MacMost Now 604: Cutaways in Final Cut Pro X

In Final Cut Pro X you can switch back and forth between videos using a variety of methods. The video can shift from one viewpoint to another while the audio stays constant. Learn about mixing multiple video tracks and going back and forth between them.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today's episode let's learn how to do cutaways in Final Cut Pro.
Now, by cutaway I mean kinda the same effect as the cutaway effect in iMovie. Having two streams of video be able to cut between each one of them while keeping the audio constant.
So lets create a simple project by simply dragging a clip in here and expand the timeline a bit, so we have something to work with. Now say I want a cutaway to second video, I'll add that here right above it. And you can see it appears as an attached timeline. And it cuts from one to the other, and then back again. Now that's pretty simple, but lets say I want to actually have it cut back and forth several times.
So I wanna take chunk out of here basically, and have it go back to the main video and then return to this video here.
So lets change the tool were using, and go to the range selection tool. I'm going to select a range here and I'm going to cut it out so it actually goes back to this main video. I hit the delete key, I get a nice gap there and I can see how if I skim over the video I go from the remaining timeline, to the secondary one, back to the main, back to the secondary one, back to the main. 
Now if I go back to the select tool, I can select both of these and then drag them together, keeping the space between them perfect. Another thing I can to is Control-click on them and select create story line. And this locks them together in kinda a secondary story line that can be moved about.
Let's go back to this and say that I actually want to have a transition between these. That's one of the problems you're going to this, its just too hard of a transition into it. Now I can go into the animation here and then scroll down a bit and see that one of the bits of animation that I can add is the opacity of the clip. So I can make it fade in and out. You can see it doing that. That's kinda handy, but I want to add a regular transition, like I'm showing here on the right, then I can't really do that.
So let me close the animation here, I'll show you another way. One of the things I can do is take these, and move them onto the main timeline. So when I'm sure this is exactly how I want the clips to be, I hit control, and overwrite to main story line. And see how it drops those in there.
So the video now is identical to what I had before, but it's really implanted there, in my timeline. And I can now drop transitions in between. I still can adjust where there's a transition or even where there isn't a transition. I can go into the position editor and double click here on the gap, and I can still work with exactly where one clip ends and the other clip begins, while holding both in perfect time.
I can do that here with the transition as well, by dragging the point of the transition. So there's a lot that you can do once you have these put together. Now its important before I do this overwrite transition. Let me undo all the way back to it. That I would detach the audio here. So there's no audio track for this particular example but If I were to detach the audio and create a separate audio track so as these are now brought in, overwriting the primary story line, I still end up with a coherent audio track that is locked to the entire thing. I could remove the audio from this one here, or these two, if I didn't want those to be heard at all.
Now go back to having just a single extra track up here. Suppose I actually wanted to do something a little different and use the video animation here. We're looking at controlling the opacity of this, so here's a blend in and a blend out. So I can see it blending in and out.
Well I can add key frames to this. I got this one key frame here and this key here. I can use option-k, it's under the modify menu here, but it's much easier to use the keyboard command. And I can add four key frames here so I'm going to option-k, option-k, option-k, option-k. And them I'm going to drag these two points here down, and this one up.
So now what happens is that it fades in and fades out. You see the primary story line show through, and then fades in again. So you can actually use the animation with the opacity of the secondary clip here, to do cutaways just as well.
So there are several different methods for doing cutaways, multiple cutaways. By
using different tracks in final cut pro. The key is understanding how the audios working. So detaching the audio from the main clip and then silencing the audio from the other ones, either by detaching and deleting them, or by lowering the volume all the way.
And If your doing an overwrite, you can actually have the sound overlapping as well so you can kinda play with that and get the exact effect you want.
Hope you found this useful! Till next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 604: Cutaways in Final Cut Pro X”

RedneckBob

13 years ago

When I hit the delete key to remove the clip that was selected with the "range" tool, it collapses the empty space.

How can I get it to leave the gap?

Gary Rosenzweig

Control+click on the clip and you'll see a variety of options. One of which is "replace with gap."

xample

12 years ago

replace with gap cannot be undone in my case. Very boring when you expected to just to delete a keyframe and the whole media is gone…

Ron

Hi body,first I like all those explanations you have on Facebook. That's very great specially for me who have learned alot from those video's. The question I have for you is why Final cut pro x take so much space when it's rendering? is there any way I can eliminate automatic render? or save it?

It makes sense that it would use a lot of disk scratch space when rendering. I don't think you want to not have it render in the background. I would simply invest in some more hard drive space since it is so cheap now.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 604: Cutaways in Final Cut Pro X

Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 604: Cutaways in Final Cut Pro X”

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