Using the Crop Tool & Feathering Edge in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to show you how to use the crop tool and feathering an edge. There are two different ways you can crop an image. First is over here in the motion tab. You notice the crop bar. There is a little arrow next to it; go ahead and hit it, twirl it down. Now these sliders adjust to the size of the image. Now cropping is basically just cutting off sections of your image. So if I move this left slider over you can see that now the left side of my image a lot of it has been cut off and you can see this line right here, this new line that has been added that is where the crop is at. I just grab it back and the image is now revealed. You can do that for all the different sized up, bottom, top or whatever. That is only if you want to do specifically with numerical values though. You can put in a numerical value if you want it cropped by 20 or whatever you want. Personally my favorite way is to use the crop tool which is down here in your tool pallet. This is the crop tool. Bring it up here and you will notice once you move that tool to the edge you can see it takes shape of the crop tool. Your cursor takes the shape the crop tool. You just click and hold and then you can crop it in. So you can crop the sides, you can crop the bottom and the top. So that is a good way to get rid of a certain portion of an image if you can shrink it down. It is a little hard. The edge of it is a bit harsh. Now you can put a feather onto that edge over in the motion tab under the crop settings. This bottom selection is edge feather. Now you turn that up and it feathers the edge of your crop. So now you can see it is feathered now. It's not just a straight cut. It is a feather to it. Now if I could look at just the image, you know that's not bad. Instead of just looking like it got cut off there is kind of a fade in the black going on. "