Bright White Background Generator

Easily add a new color generator to Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro has a lot of cool generators for some basic functionality. One of the categories is Solids where you can insert a blank color, useful for text background or something.

Right out of the box there are six colors: Custom, Grey Scale, iMovie, Pastel, Vivid and White.

Seven Shades of White

When you add the White color, in the inspector you'll see that there are seven options: Antique White, Beige, Bright White, Cream, Ivory, Mint, and Smokey.

Smokey is the default.

What if you wanted Bright White to be the default? Wouldn't it be great to always have Bright White available?

Make Any Color Solids

If you have Motion installed, you can easily make your own color the default. Here are the simple steps:

• Right click on the White and select "Open a Copy in Motion"
• In Motion, Click on the Inspector tab.
• Under Projects, select "Bright White"
• Under the File Menu, select "Save As..."
• I would recommend calling it "Bright White"

Highlighting steps in Motion.

Remove "White Copy"

So when you right-click to "open a Copy in Motion," Final Cut Pro automatically creates a copy of the file and places it in the Generator folder. Here's how to remove that file.

• Quit Final Cut Pro.
• Navigate to the Motion Template Folder: {{Home Directory}} / Movies / Motion Templates / Generators / Solids
• Delete the folder labeled "Whites Copy"
• Open up Final Cut Pro and Navigate to the Solids in the Generator category.

You'll see that only the "Bright White" and the rest of the preinstalled generated files remain.

Here's what my solids section looks like today.

Other Colors

This is a good time to install other frequently used colors, such as company colors. I would recommend spending a few minutes now adding your own so you'll save time later when your working on the next big project.

RenderFrameAt Error

Fixing the dreaded RenderFrameAt Error

Have you ever gotten the following error when exporting a movie?

The Share operation "Apple Devices 1080p: " Name.m4v" has failed.

Error: RenderFrameAt returned: 4 for absolute frame: 50362

I recently got this error and had to figure out why it was happening to me. I first went to the frame that was causing the issue. In order to do that I had to change the Time Display to show the frame count instead of the time.

Change the Time Display to Frame Count

It's pretty easy to change the Time display, the clock under the preview window, to show the Frame count. Here are the steps:

1. Open up Final Cut Pro Preferences. (Use Command Comma as the keyboard shortcut.)
2. Click on the pull down menu next to the Time Display
3. Select Frames
4. Close the Preferences dialog box

I then navigated the timeline to the 50,362 frames. I found that the video frame and audio were empty.

What Happened?

I created a Compound clip from two GoPro clips. Apparently, there wasn???t a 100% connection and that caused the error.

I removed that part of the clip.

Then I tried to export the file again and this time I was successful.

Lesson Learned

I need to figure out the best way to join GoPro clips. Especially when the clips are automatically split because of file size.

White Balance

Quick Tips on setting your own White Balance.

White Balance is very importaint to maintain a quality video production. This is one way to keep colors the same between clips and cameras.

The key thing about dealing with White Balance is to adjust at the end of a project and not during the project. This is because the White Balance will add additional render time every time you make some alteration to the clip - including adding transitions.

Remember the best white balance set up is before production, not at the editing room. Make sure to learn how to set up the white balance on your camera. For most situations, the auto setting should be fine, but there may be times where you may need to make the adjustment before shooting.

Manually Adding White Balance

Here are the steps to adjust any clip to use the Final Cut Pro White Balance:

1. Select the Clip
2. Click on Balance Color:
   1. Located under the Preview, click on the "magic wand" and select "Balance Color."
   2. Under the "Modify Menu" select "Balance Color"
   3. Use the keyboard shortcut: Option Command B
3. In the clip Inspector, go to the Video Inspector (First Icon)
4. Under Balance Color, you should see the Method is "Automatic." Click on Automatic and select "White Balance"
5. Now in the Preview window, click on the area that should be white.

Not The Right Color?

After applying the Balance Color, you can use the Color Wheels to fix the color to what you think works best for your project.

Looping Audio

How to Loop Audio in Final Cut Pro

Last week I talked about using audio clips from iMovie. This week I wanted to use the "Playful.M4A" clip for the duration of the video that I was working.

This means that I had to figure out how to convert a 1-minute clip into 10 minutes. Unfortunately, there is no "loop" feature in Final Cut Pro.

Basically to loop this audio clip, you need to copy and paste it X number of times until you get the duration that you want. The problem with the "Playful" audio is that it fades in the last 2 seconds.

Five Things I Learned

The reason why I want to do this outside of Final Cut Pro was that I could create a new Audio file so I can reuse this in the future.

I looked into using ffmpeg, and someone had a solution over on StackExchange, but it was a lot more work for the simple task.

Apples' Garageband wasn't very friendly. I couldn't clip the final 2 seconds. I tried using Rogue Amoeba's Fission, but I couldn't get the copy clip to paste at the end of the clip.

Audacity was the clear winner.

The best program that I found to clip and duplicate the audio is Audiacity. It was very easy to clip the final 2 seconds and then copy/paste the clip over and over.

I only needed 7-minutes, but I ended up creating a 10-minute audio file. This way I don't have to do this in the future.

Other Audio Clips

If your looking for alternative audio clips, similar to the Playful clip check out Fiver. A few years ago I purchased a couple of good audio collections that is useful for background music.

Chan Redfield - For $5 I was able to get 17 royalty free clips. Awesome deal now that he is selling some of the songs on an album for $28.

BasicPro - For $5 I was able to get 24 royalty free clips. Today Basic Productions is selling some of the individual songs on EnvatoMarket.

Getting iMovie Sound to Final Cut Pro

Bring some classic iMovie Sounds to Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro has a great collection of music and sound effects. The Final Cut Pro supplemental pack includes over 1300 royalty-free sound effects you can access from the Photos and Audio sidebar right in Final Cut Pro.

Even with all those sound effects and music, I still like the music from iMovie. I especially like Playful sound. It's great when you need a filler sound for when you doing a collage of video clips.

Seven Sounds of iMovie

These are the sounds that are available in iMovie:

Bright.M4A, Modern.M4A, Neon.M4A, News.M4A, Playful.M4A, Simple2.M4A, Travel.M4A

Lets Use them!

Turns out you can "mix rip burn" the sound from iMovie - if you still have it installed on your computer. You can import these into Final Cut Pro for all your fun projects

Note the location of these files.

Getting the Audio

You can't use Spotlight search to find the "Playful.m4a" audio file. It's actually buried in the iMovie application. Here are the steps to find the audio include in iMove as the "iMovie Theme Music"

• Go to the Applications folder and locate the iMovie applicaiton
• Right click on the application and select "Show Package Contents"
• Click on the "Contents" Folder
• Click on the "Resources" Folder
• Click on the "iMovie Theme Music" Folder
• You should now see seven audio files.

You should drag and drop a copy of these files into another location. One option would be the Music application, so you can go under the Photos and Audio sidebar and use these files.

Just remember to copy the files, you don't want to lose the files in the original location!

Apple Music Tip

These audio clips don't have any metadata so when you are in Final Cut Pro it makes it hard to search for the clips that you got from iMove.

In Music, I selected the seven sounds, right-click, and selected "Get Info." I then added some metadata so that that it's easy to search:

All I have to do is search for "imovie" and the sounds show up!

Apple Licence

Here's the legal info about using the media files in iMovie and if you're allowed to move them to other applications:

Crop 4k to 1080p in the Timeline

Simple technique to crop 4k so the video looks good in 1080p

So the advantage of taking footage at 4K is that you have more flexibility when you convert the video to 1080p format.?? You can now crop the video so that the scene fits to your production.

This is particularly useful when you use a GoPro camera and you want to focus on a particular part of the video - such as a stage or a landmark.

Crop to 1080p

When you crop a clip make sure the Scale value is at 100%

Fun Facts

4k Image is 3840 by 2160, which is twice as big as the standard HD format of 1920 by 1080 - otherwise known as 1080p.

When you crop a video you want to make sure that the scale is at 100%. (As seen above.) This shows that you have a correct proportional crop.

If possible crop the video before putting in the timeline, this way it doesn???t downsample the video to 1080p and then crop it.

You can crop it to 100% at any place in the video - it doesn???t need to be exactly in the center.

Split Screen

Created My Own Split Screen Template

Check out this video that I put together. It???s a side by side comparison of the GoPro 7 and the GoPro 9.

This was done using my own template thanks to Motion and Final Cut Pro.

How This Was Done

Final Cut Pro doesn???t come with any templates or effects to split-screen. I had a choice to go out and buy one or design my own using Apple Motion.

If you want to purchase a Screen Splitter effect, check out Screen Splitter 2 by FCPeffects: Final Cut Pro Plugins.

I decided to venture on my own - using some knowledge that I learned from watching some Udemy classes. Such as the Going Further With Apple Motion 5 class.

I created the design in Apple Motion and then imported it into Final Cut Pro.

Started in Apple Motion

The first thing I had to figure out was the layout. How can I properly display two videos side by side?

I figured that making the image at 48% of the original size was a good way to have them side by side with a border between the videos. The videos would be 941 x 529.

I added the top graphics and bottom text so the viewer knew what video was what.

I added the screenshot of the videos for layout purposes and converted the image to drop zones.

The video is 2-minutes long which seems a long time as there isn???t much going on in the videos. There is a way to be flexible on the duration. I just forgot about it.

Total time to get this up and running was about 20-mins.

Getting To Final Cut Pro

Once I was satisfied of the template was in good order. I had to convert the project to the Title Generator section. This is done by going under the File menu and selecting "Convert Project To" and then selected Generator.

I then gave it a name and a new location in the Generator section.

Ready to Go!

Now whenever I want to compare videos for the GoPro, I just use the template in the Generator section. Its ready to go.

The only change I would make is to fix the duration so that I can make it longer if needed.

Best Final Cut Pro Blog Post

My Collection of the Best Final Cut Pro blog post of 2020

I learned a lot of cool things with Final Cut Pro. Here are 7 Blog post that I think are working checking again:

Best Final Cut Pro Posts

Logic Pro Effects in Final Cut Pro??- (December 15) Description of each Logic Audio Effect in Final Cut Pro

Blade Tool Tricks??- (November 24) Learn how to quickly cut multiple tracks

Transparent Background in PowerPoint??- (October 20) How to make the background in Powerpoint transparent for Final Cut Pro. You can then use the Powerpoint movie in any Final Cut Pro project.

Trim Start and End??- (October 13) Cool Shortcut to quickly cut out a clip from a certain point.

Adding Favorites Folders to Import??- (September 15) Add your favorite folder to the Import dialog sidebar. This makes it easy to navigate to common folders.

Slow Motion Video??- (September 8) Using the iPhone Slo-Mo videos in Final Cut Projects

Getting Live Photos??- (August 18) How to get the Movies from Live Photos taken with the iPhone.

Color Wheel

Color Wheel is an easy way to color correct a video clip

You can change easily the color of a clip by using the Color Wheel option. The color wheel helps you adjust the clip's brightness and saturation levels on each side of the four-color wheels. You get an instant live preview of the adjustment.

Five Thing I have Learned

The color wheel really helps me balance two different cameras that I use to film a church service. The cameras don???t exactly have the same white balance effect.

I find it easier to balance the colors of similar clips using the color wheel instead of the ???Balance Color??? feature.

There are controls on the bottom of the color wheels section that allows you to adjust for Temperature, Tint, Hue, and Mix. I really haven???t played around with these.

Usually the Master and Shadows are the only wheels I have to control. My shooting is inside and the lighting doesn???t change that much.

Using the colors wheels really help make using two cameras so much better. People really can???t tell that there are two different cameras being used.

Finding the Color Wheel

The color wheel section is located in the Color Inspector of the selected clip. Simply put the playhead on the clip that you want to be adjusted and type in Command 6.

Click on the ???No Corrections??? popup menu and select ???+Color Wheel???

Start playing around with various settings to see what works best for your situation.

Logic Pro Effects in Final Cut Pro

Description of each Logic Effect in Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro includes several Logic Effect tools. These tools help improve the audio in your Final Cut projects.

Which audio effect works best for you depends on your audio needs. It might be tricky to figure out which effect does what.

Logic Pro Effects Tools

Here's a description of each Logic Effects functionality from Apple.com.

Adaptive Limiter - This is a versatile tool for controlling the perceived loudness of sounds. It works by rounding and smoothing peaks in the signal, producing an effect similar to an analog amplifier being driven hard. Like an amplifier, it can slightly color the sound of the signal.

Compressor - This emulates the sound and response of several professional-level compressors. It tightens up your audio by reducing sounds that exceed a certain threshold level, smoothing out the dynamics, and increasing the overall volume - the perceived loudness.

Enveloper - This is an unusual processor that lets you shape the attack and release phases of a signal - the signal transients, in other words.

Expander - This is similar in concept to a compressor, but increases, rather than reduces, the dynamic range above the threshold level.

Gain - Gain amplifies (or reduces) the signal by a specific decibel amount.

Limiter - This reduces any peak above the threshold to the threshold level, effectively limiting the signal to this level.

Multichannel Gain - Multichannel Gain allows you to independently control the gain and phase of each channel in a surrounding mix.

Multipressor - Multipressor (an abbreviation for multiband compressor) is a versatile audio mastering tool. It splits the incoming signal into different frequency bands- up to four -and enables independent compression of each band. After compression is applied, the bands are combined into a single output signal.

Noise Gate - This is used to suppress unwanted noise that is audible when the audio signal is at a low level. This effectively removes lower-level parts of the signal, while allowing the desired parts of the audio to pass.

Spectral Gate - This is used as a tool for creative tool design.

Surround Compressor - This is specifically designed for compression of complete surround mixes. It is commonly inserted in a surround output channel strip or in audio or aux channel strips -busses- that carry multichannel audio.