From the course: Final Cut Pro Essential Training

Adding and adjusting transitions - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro Essential Training

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Adding and adjusting transitions

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- [Instructor] This chapter covers transitions and adding effects inside of Final Cut Pro. I'm in my chapter 10_1 project. And you can find that in the chapter 10 event of your Final Cut essentials training. Now we have worked with effects in the past not to mention forms of transitions in fade ins and fade outs that we've added to clips but we haven't actually added transitions or added effects. All of the effects we've used have pretty much been built in minus a few mentions in the first getting started with Final Cut chapter for this entire chapter we'll be adding effects from Final Cuts transition and effects browser. This can be found just on the top right hand corner of your timeline. And let's start off by going to the transition browser. If you click on all here on the left, you'll see all transitions installed on your system. I do just want to mention that I have a few more than you because I have some third party plugins that I work with for professional work. If you need to get into a specific category or want to explore, you can click on that category and you'll notice that the transitions are limited to whatever's inside of it. Another thing we can do is do a search. So I'm going to just type in the word in this case, dissolve, you'll notice that nothing shows up and that's because I'm in the blurs category. But if I go to all to reveal all the transitions several transitions with the name of dissolves show up. In order to see all of the transitions again, I'm going to click here in order to reveal them and I'm actually going to head to the dissolves category. Applying a transition is easy, we simply drag it to a desired edit point in the timeline then I'm going to drag it here over the clips that appear just past the 22nd mark. And when I see that green plus icon over the edit point I'll release my mouse. To get a clearer review of the transition, let's press command equal a few times in order to zoom in and we can see that this cross dissolve allows us to transition from one clip to the other. If we'd like to lengthen the transition, we can hover over one of the edges on the left or right side and increase the length of the transition. Noting that the default length of a transition is actually one second. So in this instance, I've extended this transition by 15 frames, I'll release my mouse and actually press command minus just to zoom out again and show something really special about transitions. Not only can you lengthen or shorten a transition but actually roll the edit point. So I'm changing where the edit point occurs, which also changes where the transition occurs. I'll roll this, edit 12 frames earlier and let's give this a preview. One way to do that is our play head is over that transition is use the handy play around edit which is the Shift Forward Slash key. - It's very difficult for me to put into words, but they're always has been a relation. - [Instructor] Excellent, transitions also have properties that we can adjust. And for this, with the transition selected we'd like to go to the inspector. So I'm in the inspector the cross dissolve selected and note that I have different types of looks for the cross dissolve. So right now it's on video but I can choose a different type for making the image more bright. Blend modes such as additive which will overall brighten the images when the transition occurs and even modes to darken this like subtractive where it adds additional contrast when the dissolve happens. And I'll just preview this back. - Put into words, but there. - [Instructor] So again, that only happens when the cross dissolve happens. The cross dissolve is actually quite special because it is a default transition. And that means that we can apply it with a shortcut key. So I'm going to press command minus just to zoom out a bit and I'm going to select the edit point at around the 32nd mark here in the chapter 10_1 timeline and then just press command T. I'll undo this by pressing command Z with both clips selected if you press command T it will add transitions to several different edit points across those two clips. So I'm going to press command Z to undo. There are several transitions, of course beyond cross dissolved that you can become familiar with and have even more properties than what you saw with the cross dissolve. And for that, I recommend exploring some of these transitions, but just for us to take a look I want to grab on this divide transition and apply that over the edit point in about 30 seconds. And let's just play this back to see it. (upbeat music) Now we have a little bit of a window split before cutting to the next clip. I'll move my play head over the transition, select it and just note that we have a control here for a number of dividing selectors, very basic three or two depending on how long we want that transition to be and of course our ability to lengthen it as well. So I increase the length, we'll play it back. (upbeat music) And we lend on the next clip. Now there are going to be some situations where you run into adding transitions and something strange is going to happen. Let me show that by in this case grabbing the fade to color transition and applying it over this edit point at about 40 seconds here in the timeline. Notice that we don't actually see the transition although we see the green plus icon and when I release my mouse, we get a warning dialogue box and it basically says that, hey these clips don't have enough information to the right or to the left to allow the transition to happen. Transitions, look beyond the edit point of the outgoing clip. And before the edit point of the incoming clip in order to create the transition. And in order for it to happen in this case it needs to decrease the length of our project which we'll see when I press create transition. It shortens both of those clips so that the transition appears on the clip. To show this in a different way, I'm just going to press command Z, I try to extend the endpoint of this boat clip. You'll notice it we run into red, which is what's preventing this transition from happening. So that's why it made this clip shorter in order for the to transition to happen. Last but not least if you go to your Final Cut Pro preferences, under the editing pain, you'll notice that we can actually switch the transition length for when we apply them to something greater or shorter, depending on our needs. Now I've barely touched the surface of all the transitions available in Final Cut but I hope this gets you started and if you need more information, I have a course on effects and titles and Final Cut that dives a bit deeper into more transitions that you can explore.

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