: Q to connect a clip on top of the primary storyline where the playhead is, W to insert a clip to the primary storyline where the playhead is, E to append a clip to the end of the storyline.
Once the clips are on the timeline, let's move them around and adjust them. This is where many people misunderstand the magnetic of the magnetic timeline, but it's where its strength lies. There are three main tools for moving clips around: the Select tool, Position tool, and Trim tool.
With the Select tool, moving clips is simple enough. You can arrange and reorder the clips in your project however you want. You can add or move a clip to the timeline simply by dragging. The other clips just move to make room for it. To move a clip out of the primary storyline, just right-click and select "Lift from Storyline" or Option Command Up Arrow. The down arrow will move it down onto the storyline. Any clips connected to the primary storyline will also move. If you want to move a clip but not the connected clip, press and hold the tilde key. That ignores the clip connection and lets you freely move the storyline clip. We'll talk about clip connections a lot in this video and how you can ignore them depending on the task you're doing. More on those a little bit later.
With the Position tool, you can overwrite clips. Also, as a note, to switch to the Position tool temporarily, hold down the P key. When you release the P key, the tool reverts to the previously active tool. This is a good thing to get your muscle memory accustomed to. Select the clip you want to move, drag the clip to the new position in the timeline, and it'll overwrite the other clip. The moved clip will overwrite any clips that are in the new position, and a gap clip fills the vacant part of the timeline that the original clip came from. Make sure to press A to return to the Select tool if it didn't automatically do it.
The trim in the timeline with either the selection tool or the position tool. Move the pointer to the start point or the end point of a clip that you want to trim. The pointer changes from an arrow icon to a trim icon. The look of the trim icon changes to indicate whether the trim will affect the end point of the left clip or the start of the right clip. This is a ripple edit, the basic trim edit. With the Select tool, the adjacent clip will move with the timeline. And with the Position tool active, a gap will be created. Just note if either end point turns red as you drag, you reach the end of the available media for that side of the clip.
The Trim tool is an extension of the trimming functions but opens the door to way more. This is where you can do roll, slip, or slide edits. This is one of those tools, once you understand it just a little bit, you'll love it. Click the Tools pop-up menu in the top left corner of the timeline and choose the Trim, or press T again to switch to the Trim tool. Temporarily hold down the T key.
Roll edits are the easiest to understand and do what they are called. They roll the edit point left or right.
A slip edit with the Trim tool selected, click and hold on the clip and move it left or right. Your footage in and out points will move without changing the duration or the position of the clip.
Slide edits are almost the same, but instead of changing the in and out points of the clip, it slides a clip left or right on the timeline and it shortens and lengthens the clips on either side.
Another important function is the Blade tool. You can select it from the tool menu or by clicking Control B. You can use this tool to make your cuts, your edits, to split up clips. Pressing V on the keyboard will disable or re-enable a clip. To nudge clips, press comma or period to nudge the start and end points one frame to the left or right. You can also press Shift comma or Shift period to nudge the start and end points 10 frames to the left or right. If you select the Position tool and nudge, you will overwrite the clip you are nudging over.
Split edits are a great way to extend the audio without moving the transition point. Double-click the clip's audio waveform to open it, or press Control S. Now you can adjust the duration of the audio. Either create a J-cut or an L-cut, lead with audio or lead with video. And now the trim tools work the same way with just the footage. Nudging audio works exactly the same, but you can get more detailed with audio into subframes if you want to nudge connected audio clips by one or more subframes. Do any of the following: to move the selection by one subframe, press Option comma to go to the left or Option period to go to the right. To move audio by 10 subframes, press Option Shift comma to go to the left or Option Shift period to go to the right. Just make sure that you double-click the audio to close it, but it retains the edit underneath it. It's just not visible until you double-click the audio waveform again.
What if you want to adjust the clip's connection? By default, connected clips and storylines are connected to the primary storyline at their very first frame, but you can move the connected point. This is useful when you want to connect to a specific frame or audio sample in the connected clip or storyline to a specific frame or audio sample in the primary storyline. Hold down the Command and Option keys and then click the connected clip at the point where you want the new position to be connected. The connection point is moved to the point where you click.
Pressing the grave accent or tilde key, the one that's right below most escape keys, ignores the connected clip connections. You can also have secondary storylines, which is a way to group clips together and still be able to move the clips around with the magnetic functionality. I use this with B-roll and VO's all the time. Now, when you apply a transition to a clip connected to the primary storyline, a secondary storyline is automatically created for that clip.
Another way to group clips is to create a compound clip by right-clicking and selecting "New Compound Clip" or pressing Option G. Unlike the storyline, this creates something that is treated like a single new clip, and if you want to edit that footage, you have to double-click and go into that to adjust it. Effectively, each new compound clip can be considered a new mini-project with its own distinct project settings. Compound clips function like other clips. You can add them to your project, trim them, re-time them, add effects and transitions. I use compound clips to simplify a complicated project by creating a separate compound clip for each major section, or when I want to do a final mix-down for the audio. I did a whole video on how I do audio mix in Final Cut Pro. You can check it out in the description.
Gaps and placeholders are also really important for the timeline. They are really good to fill out the timeline for proper timing before you have all the footage. Press Option W for gaps or Option Command W for a placeholder. I typically use gaps for my own work, but if I'm sending something to a client, I'll use a placeholder that can be pretty good to convey what type of shot will go there when we get the footage. Placeholders are great. You can add up to five people, different settings, with different focal lengths, wide, close. Also add notes to further describe the shot that is needed.
Also, if you have footage that is different dimensions in your timeline, you can change the spatial conform setting to make it fit better before you have to adjust the scale in the transform. And these buttons on the right turn the video and audio skimming on and off. This is where you can scrub back and forth on the timeline. You can see and hear the video as you're scrubbing over it. And this disables or enables snapping. This is handy when you want to have more precise control over the timeline cursor. And this drop-down gives you access to how the timeline looks. Zoom in, zoom out, make your audio waveforms larger or smaller. This drop-down is really important as well. It's where most of the timeline remapping functions and controls are. You can speed it up, slow down, hold speed ramp, and reverse a clip, or you can press Command R to open up the retime controls on the clip and make your adjustments right in the timeline.
If you want to see larger audio meters, you can press the little audio meters below the view window right here. Make sure you check out my video about keyboard shortcuts to do a deep dive on how to get around the timeline even faster. Also, the index is a great way to find clips and titles within your own timeline.
The magnetic timeline is so great when you understand it just a little bit. It's hard to go to any other NLE after you've used it. I've made more videos on how to improve your workflow in Final Cut Pro. Make sure you check out this playlist. As always, thanks for watching. Give this video a big thumbs up. Subscribe. I'm Rafael. I'll talk to you soon. Bye for now.