How do I edit my YouTube videos using Final Cut Pro?
Come and sit in on one of my edit sessions in real time, and watch along as I edit my last YouTube video.
I share how I import and organise my video files, change and mix the audio levels and add sound effects, edit out pauses and ums and ers... add graphics and moving graphics, and zoom in or resize my screen recordings.
See the finished video here!
How I edit my YouTube videos on Final Cut Pro. Real time small Youtuber FCP edit session 2021
TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)
THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!
How do I edit my YouTube videos?
That's a very kind question that I’ve been asked in the comments on my YouTube channel and it got me thinking.
What if I were to share my entire edit process with you in real time right here and share the whole process from beginning, right through to the end.
And of course whenever I get an idea like this I’m terrified.
This time I think it's because I work with the best, absolutely the best video editors in the industry.
Look, here's footage of me working with two of them right now in the Before Times, obviously.
This is how we'd work together.
Everyone's gone to the pub.
And, we're still here.
Hi!
Now obviously I don't want those amazing video editor friends of mine to see this video at all.
I am definitely not a video editor and this is definitely not a Final Cut Pro tutorial.
It's more of a... a ride-along.
Uh, you can sit in an edit session with me.
How exciting!
I’m gonna fast forward through as much as possible, so any boring bits I’ll try and speed up.
You'll get a sense of how my edit session works.
Hello I’m Neil Mossey, and I’m a development producer helping high achieving creators and performers just like you - high five! - to help you get ideas out of your head and out onto here on YouTube where they belong.
Where you can make the world a happier place, and I’m going to see if I can keep your attention for longer than two minutes because the most important thing with editing is...
So I’m going to put my camera file onto the timeline first.
I hit “W”.
The next thing I usually do is to add some compression to my speaking.
It gives it a bit more oomph, and then after the compression it looks like this, so next I’ll just have a quick whiz through the intro to get up to the point where I’m speaking over the screen recording.
I tend to record too many takes for my intro.
It's a way that I psychologically get into doing this.
Here in the waveform you can see my three hand claps.
I’ll drop the screen recording onto the timeline and then I’ll drag myself on top of it.
Command X to cut, and jump to the beginning, and then command V to paste.
I can't see the hand claps on there!
Right, really helpfully I’ve started the screen recording AFTER the handclaps!
Those claps are meant to synchronize the... the timing of the screen recording with my camera recording.
But a lot of the time I just do it by ear.
It doesn't have to be that precise because it's only a screen recording.
So I can hear a delay, so all I need to do is move this across so that they are in sync.
All I need to do now is to kill the audio of the screen recording and then I need to move myself up into the corner into a box.
I select my camera footage and I use transform.
You can see I’ve got dots around my camera footage and if I shrink the picture you can see there we go - disappear into... into space and I’ll put that on the top right hand corner.
I try to make this box as... as big as possible - as you can probably see now!
This is going to fry my brain in the edit because I’m doing this on this video that you're watching right now.
I’ll just move myself across, and you can see I’ve got a lot of room to the side of me there which we don't really need, so I use trim to bring this down... so we'll click on this menu.
Click on crop.
Difficult to say.
And I’m going to shrink that.
Something like that.
I don't want it to be too tight but I need as much screen real estate as possible so I might go back to transform just move me over just a little bit.
That looks okay.
The next thing I do is to resize the screen recording so that I can fill as much of this picture with the material that I’m talking about.
Man this chair is really starting to annoy me!
To resize my screen recording I don't hit use transform, I just use crop, and you can see I can shrink down that's a screen size window which is really handy, so I try to get the YouTube logo in just so that you can see what I’m talking about.
That sort of looks like enough and if I hit done you can see now that the screen recording fills the screen - which looks great - and the picture of me in the box doesn't look too intrusive.
[VIDEO SOUND:] And we want to go down to here, customization.
I put lots and lots of pauses in my speech and I tend to take them all out.
I’m probably leaving them all in here, but usually on my videos I try to snip out these... these little pauses.
My worry is that by taking them out, anyone watching my videos will hate the way that I speak normally - so it doesn't seem to be serving my long-term interest to be taking these little pauses out.
But leaving them in is just as annoying for me to listen to so... I’ll take them out for now.
Now the way I make an edit to keep the screen recording in sync with my talking over the screen recording, I’m going to have to cut both the camera footage and the screen recording footage.
And to do that, I select all so that's command-A
Now when I make a cut with command-B it slices through both sections: both the camera footage and the screen recording.
And if we're coming back in here...
[VIDEO SOUND:] this opens
I think that looks like a good spot.
I’ll do the same thing again, so command-A and then command-B.
And then when I remove this section, it stays in sync and hopefully the edit sounds like this.
[VIDEO SOUND:] it expands the menu and we want to go down to here customization this opens up a menu
I am very comfortable with my videos jump cutting as you've probably seen already.
I would much prefer to give a signal to the viewer that I am not wasting their time at all so I have no problem whatsoever with... with jump cuts.
I try to make them less messy and I’ll show you how I do that with the edits but I’m not too precious about my footage jumping around.
I just want to get through what I want to share as quickly as possible and I think it sends a good signal to the viewer.
Even though it's something that TV and cinematic editors absolutely hate!
[VIDEO SOUND:] so at the top here we've got a channel trailer for
[VIDEO SOUND:] for people who are and
[VIDEO SOUND:] a channel trailer for people who are subscribed or not and then you might be aware of this but this is where you can put different shelves different lines rows of rows of videos for your for your YouTube channel rows of videos
[VIDEO SOUND:] different shelves different lines
[VIDEO SOUND:] put different shelves different
[VIDEO SOUND:] you can put different shelves different rows of videos for your YouTube channel page these are my rows I kind of like to think of them as bookshelves and then
[VIDEO SOUND:] and then you might be aware of this but this is where you can put different shelves different rows of video
[VIDEO SOUND:] different rows of videos for your YouTube
[VIDEO SOUND:] yeah those for your YouTube rows of videos for your YouTube channel page these are my rows these are my rows I kind of like to think
[VIDEO SOUND:] i kind of like to think of them page these are my YouTube channel page
[VIDEO SOUND:] YouTube channel page because I kind of like to think that
[VIDEO SOUND:] page I kind of like to think of them as bookshelves
Can you hear here, I have a little lip smack which is something I tend to do a lot.
If I run the the play head over it
[VIDEO SOUND:] let's turn it off
Did you hear that?
So I’ll put the cut slightly after it.
You can see it, it's just on this waveform here.
I’m just going to go after the this lip smack.
[VIDEO SOUND:] sort of it's not very
There’s a horrible swallow as well, so we'll get rid of that.
[VIDEO SOUND:] there's bookshelves it's not very intuitive
[VIDEO SOUND:] it's not very intuitive but this is how you add but this is how you link something definitive but this is how you add but this is how you link
[VIDEO SOUND:] shelves it's not very intuitive but this is how you link a featured channel
I keep making mistakes while I’m doing it.
I’m always... always using command-Z or command Z which is undo, undo, undo!
I had a friend who said “wouldn't it be great if you could just apple Z things in life?”
That's quite a philosophy.
Now when I get to the end of this I’m going to be resizing the screen recording so we can zoom in on what we're talking about and zoom out.
I’m just cutting this for audio.
I just want my dialogue soundtrack to be continuous and I’ll make the screen recording fit and time with my speech.
I have a feeling this is going to be quite a long video so there are chapters in the description below if you want to jump ahead.
[MUSIC]
So I’ve got a section here where I’m talking about the URL at the top of the browser and obviously I’ve cropped that off.
So I’m going to re-position the screen recording so that we can see what I’m talking about.
And just reposition that now, so go to the crop and then I’ll move this crop up to here so I’ll take out this gap.
And I’ll go super big on the URL here, so I’ll use crop and I’ll zoom all the way up and my face is going to obscure some of this.
I wonder if I should move it across.
I might move it across.
I think if I hold down command while I’m moving it... it allows you to move it more smoothly.
Done.
I’m going to go full frame on me.
Sorry, that was me “going full frame”!
I’m going to fill the frame with this shot to hide the jumpy join.
If I highlight this, I’m going to take off the crop so I’m going to untick transform and crop and you can see that I’ve removed the crop so I’m going to fill the picture.
I’ll play it through and you can see what it looks like.
[VIDEO SOUND:] A unique URL name for the channel this is what the channel's actually got...
There.
It just helps the viewer feel like I’m... “I’m here for you” rather than blathering away over a screen recording.
The reason I chose to cut there to come back to the screen recording was: have a look at my face.
[VIDEO SOUND:] for the channel
There.
Can you see that I blinked there?
Let me show you again.
I blinked before I looked down.
T here's a theory of cutting on the blink, and basically when we're talking, we provide little edit points when we blink.
It's when we give chunks of information or when we're taking in chunks of information.
It's almost like our brain shutting everything down parking it in our brains and then opening our eyes again.
Bizarrely if you ever want to know how to time when is the right point to edit yourself, your eyes blink at the... at the right moment!
Your eyes give you the... the clue.
So if you watch that while you're editing, these little blinks that you're doing subconsciously without even realizing it, they're providing all the edit points that an edited video is actually trying to recreate.
It's one of the best theories I’ve been given about editing.
[MUSIC]
Now here we have a problem because the thing that I’m talking about on screen recording is actually hidden by me - by my box.
Let's start it here, so I’m going to move that over to here and I’m going to crop the right hand side of my box, and now I’m obscuring the left-hand side of the screen so I’ll probably resize this screen recording, to go crop...
Let's make it bigger.
I don't really like doing this but I might have to move my box to the middle.
I really don't like putting my box at the bottom of the screen it's like it diminishes my own authority on my own channel!
Let's put it to there.
It doesn't look right but at least you get to see everything we need to see.
[VIDEO SOUND:] ikea dad there are no matching results basically it won't link to channels that don't have any videos on them yet when you've found all the channels...
I’m going to do something different here, so what I’m going to do now is detach the audio.
So it means that when I turn off my vision I’m going to hit the letter V to turn off my video so we can still hear me talking.
[VIDEO SOUND:] obviously you want to
Which wouldn't have happened if I hadn't detached the audio, and we'll just go big on the screen recording so if I resize this...
I want to see the “done” there.
Centre it.
[VIDEO SOUND:] goes on them yet when you've found all the channels that you want to link to just go down to done
So about here I’m going to cut close to the word “DONE”.
[VIDEO SOUND:] yet when you've found all the channels that you want to link to just go down to done...
I quite like that!
[MUSIC]
[VIDEO SOUND:] and right here right now is what YouTube thinks you should be watching next oh my god.
That's my stomach! (LAUGHTER)
Let's try again.
[MUSIC]
So I’ve had a little break.
I’ve got a cup of hot chicory drink and some chocolate from whoa... some chocolate from Cornwall.
I’m also wearing my Christmas hat because it's so cold here in the happy hut.
I’m going to go through the whole video again.
It's five minutes 16 seconds long. I’m gonna really tighten it up.
[MUSIC]
This is where I would put in my name strap.
I’ve got this pre-prepared as an animation that I made in keynote.
All I need to do is to hit Q
I’ve got a selection of things that I use in pretty much every video.
Like there's a comment button... a little subscribe button...
By the way if you're here at this point, thank you so much!
If you've made it this far please hit the thumbs up button just to let me know someone reached this point.
I can't believe you're still watching this, but kudos to you.
And that thumbs up animation along with my subscribe animation - hint! - is all on here as green screens.
I’ll put those ones on the video - and it drops about there.
[VIDEO SOUND:] the channel way too much there hello I’m neil and I do a lot of experiments here on YouTube.
Let's now go through the rest of the video!
[MUSIC]
This is the about the time I start to drop in my little arrows just to help the viewer register what I’m actually talking about.
I’ve got the arrow in my evergreen folder.
Hit Q to drop it onto the timeline and then I use transform to position it, so I’ll rotate it.
And I made this arrow in keynote as well which is the mac powerpoint presentation program.
It’s free and it's absolutely fantastic.
You can export pictures like this so that the background is transparent.
[MUSIC]
So now it's time for me to do the final pass and I find this part of the edit the absolute hardest because technically it's the easiest and I’m just so close to having this thing finished.
And yet I’ve gotta look at my stupid face for yet another possibly an hour.
I’m gonna try and do this as quickly as possible but this is the pass where I put all the final graphics and do any more nips and tucks that need doing and it's also when I add the music bed and the sound effects.
I hold down the command button when I’m adjusting the audio levels.
If you do it just by dragging this bar up and down, it's really difficult to get the exact number of decibels you want.
But if you hold down the command key on your mac keyboard you can get it going up and down in increments of one.
The other thing I do at the beginning is, I have a title that drops down and I use keynote.
I just copy and paste the last strap.
Put something like “How to link your channel... or try “how to link my channel”
That looks good!
[MUSIC]
The last thing that I do that I always, always leave to the very last thing is to make a little montage at the beginning of the thing that I’m talking about.
So let's take a listen to what I’m going to cover.
[VIDEO SOUND:] but I’ve just created a few other new YouTube channels and I want to link to those on my channels. I want them to appear like this as featured channels and I found it really difficult to find where to link other YouTube channels to my YouTube channel.
I can see here, it's about 15 seconds that I’m looking to cover, so what-- all I do for this is I just scroll through the video and anything that leaps out as being really... that looks good, kinetic moving pictures...
I like that that big close-up of the word “Featured channels” and I’ll paste it right at the beginning just so I can remember where it is.
Now that looks good, so grab that and the arrow, and I’ll use that for when I say the words “appear on your channel as featured channels”.
I might take that because that's a nice scroll.
Yes I’ve just got a bunch of shots, and then I’m just going to drag them up here for when I’m talking, so drag it up and then I’ll cut... and I’ll paste it over here.
Now this seems like an insane amount of time to be spending on a few seconds at the opening, but I just want to stop that drop off.
I’m going to keep the audience watching so I really do tend to over invest a bit of editing time on the first 30 seconds.
So it's a bit too much, I’ll make it smaller and then paste it into position.
[VIDEO SOUND:] new YouTube channels and I want to link to those on my channels
I can't move these up, uh so I’ll move the arrow to one side then I’ll move this up to here and then I’ll put the arrow back in the right place to there I think it is.
Let's play that through
[VIDEO SOUND:] YouTube channel but I’ve just created a few other new YouTube channels and I want to link to those on my channels. I want them to appear like this
So I’m just going to fill that gap.
I think I think I’m going to fill the entire gap.
And I’ll just grab the tick where I check that check box.
That's a bit too much, give it a bit more breathing space.
Grab that one, put it there.
And I grab this one, put it there.
And then finally, the final piece of the puzzle, oh that's in the wrong place... so I want to put that one there and that one here and I’ll make this smaller.
My opening montage looks like this.
[VIDEO SOUND:] and I have this YouTube channel but I’ve just created a few other new YouTube channels and I want to link to those on my channels. I want them to appear like this as featured channels and I found it really difficult to find where to link other YouTube channels to my YouTube channel so I’m going to walk you through...
That sort of works.
I don't like it because this this shot doesn't really do anything, so what I might do is just reinstate this clip.
Oh that's perfect.
So I’ll hide that and let's see how this looks.
[VIDEO SOUND:] and I have this YouTube channel but I’ve just created a few other new YouTube channels and I want to link to those on my channels I want them to appear like this as featured channels and I found it really difficult to find where to link other YouTube channels to my YouTube channel so I’m going to walk...
Great so that works really well.
Right, so I want some sound effects to happen here.
Let's have a pop.
[VIDEO SOUND:] I have this YouTube channel but I’ve just created a few other new YouTube channels and--
What I might do actually, let's have a crash.
I’ve got an even bigger crash.
This is a really over-the-top crash.
[CRASH!]
I love that one!
Let's-- let's do it, and then I’ll move this pop onto there, so the crash goes here.
I might have to check the sound level because it's going to be really loud.
[VIDEO SOUND:] and I have this YouTube channel...
It's a bit too loud.
Take it down to about minus eight?
Let's try
[VIDEO SOUND:] and I have this YouTube channel but I’ve just created a few other new YouTube channels...
And then I want a clang there, so the ship bell.
[VIDEO SOUND:] I want them to appear like this as featured channels and I found it really difficult to find where...
And then another pop.
[VIDEO SOUND:] to my YouTube channel so I’m going
I need a couple of clicks I think, so let's put in a click here.
[VIDEO SOUND:] do link other YouTube channels to my YouTube channel so I’m going to walk you through the process.
I’ve got a nice shot of my channel page, it's a bit less frenetic.
I’m going to reuse the clips I had here.
[VIDEO SOUND:] rows of videos for your YouTube channel page. I kind of like to think of them as...
Obviously we don't to see that I’ve managed to get the channels - featured channels - so the scroll will end there.
I might slow it down a bit and I might crop in a bit as well.
So we just see the channel.
Let's try that and let's get a couple of sound effects on and have a little pop for it to appear.
[VIDEO SOUND:] and then you might be aware of this but this is where you can put rows of videos for your YouTube channel page.
Let's try that.
[VIDEO SOUND:] videos for your YouTube channel page because I kind of like to think of them as bookshelves it's not very intuitive but this is how you link a featured channel if we click on...
That... that'll do.
I’m done!
It's all finished so all I need to do now is export it and upload to YouTube.
Is this helping?
Is it helping to see how I edit my YouTube videos on Final Cut Pro?
If you're cutting on iMovie at the moment and thinking whether or not to step up, I... Agh, do it!
Do it if you can afford it.
It's insanely expensive but I find it a lot easier to manage video files in Final Cut Pro.
I’ve just realized I’ve got to... I’ve now got to edit this one!
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