Cloning moving subjects in Final Cut Pro X

- In this movie, we're going to look at how to clone moving subjects in Final Cut Pro X. Alright, so if you're just joining me in this movie and didn't see the last one, we're working with a subject moving across the frame, either left to right or right to left. They can be walking, they can be dancing... So we're going to kind of fashion an army of walking Nates across the frame. If I go over to Premiere, we just did this and you can see the result here. And it is very important that you have a locked down frame for this to work. If you don't, you can see that even with a little bit of camera movement, we get this buckling and banding in the video.

Alright? So a locked down frame is important; which we've got, and instead of using a wipe like we did in Premiere Pro, I'm going to use a mask. So I'm going to go over to my effect browser, and under mask, I'm going to choose draw mask. Ok? So now I need to draw this and I'm going to back out a little so that I can see the offscreen area. I'm going to go out to 12 1/2 percent. And I'm just going to add four control points around the frame like so.

Ok, so right now if I go into the inspector, I'm going to immediately want to invert the mask, and you'll see why in just a moment. And so that we can actually see the video underneath, I'm going to change this from composite, to original. Once we keyframe the mask, I'll change that back to composite. Ok, so what are we going to keyframe? We're going to keyframe the position, and that's under transforms. And so here's my position parameter, I'm just going to add a keyframe to the very beginning. And now that I've added my first keyframe, Final Cut knows that I'm keyframing, so I'm just going to play the video and move the mask as Nate walks.

Alright, so right there we want it to be right in front of him all the time. Ok, I think we're in good shape there. Alright, so let's just take a look here. I want to make sure that it never cuts off his hand or his foot as he's walking.

And that should be just fine. Ok, so I'm going to change this back to composite, so we see our mask proceed our walking subject, and I want to bump up the feathering to blend this in, ok? And now, we're ready to begin duplicating. So I'm just going to select this layer, and then option drag, and as soon as Nate is in the frame, I'm going to move that over to that point, ok? And there we go.

And I'm going to just delete my mask from the very first layer, because we don't need it there. Alright, so we have a full frame and Nate's walking across, and let's do it again. Option drag up, and move over, and keep going as long as we like. Ok. So here's a little taste of what this is looking like. And of course you have the flexibility to go as far as you want. Now this does get to be a lot of layers in Final Cut, so if you'd like to clean that up, feel free to put them all in a compound clip.

Just select them, right click, choose new compound clip, or option G, and there they all are. We'll go back to fit so we can see this a little bit better. And of course, if I ever want to go inside, just double click and everything's available to me. Alright, so that is cloning a moving subject in Final Cut Pro X. Pretty straightforward once you have the right lockdown shot, and with a little patience in terms of keyframing the movement, you can get a nice result.