Tips for Editing in FCP X

If you’re new to editing in FCPX getting used to the unique way in which it does a few things can be a bit of distraction to getting any real work done. Hopefully this round up of tips, tricks and tutorials will help you leap over those pain barriers and get back to what you really love doing – editing!

Faster Editing in FCPX

Larry Jordan has a good write up of all the keyboard shortcuts involved in trimming in FCPX. Memorising these will definitely speed up your working day. He also demonstrates how to use the precision editor in this short tutorial from his training series.

In this great short tutorial Ben Consoli shares how he uses FCPX’s favourites feature to keyword talking head interviews to allow him to search through interview footage for the sound bite you need.

Tips on Correctly Setting Up FCPX

Larry Jordan talks through how to make sure you pick the right video format from the start and then how to get the best output from FCPX as a result.

Discover the ins and outs of batch renaming clips in FCPX with the Mac Break Studio boys Mark Spencer and Steve Martin. Here’s a quick run down of why you might want to know how to do that:

This custom batch renaming feature, coupled with the ability to group and arrange your event clips by various methods (content created date, date imported, role, file type, camera name, etc.) and the ability to create keyword collections and smart collections mean that you can very quickly sort through a large amount of material to find just the clips you want, when you want.

Audio Tips in FCPX

How do you get rid of background hum, loud peaks and unwanted ambient noise? Check out this simple walk through of some of FCPX’s audio enhance features from Danny Greer on PremiumBeat. In another post Danny shares two quick keyboard shortcuts for making the most of audio skimming and slow motion playback.

Quickly dip audio with the range tool (R) with this micro tip from Jeff Greenberg who has some great FCPX tips on his blog and plenty of free lecture notes from his NAB sessions.

Ben Consoli shares how he uses the ‘voice over enhancer’ to sweeten his dialogue.

Lastly in this quick tutorial Larry Jordan shares an excerpt, from a 40 minute long webinar on working with audio in FCPX, how to work with the surround sound panning tools. Nice.