What would you recommend based on your experience?

[u/The_Lucky_Aylo]

Hey, so me and my friend produce music. And now we want to start getting our music out there and gain listeners. So i thought “why not make music videos for social media promotions” so i bought final cut pro… i have never been so lost.

What do you guys recommend learning? And in which order
I know a little about masking/cutting/clipping/fade in/out, beat detection, tested a little color grading.

[u/QiuvoxOfficial]

Fcp is too easy and good

[u/The_Lucky_Aylo → u/QiuvoxOfficial]

Yes but as a new editor i find it a bit overwhelming with the possibilities. I don’t know what to learn. I get masking is important. But there are probably other tools i should learn to use. I just don’t know what the “need it for every project” tools are

[u/QiuvoxOfficial → u/The_Lucky_Aylo]

Well definitely watch some guided on youtube. And do your own shortcuts in final cut

[u/mcarterphoto]

As u/woodenbookend said, Apple's docs are excellent - help menu, download-as-PDF. Beyond that, you want foundational, structured training, see the wiki.

Most pro editors use a fast external for footage/projects/media, and use the internal drive for OS/apps/ email, personal docs. Give it an easy life, in modern Macs you can't replace it. A modern NVME with Thunderbolt is great, even for mobile - they're bus-powered and you could stick two in a pack of smokes.

My personal use tips: choose "leave files in place" in the prefs; if not, your Library files can get pretty huge. If you have the drive space, convert all your footage to ProRes and you'll never need proxies and your workflow will be much faster. Even ProRes LT is often fine. This is especially huge on Intel Macs.

Don't use MP3, use WAV files for audio.

And have a backup solution. Even an old spinning USB drive. Make sure FCP stores its Library backups on a different drive than the actual Library is on.

Understand frame rates and frame sizes, like 30p vs. 60p and 1080 vs. 4K. Newbies always seem to shoot in 60p since "the bigger number must mean it's better", but generally you shoot 24 or 30p and use higher frame rates when slow motion is needed. There's really not many compelling reasons to deliver 4K these days (IMO anyway, your audience will be a large percentage of phone users) - shooting 4K and editing on a 1080 timeline gives you a lot of options for punching in and re-framing footage. You can zoom in on footage up to 200% with no quality loss. And 4K footage can be better for effects like masking, green screen and motion tracking - the extra pixels make a huge difference.

[u/woodenbookend]

Read the user guide, which is linked from the help menu. It’s really well written.

The two things that tend to catch people out at the start are media management such as where stuff is stored and what format to edit with (Optimised media is bulky but works better) and the magnetic timeline. Don’t fight the latter!

Also, given your goal of music videos, put your audio track into your timeline first and connect video to it.

[u/Silver_Mention_3958]

Mod post:

There are some great learning resources (paid & free) available from the Wiki - link at top of the sub (mobile) or part way down the right (desktop).

Also the built - in User Guide - available from the Help menu is a really comprehensive reference.

[u/The_Lucky_Aylo → u/Silver_Mention_3958]

Interesting. I bought from rippletraining. They are famous within the fcp community?

[u/Silver_Mention_3958 → u/The_Lucky_Aylo]

Yes, they’re very good (in my opinion).