The sheer depth of Final Cut Pro features can intimidate new users. Apple's plan was to take the video editing world by storm with their professional editing app. In order to shake Avid from its high horse, Apple had to cram an unbelievable amount of features in there. 

We've assembled ten features that will help you master FCP and create the next great movie.  

1. Keep Organized

Video files are large, and Final Cut Pro generates a lot of information using these files. If you are not careful, your hard drive will be full and you will need a CSI team to clear out all the capture and render files that have exploded across your system. To help keep David Caruso away from your computer and all its bits, watch the video below to learn how to keep your FCP files organized.

2. Toggle Clip Overlays

So you want to bring down your audio levels, fade out your video, or even super impose one layer of video over another while they both play at the same time?  Bold, very bold, we like how you think. Now stop thinking and start layering video.  

In the bottom left corner of the timeline you will find the Toggle Clip Overlays button (Option+W), it looks like a mountain range with a couple of dots on it.  When you toggle this button, you will see red lines appear across your audio and a black line across the top of your video. Don’t panic, now you can increase or decrease the overall opacity of the video or volume of the audio with the selection tool, just “grab” the line and move it up or down. 

For more precise control and track fading, choose the Pen tool (P) in the Tools Palette. Now when you click on the red line in the audio, or black line in the video, it will create a key frame that you can manipulate. Create a second key frame to the right or left of the first one, drag it down and you have created a fade in or out.  If you stack video clips on top of each other and bring down the opacity of the upper clip, you will be able to see through to the lower clip.  

3. Snapping

Snapping is simultaneously the best and worst feature in Final Cut Pro.  Snapping, does this have anything to do with turtles? Unfortunately, no. When the snapping feature is enabled it pulls your playhead to the nearest edit, or when dragging clips, “magnetically” pulls them together. This helps to avoid flash frames, or tiny spaces between edits. All very helpful, until you want to precisely scrub video near an edit point or trim a frame or two off the end of a clip, suddenly your playhead is a possessed demon with a mind of its own, flying willy nilly toward the nearest edit point.

What you need is control, and the power to summon or exorcize that demon at will. That power is N, hit N on the keyboard to toggle snapping on and off as needed. You can also switch snapping on and off with the toggle button in the upper right corner of the timeline window.  An extra treat for the hard core control freaks, you can toggle snapping on and off while scrubbing or dragging clips in the timeline, just hit N while in the process of dragging, trimming or scrubbing in the timeline.

4. OMG JKL FTW

Like rotary phones, the buggy whip and good episodes of Heroes, VCRs are a thing of the past. Just because the VCR is gone doesn’t mean you don’t need to fast forward and rewind from time to time. To save yourself some mouse clicks and drags, mosey your hand over to that keyboard and feel the magic of JKL.  Hitting the J key will start moving “backward” through your footage, if you press it again it will increase the speed you are “rewinding”, keeping hitting it, it will go faster and faster. If you can press the key at 88mph you will go back in time, well, not really, that is a lie.  
To move forward, and fast-forward, through your footage you'll use the L key.
The K key brings everything to a grinding halt, just hit it once to stop the madness. In order to play your footage normally press the Spacebar. Pressing the spacebar a second time will pause the footage. These hot keys work within the timeline, canvas or viewer when active. This will also work with the Quicktime player application.

5. Paste Attributes

Just because the iPhone doesn’t have cut and paste yet, doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to suffer. If you are using the same multiple effects on clips through out your project, Final Cut has a secret weapon to help save you a lot of time.

In the timeline, right click or ctrl click on a video or audio clip that you have already applied effects to. In the contextual menu, select copy. Now move to the clip you would like to add the same effects to, and right click (ctrl click), choose the Paste Attributes selection.

In the window that pops up you will find quite a few helpful choices, you can transfer any of the available attributes from one clip to another by clicking the box next to the option. Hit ok, now your settings have been copied and can be adjusted independently on the new clip.

6. Arrange

Every so often your windows in Final Cut will go haywire and rearrange themselves or disappear entirely. Whether you switched screen resolutions, switched monitors, or opened the project on a different computer, there is only so much space available on the back of milk cartons, so the next best thing is Arrange.

Click on Window in the menu bar, select Arrange to reveal a secondary down down menu. There are several choices here, if you just need to get back to the simple default layout, click on standard, this should get all your windows visible at least. If you have customized your layout, this is also the place to save it so you can call it back up easily in the future.

7. View Choices in the Browser Window

Icons and lists, can they ever learn to get along? If only they had a place where they could work side by side, where the best aspects of both could be used to their full potential. There is such a place, it’s called the Browser. The Browser is the window that holds all your imported files, video, audio, unicorns, whatever you happen to have in there. 

Ctrl or right click in the grey area of the Browser window, a contextual menu will appear where you will find four viewing choices, View as List, Small Icons, Medium Icons and Large Icons. The list option is great if you have a large amount of media or have carefully named and organized your assets. The Icon Views let you see the first frame of your clip, and even better, you can open that clip in the viewer and set an in-point anywhere in the clip and that will now become the thumbnail you see in the Browser.  With just a glance at the thumbnails in the Browser you can find the clip you are looking for.

8. Color Corrector

The color corrector is hands down the effect we use the most. The quality or “look” of your footage can live or die by the color corrector. Whether your white balance is a bit off and the people in your footage look like Smurfs, or you want your home videos to look just like Sin City, the color corrector is your first stop.  There are a couple different ways to find the color corrector.

First, select the clip you want to apply it to in the timeline by double clicking it, next go to Effects in the menu bar and select Video Filters/Color Correction/Color Corrector. In the Viewer, above your clip you will find a new tab, Color Corrector, click on this.  Now you see the Color Corrector controls.

Let’s fix that white balance problem, in the timeline drag your playhead until you have a frame of video that contains something “white” or something that is supposed to be white, this should show up in the Canvas window. Now in the viewer click on the eye dropper, or select Auto Balance-Color, button below the Balance circle on the left.  When you move your cursor over the Canvas window it will change into the eye dropper, click on an area in your clip that should be white. This will tell Final Cut Pro that this area should be white and it will adjust the color of your footage to try and represent that.

If it’s still not quite right, grab the small circle in the center of the Balance window with your cursor and drag it in the direction of the color your footage needs more of. This is just the tip of the iceberg for the Color Corrector, there are tons of toys to play with here, you can individually change the white, mid and black levels of your media, similar to the Levels adjustment in Photoshop, as well as the saturation levels.

You can also access the Color Corrector through the Effects tab in the Browser, expand the Video Filters section and then the Color Correction section to find the effect, from there you can double-click it or drag it onto a clip.

9. Composite Mode

Is your video just not “weird” or “cool” enough? 

Or maybe you are just bored, either way, stack a clip on top of another in the Timeline, now Ctrl or right click on the upper clip, in the contextual menu choose Composite Mode. Inside there are quite a few options, each option tells the clips how to interact with each other, giving you a wide range of wild effects. 

Make sure your play head is over the clips you are working on in the Timeline to get a preview of the effects as you try them out.

10. Export-Using Quicktime Conversion

You have edited your footage, piled the effects on, layered your video and created the finest Smurf zombie fan-fiction film of all time. Now how do you get it out of the clutches of Gargamel...err...Final Cut Pro?

Choose File from the menu bar, select Export then, Export Using Quicktime Conversion. QuickTime Movie is more suited to exporting full resolution versions of your project. If you are looking to put this masterpiece on the internet, lets take a look at the Using QuickTime Conversion option.

When you choose this option a Save window will pop up, let’s concentrate on the Format: and Use: options toward the bottom of the window.  Leave the Format option on QuickTime and click on the Use pull down menu.  Under the list of options, Broadband Medium or Broadband High are both good choices.  They are both preset to use the H.264 codec, which produces nice sharp video, great audio and small file sizes.  Now youtube it and prepare for fame and riches.