You’re Not a Pro Yet, Kid

Now let’s pay closer attention to the Sequence window itself. If you’ve added a couple of clips to the Sequence timeline, you have no doubt noticed that one of them is blue with a small picture icon at the head of each clip, and the two tracks below are green. Blue indicates video and green indicates audio (in this case we’re dealing with stereo audio, thus the two green tracks).

Once you insert clips into the timeline, you’ll likely want to tweak them further as you add more footage to your project -- maybe you want to add or remove a few frames, for instance. Like many things in FCP, there are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest are the two you already know: either double-click to open the clip or click & drag it up to the Viewer. Now you’ll see arrows in the playhead area, which indicate where your existing in & out points reside; move the playhead to wherever you want to make the change.

For example, let’s take five frames off the start of the clip. With the playhead at the in point (you can get there by selecting the Up arrow key on the keyboard), press the right arrow key five times -- this moves the playhead forward five frames. Press the “i” key to mark the new in point, and take note of what happens to the clip in your timeline; it just got a little bit shorter. Try it again on some other clips until you get the hang of it.

Now, use the Insert tool to lay out a few clips in your timeline and let’s add an appropriate fade in and fade out to your quick project. Move the cursor to the left edge of your first clip. Hold down the Control key and select Add Transition ‘Cross Dissolve’. By default, this adds a one-second fade in (both video & audio) from your blank timeline into your first clip. You can change the length by using the mouse to grab the right side of the Cross Dissolve. Drag it to the left to make it shorter, or to the right to make it longer. As you do, Final Cut will show you the new duration and how many frames you have changed it either way. For a precise amount of time, double click the Cross Dissolve and type your desired length into the upper left corner of the new Cross Dissolve tab in the Viewer. Repeat this for the last clip in your timeline and you’ve successfully added both a fade in and fade out to your first program!

So what happens if you only want the video or just the audio from a given clip? That’s where the timeline editing controls come in. At the far left, you’ll see track assignments for V1 (video track 1), A1 (audio track 1) and A2 (audio track 2). If you click on the left-hand side a1, you’ll see that it detaches itself from the right-hand side A1. This basically tells the Viewer to disregard that audio track and only bring over the video and second channel of audio.

With a1 detached, try dragging your clip from the Viewer to the Sequence window and watch what happens -- now you only have the blue video track and one green audio track (the right stereo channel, in this case), with A1 left empty. If you reattach a1 and then click on v1 to detach it, you’ll now get both tracks of audio but no video. Likewise, if you leave v1 attached and detach both a1 & a2, you’ll get video but no audio.

If this is your first time in Final Cut Pro, we recommend that you stick with these basics to get started -- take some home video footage you’ve shot, capture it and then find the best stuff and use the Insert edit tool to lay it all out in a new timeline. But don’t be afraid to experiment, you can always undo mistakes along the way!

Overwrite, Trim & Subclips

Let’s add a few last tricks to your FCP arsenal for now. First up: the Overwrite edit, where we’ll first cut in a piece of audio and then lay different video over it. Before you start, make sure that v1 is detached (and that a1 & a2 are both attached) in the Sequence track assignments, then open a clip in the Viewer and select in & out points.

Drag the clip into the Sequence using the Canvas Insert tool, which should only be two audio channels right now. While you’re still in the Sequence window, press the semicolon (;) key -- this will bring the cursor back to the head of the clip you just inserted. Likewise, the neighboring apostrophe (‘) key jumps to the head of the next clip.

Now, attach v1 and detach a1 & a2 and find another spot in the same clip and mark new in & out points. (It doesn’t really matter right now if the clip is longer or shorter than the audio you just inserted.) Drag the new clip to the Canvas, but this time, move it into the red Overwrite area and watch as only the video is placed in the timeline on top of your previous audio-only clip. Press the semicolon key again and then the Space bar to play your new clip in the timeline!

If you used the same clip for both pieces, you’ll probably notice a red box has now appeared at the start of both clips with a number inside -- this is an indication that your audio is out of sync with your video (one is earlier or later than the other) and can be safely ignored for the purposes of this tutorial.

If you made the video too short or too long, move the cursor to the tail edge of that clip and when the cursor changes to arrows pointing left & right, click and drag to shrink or extend the length of your clip. As you do, you’ll notice that the video clip “snaps” against the audio when you get close to it -- the same will happen when you start moving clips around in the timeline (by clicking & holding and dragging them to another location), which helps prevent any gaps between edit points. Now you’ve just trimmed a clip in the timeline.

Finally, remember during the capture lesson how we told you that you can take a complete reel of footage and break it into smaller pieces with subclips? With a clip in the Viewer, mark an in & out point and then go to the menu and select Modify > Make Subclip. In your project bin, you’ll now see a new clip with torn edges on the side of its icon and the word “Subclip” appended to the name. If you double-click to open it in the Viewer, you’ll now see that no in & out points are actually showing, yet the clip’s contents have been reduced to only the in & out points you had selected before creating it.

This is a subclip -- it references the original media you captured and takes up no additional hard drive space. You can use subclips to break your master reel into smaller parts, and if you double-click on the name field in the project, you can even give them completely different names than the master, too. Otherwise, they work exactly the same as your master clip, just with less footage to sort through.

Am I A Pro Yet?

Editing is a very subjective art -- it can be as simple as just paring down your home movies to include only the best footage, all the way up to a layered montage of visuals, graphics and sound straight out of the best Hollywood has to offer. It goes without saying that we could keep writing for days on end and still not scratch the surface of all the features Final Cut Pro has to offer -- take heart, because most professional users who live in the program day in and day out still haven’t mastered every aspect of it, either.

We’ll likely cover other aspects of Final Cut Pro in the future, but for now we hope to have given you enough ammunition to learn some of the basics and get your clips from your camcorder and into a Sequence timeline where you can rearrange them to your heart’s content. Happy cutting!