From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

Adding and adjusting transitions - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

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Adding and adjusting transitions

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to look at adding transitions to our clips in our timeline, and it's going to start off the discussion of adding video and audio effects inside of Final Cut Pro and how we can look at a transition in Effect Browser in order to accomplish this. If you're following along with the exercise files, you want to go to the chapter nine underscore one project which you could find in your projects events area of this library. Inside this project, I'm just going to move over these two clips here, the JMCU1 and the mixing add. And if you need to get to this edit point, you can always use your up and down arrow keys to be precise. We're to add a dissolve to transition between this clip and the other clip. And how we'll do that is we'll go to the transition browser over here at the side. So you can see it's at the top right of the timeline. I'll click to look at the transition category. You'll see that we're currently looking at all transitions in Final Cut. There's about 118 of them. We can perform searches down here if we are looking for a specific transition, such as maybe something with lights. So I'll type in light, and I get two transitions specifically with light noise and light sweep. Notice that as I skim over them, I'm able to preview the transition. In many cases, we can see representation of a outgoing clip by trees and an incoming clip by the picture of mountains and a lake. I'm going to clear my search results so I'm able to see all the transitions here in my transition browser, and I'm going to select the cross dissolve and drag it on the edit point where my playhead is. So this is how we add a transition to the edit point. The default length of a transition happens to be that of one second. I can see that by pressing control D and looking at the duration right over here. And meanwhile, I can also just change the duration when I do that by pressing 20, and now it's 20 frames in length. Just going to move back a bit earlier and press the L key to play forward so we can take a look at that transition commonly used to show a passage of time in a project or just used in a slideshow. But very handy transition depending on your project. And if you ever need to change the length of the default transition added, you can always go up to the Final Cut Pro preferences section, and under editing, you'll see that there's a transition duration which you can change the length of here. I want to close down this window. A really handy feature of the cross dissolve is that we can apply it to several clips at once because it's the default transition. So if I were to come in my timeline and press command + A to select every single clip and follow that with command + T, we'll be able to add transitions to everything. In this instance, I get a warning dialogue box which is basically saying that I might need some extra media beyond the clipped edges to create a transition. And whatta ya want to do in this case? Do you want to cancel this operation, or do you want to accept the fact that this is going to decrease the length of your total duration of your project? This is the fact that some of these clips in the timeline don't have enough handles to perform that one second default cross dissolve. I'll choose create transition, and you can see right here that in this instance, it wasn't able to match the length of the cross dissolve just next to it. Let me just press command + Z to undo that. But there you see that you can add multiple transitions if it's a default transition in Final Cut. Another thing we want to note is that transitions have properties just like clips, and we can change those properties. So they move over the middle of this cross dissolve that we just added. I'm going to select it. And let's press command + 4 to open up the inspector. We'll see that the cross dissolve properties show up. And right now the look for this cross dissolve is video, but we have quite a bit to choose from. These use sort of len modes in order to either, let's say, boost the contrast of an image or make the image more bright such as if I chose additive. We'll see a much brighter dissolve between both of these versus if I chose subtractive. This is going to be a lot darker. And this could suit the mood of the project that you're working on. For this instance, I'm just going to choose highlights, and we can just sort of see the effect there, as well as we could see that we could play around with the amount of the dissolve here as well. Just like the transform properties we switched in an earlier movie, you could always undo that operation by resetting the effect. Now it's back on the video. So besides adding a transition, we can always replace a transition with another. So if you go here to the blurs category where there are a series of transition. I'm going to skim over the Gaussian blur so we can take a preview of how that's going to work. And I want to drag that over the cross dissolve that I added in the timeline. Once I release the mouse, I can see there that there is now a blur transition taking place. I'll select this transition and just take a look at the properties of the Gaussian blur. So in this instance, I'm just going to take the vertical blur and remove it, so there's only a horizontal blur on these images. I'll move my playhead a little bit earlier and press L to playback and can see that transition take place. So I'd like to encourage you to play around with some of these transitions and become more familiar. There's quite a few. And always keep in mind what project are you working on, and does your transition fit or suit the project. Also keep in mind that sometimes solving a edit that might not seem natural, might be better suited to use trim tools rather than dissolves in the first place. But just something to keep in mind as you go through the process and you continue your editing journey. Regardless, Final Cut Pro 10 has a ton of transitions for you to use and place onto clips. Take some time to look through this category, and apply them to the various clips in your timeline.

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