One of the most common questions that people have when starting out with Final Cut Pro is how to adjust the speed of a clip. Final Cut Pro makes it easy by allowing you to create slow motion, fast motion, and reverse effects from one simple menu. You can adjust constant speed and variable speed, in this tutorial we will focus on Constant Speed. Lets check it out.
Fast Motion
For all of the speed effects that we are talking about in this tutorial you will open the speed menu. To do this, select the clip that you wish to edit and press Command+J on your keyboard or go to the menu bar and click Modify > Speed. Once this menu is open you are presented with a few option, we will be looking at Duration and Speed primarily.
You can adjust your clip by duration if you are trying to speed up the clip so that it will take up less time. For example, if you have a 40 second clip and you only want it to be 10 seconds, simply type that into the duration box and the speed will be adjusted accordingly. Simliarily, if you want the clip to be twice as fast, you could type in 200 percent in the speed box and the duration would be adjusted accordingly.
At the bottom of the dialogue box you will notice the option to turn Frame Blending on or off. Put simply frame blending helps to smooth the motion of a speed adjusted clip. It is turned on by default and I usually will keep it on. It is more relevant when dealing with slow motion.
Slow Motion
Slow motion is accomplished in much the same way as fast motion. Select your clip and open the speed menu as described above. The only difference is that instead of decreasing the duration or increasing the speed percentage, you will do the opposite. Taking a 10 second clip and changing the duration to 5 seconds will cut the speed in half. You will achieve the same effect if you change the speed percentage from 100 to 50.
To achieve slow motion Final Cut Pro will duplicate frames of your footage so that it takes longer to play. Because of this, using frame blending can greatly help to smooth out the slow motion so you don’t get jerky playback. However, I have found that in certain instances, frame blending can give your motion an unnatural look. If you are making a clip slow motion and the results don’t seem quite right, try and turn frame blending off.
Reverse
Reversing a clip is as simple as clicking the Reverse checkbox in the Speed dialogue box. It might seem a little too easy, but that is really all you have to do.
A Few Notes
After you apply these speed effects, you might look at your footage and scream “This looks like crap! The Final Cut Professional is a hack!”. Before you get upset, you need to realize that you will not achieve the beautiful Matrix or Clockwork Orange style slow motion in Final Cut Pro. In order to achieve that, your footage must be shot at a higher frame rate than it is played back at. Check out the video example to see what I am talking about.
If you are working with someone who is used to using film, they may ask you to play your footage back at different speeds in terms of frame rate. For example “Let me see that clip at 40 frames per second.” Since Final Cut Pro thinks in terms of percentages, you need to do a little math to figure this out. You simply take the original frame rate (ex. 24fps) and divide it by the desired frame rate (24/40) and you take the resulting number (.60) as a percentage (60%) and plug that into the speed dialogue box.
Lastly, if you are looking to achieve the ‘normal motion into fast motion’ effect Final Cut Pro calls it Time Remapping. This is one of the only features of Final Cut that I think really needs work as it is not very user friendly. I will cover this in a later post, but I recommend checking out Apple’s Motion if you need more complicated speed effects.
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