3. FINAL CUT PRO: WORKING WITH SPEED CHANGES, RETIMING, AND BLADE SPEED EDITS [4:33 min]
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What You'll Need: Final Cut Pro
TRANSCRIPT
Hi, I’m Aubrey Mozino from We Make Movies.
Speeding up or slowing down clips is a very common technique in editing. Both for visual impact and sometimes to make footage fit with dialog, music or other elements.
So how do you make speed changes in Final Cut Pro X?
There’s a variety of ways to do this, but let’s start with the easiest way that you can do right from the timeline.
First, zoom in a bit by pressing cmd-+ so that the clip you’d like to retime is prominent.
Next either select the clip or by hover over it and press the C key. Press cmd-R to open up the retime menu on the clip. Now, you can quickly adjust the speed of the whole clip by dragging out or in on the top edge of the speed bar on the upper right edge of the clip.
The speed percentage of the clip will automatically adjust as you move the clip out and in. Note that the color changes to blue when the clip is sped up and to orange when it’s slowed down.
You can also quickly change the speed from this view by selecting the down facing carrot in the center of the speed bar and either selecting a slow speed, a fast speed or by entering in a custom speed through the custom menu.
From the custom menu, you can have the clip play forwards or reverse, or set the speed through either custom rate or duration. You can specify whether the speed change will ripple (that is the clip will duration will change on the timeline) or not (the clip’s duration will remain the same)/ For now, we’ll set it to a custom slow speed of 57%, or about half speed.
You can also affect the speed of the clip through the Retime menu underneath the view. It’s the icon that kind of looks like a clock.
Click it and you’ll see a variety of options, many of which match what you just saw through the retime menu on the clip. There are some advanced options here as well that you can play with like Speed ramp, Instant replay, and Rewind.
You can also set the video quality of your retime effect to normal, frame blending, or optical flow… for the highest quality select optical flow, but also expect some longer render times when you use that option.
The option we’ll go with now, though, is blade speed. Position the playhead or the skimmer over the clip we retimed earlier and press shift-B.
See that in the timeline a little blade edit has appeared on the speed bar of the clip. Lets go later in the clip and add an additional blade speed edit by pressing shift-B again. Now, grab that speed edge and drag out and in to see how the speed in the middle of the clip is affected, but the speed at the beginning of the clip and at the end of the clip is staying the same.
Lets speed up the middle of the clip here, and then lets grab the edge at the end and slow it down. Now let’s grab the first edge and slow that down as well. Play the clip back by pressing the up arrow and pressing the space bar to watch the speed effect we made. If we don’t like this and we want to get rid of the blade speed edges and reset all the speed changes, make sure the clip is selected, go to the retime menu, and select reset speed, or option-cmd R.
There are countless ways you can play with speed effects in Final Cut Pro X, go experiment with all the tools and see what you like and how they can improve the look and feel of your video.