Introducing Speed: Final Cut Pro 5 Tutorial

Series Summary

A working knowledge of Final Cut Pro is essential to any aspiring filmmaker. As the most widely used software program in video and film editing, Apple computer's Final Cut Pro can give a professional appearance to any film project from basic digital video to HD material. Because it is relatively affordable and easy to use, Final Cut Pro has become extremely popular with broadcast stations and independent filmmakers. It offers a wealth of effects and functions, like dissolve, iris, distortion, and ripple, rolling, slipping, sliding and other editing functions, as well as color correction filters and audio filters.

In this free online video series learn how to affect video and adjust the speed and time mapping. Expert video editor CJ South will show you how to apply slow motion and fast motion effects, fit to fill edit, frame blending and motion blurring techniques. Learn also how to work with freeze frames and de-interlace video. Watch this free online tutorial along with the rest of our Final Cut Pro 5 Tutorial series and start working on your independent film today!

Video Transcript

" This is C.J. South reprsenting expertvillage.com. In this clip, I will be introducing you to the concept of changing video speed. Welcome to Volume 7. In this volume, we are going to be talking about affecting video mainly with speed and motion. So the default speed of all clips is 100 percent. You can change a clip's speed setting at any time. So what are the different types of speed motion. Well you have slow motion which is speed that is under 100 percent, you then have fast motion which is speed that is over 100 percent and then you have variable speed which is speed changes over time and we'll accomplish that by using the time remapping feature in Final Cut Pro. So now you may have different reasons for changing the speed settings. You may want to solve an editorial problem for instance and then in that case you can just do a fit to field edit making a clip longer to fill more time or shorter if an action takes longer than you like. You can also use variable speed changes to create like ramping speed changes from slow to fast. So it starts off slow, gets faster, gets faster and then it gets fast so it's not just an instant cut from slow to fast. This also allows you to make specific frames in a clip occur at particular times in your sequence. So the rest of the frames in a clip are automatically played faster or slower to compensate that. You have to remember that when you change speed of a clip often it will change the clip's duration. So let's say for example I take a 10 second clip and I set it to play at 50 percent of speed the clip will then become 20 seconds long and that is because Final Cut Pro has to add extra frames to make the clip play in slow motion. For fast motion, it's the opposite. It removes frames so your clips actually become shorter. "