Using the Distort Tool in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

"This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I will show you how to use the distort tool. The distort tool is a neat little tool that let's us kind of stretch and morph the edges of our pictures to create some interesting effects. So the distort tool is over in the tool pallet is in the same area that the crop tool is just right next to it. This is the distort tool; go and click that and then go up to the canvas now and when you mouse over the corners here, bring your cursor over the corner here, you notice that it now changes into the distort tool. So you just click and hold so you can drag that and as you notice that as I drag it I am just kind of distorting it now. You can stretch it to the side or up and down. You can do it to multiple corners to give the illusion of a certain perspective. Like if you were looking down a hallway it might look more stretched out like this. You can morph it a bit to give it different perspectives. What ever you change in here, correlates to the distort drop down in your motion tab here. So as you can see all my number values are being set right now. So if you ever did a distort to the image in the canvas and wanted it copied over to another clip, you could just copy all these values over there. But whatever you change up here in your motion tab will also affect the canvas whenever you are affecting your canvas here which changes in the motion tab. Now if you watch and change my aspect ratio down here, you can see it is kind of shifting that ratio. So the distort tool is used mainly to give you unique shapes that you normally wouldn't have with a standard image. "