Final touches (letterbox)

We’ve made it to step to the editing process the final stage.

This is where I do the last minute things such as at a letterbox effect if I decide that the contents appropriate for that I’ll add any annotations.

I’ll do any final colour grading and final checking to make sure that I haven’t left any of the best clips on the cutting room floor.

I always said to find one clip that I really when I try to squeeze in there somehow.

And eventually I’ll sleep on it for a night.

Once I finish the whole thing always and then not publish it or distribute it in the morning depending on what I’m actually doing with the project.

So let’s first of all start and look quickly at the letter box idea to the letter box is of course where you put an effect on it and it will put a black line across the top and the bottom of the production.

And this is particularly useful for when you’ve got lots of geographical dramatics in your overall production.

Doesn’t work so well when it’s full of flight dramatics that needs to look more TV like and less cinema like.

But if you want to put a letterbox in you can put the effect in from Final Cut Pro X itself.

If you go into the all section and type letter box then it’s got a letterbox effect and you would drag that in and apply it to an individual clip and it would put.

For us the black lines here we would then need to change in settings for that letterbox effect.

And this can be quite useful to use the built in one but it’s not my favourite So it would select the appropriate effect something like that.

Part of the problem is it’s limited on how much offset it can do so it can offset like this where it can basically move the image behind it up or down but it doesn’t allow you to move it the full way that you would you should be able to access more of that image than just that bit there.

So though this is a quick way to put the letterbox effect in I prefer to actually do it this way instead where Instead I will insert an image.

Is effectively a pinky image has a transparent image that will have black lines across the top on the bottom that will block out part of the video below.

Here’s one I have here and then I’ll drag it straight in.

And once that image is actually in place I will then zoom in hoarding zipped down Z on here so I can get in nice and close to that image.

Soon as I get hold of an edge of that image I can and start to drag it all the way out and then I’ll zoom out by holding the Z and the old key and that zooms out for me so I can start see more of everything.

And now I’ll click on a how drag that letterbox image across the whole width of the production.

You take a little bit of time for the computer to process applying that image of crossed the top of all of the video.

But what I can also do I’ve got a much more finer control as to how wide those lines are.

So what I do is I select the letterbox image itself and I can to scale it in or out in that way.

That’s a very effective way of bringing it out particularly beyond the initial With that it is.

With that in place I’d like to have the normal full sized letterbox I might have just some hint of the black lines.

He can still see a little bit more of the image once that’s actually in place because this is just an image and I’m not using the letterbox effect that’s built into Final Cut Pro X. I can move the image my video behind it in a much more thorough way so to do that I select the clip that I want to move on.

I then go to transform and I click on that blue box there.

And this allows me to shift my image up a little bit or down a little bit and you could see if this

was the letterbox effect that was built into final approach.

I would stop about there that’s all I could get which actually I want to go all the way up to the edge of my image because I want to see more of this and less of the green.

So this is the stage where they apply the letterbox effect.

It’s quite lengthy process because once you’ve actually put the image in place you need to go along to every single clip and reposition it.

If you don’t like where it actually sits it’s you could go off and check each one and shift them all up or down it will take a huge man of time.

It is something you need to do.

It’s worth doing at the end not earlier on because otherwise every single little change that you make to any of the clips in the computer will reprocesses how it applies the letterbox picture over the top of them so it slows down all of your editing so it definitely needs to be done at the end.