Dive Into Your Imagination

This week I will quickly cover the pen tool. Final Cut is not a drawing program, so what on earth does it need a pen tool for? Well believe it or not, the pen tool is going to be your best friend when you deal with keyframes and audio. Yes, you will be able to raise and lower levels with ease. This kind of tool is often useful for perfecting the harmony between narration and music.

To begin with, I should mention that if you are familiar with any Adobe product, the pen tool is not really a pen tool. It doesn't draw anything, which many have argued should at least draw masks like FCP's sister program MOTION does. It does however have a subset of pen tools for adding and deleting keyframes, but these aren't really so useful. Who knows, in the future Apple might expand the pen tool to actually draw things. Anyways, let's start the tutorial.

Before using the pen tool you will have to reveal the levels for the timeline. To do this click the TOGGLE CLIP OVERLAYS button in the lower left corner of the timeline or push ALT/OPTION "W". You should see a thin black line appear in the video and a pink one appear in the audio. Now get the pen! It's easy to access, you can either click the tool icon, or push "P". You can also hover over a timeline with the arrow tool and push ALT/OPTION key. Click on the thin black line in the video timeline. A black dot will appear. This is a keyframe! But it doesn't do anything unless there is another keyframe to break from. So put another one down and then drag that one up or down. The distance between these points determines how fast the changes happen. Also notice a little yellow square with a number scrolling in it, this is the numerical opacity, or volume. Which means, you make your footage fade in or out. You can see in the above video how I used keyframes to alter opacity and audio levels.

If you want to fine tune your points hold the COMMAND key as you drag, you will see how slow the keyframe moves so you can zero in on your levels. To remove keyframes you don't have to select the subtract keyframe, just select the point and drag it off the timeline. If you right click a point you can SMOOTH it which will make the adjustments smoother. You should see some little handles appear out of the point, drag these up or down to adjust the velocity of the changes. Hold COMMAND and drag to break the handles if you must.

Like always, experiment with these tools just so you know what it is capable of doing, I'm sure you'll find a use for it soon.

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