More Final Cut Pro X editing tricks

Been doing nothing but edit the past few weeks and I’ve picked up a few tricks I’d like to share.

Matching Framing: If you’ve got your skimmer over a clip in the timeline and want to see the original clip in the browser, you can call it up by pressing Shift-f. This one is useful if want to see quickly whether there was more to the clip (saves you having to drag out the handles in the timeline to see whether anything is there). Or if you simply want to find the same clip because you know there’s something after the edit point that you want to use.

Sample-accurate sound editing: FCPX doesn’t allow you to split clips (audio or video) in increments smaller than a frame. This is fine for video, but sucks for fine audio editing, which contains many samples per frame. But there’s an easy workaround. Instead of cutting the clip, you can keyframe the audio level to -96db to remove it. Insert four keyframes in the audio level, then drag down on the middle to reduce the audio level and remove the offending audio.

Better Sound editing: Turn off video display in timeline and increase the size of the waveform. Makes your job way easier. You can do this quickly by pressing the light switch in the lower right of the timeline, and calling up the options available to you there.

Quick audio levels change: With video or audio clip selected, press Ctrl and the minus or plus key. This will drop or raise audio level by 1db.

Replace with gap: I find I often want to delete a section of video or audio, but leave a gap rather than have it close up. So instead of pressing “delete” use Shift-delete. That deletes and replaces selected range with a gap clip.

Lift edit: When editing dialog and b-roll, you sometimes find you want to put a clip that was in the main timeline onto a connected timeline, and replace it with a gap to preserve the length of the edit. Select the clip in the primary timeline, and press Opt-Cmd up arrow.

Select clip: When skimming over a clip in the timeline, pressing C will select the clip.

2 thoughts on “More Final Cut Pro X editing tricks

  1. Brian

    THANK you for the “Replace With Gap” shortcut. I’m embarrassed to even say how I’ve been working around that, haha.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.