Quite a “bloggy” title to this post, I know, but I’ve been thinking about these techniques that I do over and over in Final Cut Pro that I think add to better video editing.



Use Motion Blur
Adding Motion blur to anything you animate adds a touch of realism that can make your animation go from stale to sweet immediately- especially in coordination with the next tip . . .

It can add some render time, but it’s worth it. Though the default settings leave a little to be desired– “% Blur” defaults to 500 . . . that’s a lot! I have better results with a value between 50 and 100. “Sample” defaults to 4, which is a lower quality setting (for lack of a better term). As you raise this setting, the motion blur will smooth itself out. I’d imagine raising the Samples value raises your render time, but you’ve got time for quality, right?

Great tip: Move the playhead in the middle of your animation and make these adjustments to your liking, you’ll see the motion blur update in the canvas with each adjustment.

Easy Does It
If you’re animating a parameter, especially motion, try right-clicking and choosing “Ease In/Out”. This will change the animation speed from linear (start, constant speed, stop) to a logarithmic (start, get up to speed, slow down, stop). This adds a much more natural look to anything you animate: Scale, Rotation, Position, Opacity, even specific filter parameters. This works just fine in its default setting, but you’ll notice a Bezier handle for further fine tuning.

Any keyframe point you’ve made can be right-clicked and this command can be chosen. Choose “Corner” to set it back to a linear animation. In Motion and After Effects there are more powerful presets for your Keyframes: Ease Out, Ease In, Easy Ease, etc.

Coordination
I still always try to make sure my X and Y coordinates for position are even, whole numbers. This is something I do to make sure everything is ready for broadcast television (NTSC) specification, as it reduces flicker, artifacting, and general weirdness. Additionally, it’s a good idea to stay inside your Broadcast Safe zones.

Color Correction
I’m amazed how many Final Cut Pro editors are out there that know very little about color correction. The 3-Way Color Corrector built into FCP is a great way to start down the road of correcting video footage. No video clip has perfect lighting, color, black & white levels, white balance, etc. Start by learning about the video scopes built into Final Cut and simply make sure your clip has proper white balance (using the handy dandy little dropper tool on something white), black levels (try to get a little bit hitting the bottom zero-mark in the Waveform Monitor), and make sure your colors are within spec (no color shoots outside of its specific target in the Vectorscope).

For more advanced color correction, try Colorista or Looks, or jump right into Apple Color.

Use the Tools in the Suite
Ok, sort of a cheat here, but if you’re only using Final Cut Pro, you’re only utilizing a small portion of your investment in this powerful video post-production suite.

Try flying your sequences audio out to Soundtrack Pro for compression, leveling, and sweetening.

Try sending your clips to Color for final color correction. Color is not as hard as it looks to learn, and once you’ve figured it out, it’s an incredibly fast and powerful color correction suite.

Try digging through all the content in Motion’s library — you’ll be amazed at what you find that will kick start some creative new graphics production.

Livetype might seem a little Mickey Mouse for serious motion graphics designers, but it gets the job done. Quickly.

Learn how to encode beautiful videos in Compressor (if it’s working properly), by encoding right off the Final Cut Pro timeline and by using its advanced Frame Controls for resizing.

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So those are a few of my secret tricks. Leave some of your own in the comments below!

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