Adding and customizing transitions - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

- So now that we've learned some great ways of being able to add transitions to our project, let's take a look at adding and manipulating the properties of some of the transitions that are available within Final Cut. So I'm here in my Chapter 3.6 project. My transition browser is open. I'm actually in the dissolves category, which is where you want to be too. And the first transition we're going to add is going to be the cross dissolve. I just want to apply it actually over the second clip in my timeline. In fact, I want it to be on both ends, and the cool part is, if you saw in the last movie, if you press command T, what happens if you have multiple clips selected it's applied to all of them, but in this case it's applied to both ends. Now these are two-second transitions. This is because I set that up in the preferences last time within Final Cut and if I go back to my preferences, Final Cut, preferences and to the editing tab, and look down here I can change that back to one-second, and one-second is the default so if it shows in one second, that's all good. That's exactly how it's supposed to go. So this transition it matches the length of this clip primarily because there are no handles on these two clips in order to allow us to have a transition. And one thing we can do in the timeline is easily select a transition, I can press control D, and then choose to re-time it to however long we want it to be. So if I want it to be one second, I type in one period. We can also do that by grabbing on an edge of a transition. To see this a bit better, I'm going to press command equals, and you can see that I can easily change the length and a little time display comes up showing me how many frames I'm trimming off of the transition and the new duration of what it's going to be. In this particular case, you can see here it's going to be 14 frames in terms of the length of the transition. Now when you do that. I'm just going to press command equals to zoom in even more, one thing that you want to keep in mind is that snapping might be better to be turned off in order to avoid any problems that could occur when you're dragging out the transition as soon as it reaches the edit point. And then a really cool handy feature about transitions or manipulating them is that right now, we place them over edit point of two clips and you might want to experiment how that transition comes in or where the edit point is. And by dragging on the middle of a transition, what we do is we get option for a roll edit, and what this is doing is underneath the transition it's changing the edit point between the two clips. So in this particular case, the roll edit, when I drag it to the right, one thing you want to keep in mind is the clip on the left-hand side happens to be the outgoing clip, is getting longer in length, while the clip on the right-hand side, the incoming clip, is getting shorter in length. So your overall project duration is staying the same, but I am changing the edit point between these two clips, and at the same time kind of sliding that transition with it. And this is just to change the way that one shot comes in and the other shot that goes out. So that's a pretty handy feature when dealing with transitions in Final Cut. Now before we look at some of the preferences of this cross dissolve, I do want to give you one warning situation. And in order to show that, what I'm going to do is just kind of lengthen my third clip to its maximum, so show you this might get a little long, but I'm sort of just dragging it out until I see red. And this basically means there are no more frames left on this clip. And I want to do the same thing for this clip here on the right. So I'm just dragging on with my default selection tool the out point of this one clip and then the in point of this other until I see a red handle. The reason I'm doing this is this is a basically a situation where there are no handles on a clip. And if I apply the cross dissolve, Final Cut needs to do something in order to add the transitions because it has no handles to perform the dissolve. What it's going to do is ask us to create the transition and if we want to, what it's going to do is shorten the length of the project by actually using frames that are being displayed here inside your project in order to create the transition. So you can see that the project length got shorter and I used those frames in order to carry out a short dissolve, so it is rather short and if we want the transition to be longer, what we would have to do is actually shorten the length of those clips. So I'm just going to press command Z a couple times just to get back to square one and show you that when you see yellow that means there are handles for a clip on either of its end and when you apply a transition it will come up as the default length that you've put under your menu. I'm just going to press control D just to show you that that is indeed, one second long. So now, to talk about changing a transition. Something as simple as a cross dissolve. If you select it and we then press command four to head to the inspector, we get access to certain parameters of a transition. Right now for a cross-dissolve we can choose basically dissolve looks. Some of these looks will blend clips together and create a brighter type exit or entry to your clip, depending on how you look at it. You can sharpen the clip as you perform the dissolve, create a cold like feel, and then you can change the amount of the transition as well as how it eases from one clip to another. So these are just a bunch of options and this is available, or one set of options available from a dissolve. When you start looking at other categories. I'm just actually going to go all the way to the bottom to the wipes category, which you should also have in your system. Don't worry about all of these other transition categories that you see on mine just 'cause I have presets installed. So something here like a band wipe or a Chevron, if you select it. Actually just going to drag it on top of the existing cross dissolve that I have here and that just replaces out the transition. Once I select that and see the Chevrons options, there are a few things available for this one. One is number one, a set of onscreen controls that you can manipulate, and as you can see, as I adjust these Chevron settings, it can have a profound effect in how that transition takes place between these two clips. Another thing is I have a series of parameters here inside the inspector, and just like we've done with transform or crop controls, you can adjust them really easily and play around with things such as, in this case, edge treatment, to create looks that are suitable for your projects needs. So there you have it, being able to add transitions to the timeline. We looked at the preferences of changing the default length of our transitions. We then looked at some of the options available for manipulating our transition in terms of length, in terms of rolling our edit points, and then properties available within the inspector that we can manipulate to suit our projects.