Navigating Apple Final Cut Pro's Speed Options, Part 1

Figure 1. The narration is too long for the captured screencam.

Speed changes are one of the most commonly used effects, and Apple Final Cut Pro has multiple interfaces and tools to speed up or slow down your footage. This month, I'll take a task-specific view of Final Cut's speed-related tools, so you can match the best tool for the job. In the first installment, I'll look at the two simplest alternatives: the Timeline Speed tool and the Change Speed tool. Next time I'll discuss keyframing on the timeline and working in the Motion Tab.

Figure 2. You can use the Speed tool to stretch or shrink your footage to fit the necessary duration.

I do a lot of screencam production in Final Cut Pro, so I couldn't live without this first tool. The typical problem is shown in Figure 1; I have more audio than I need for the captured screencam. What I need to do is stretch the screencam by slowing it down so that it fits the duration of the audio.

To do so, I choose the Speed tool from the Tool palette, as shown in Figure 2, or simply click sss to select it.

Figure 3. Stretching the screencam video to fit the audio.

Then I click the edge of the video I'm resizing, and drag it left or right to make it shorter or longer. I'm showing that in Figure 3, though the pointer will look like the Speed Tool itself, not the pointer shown in the screen capture.

Figure 4. The video clip's duration now matches the audio; it's a lot easier to use the Speed tool than to guess the rate necessary for the video to fit the audio.

Figure 4 shows the adjusted video, with the video duration now matching the audio duration. I've also opened the Change Speed tool which we'll discuss next.

The rate of the clip is now 76 percent, and I could have matched the video duration to audio duration by opening the Change Speed tool and entering 76 percent. Unless you're a math whiz, however, this would involve lots of trial and error. My general rule is that if you're matching the duration of another object on the timeline, use the Speed tool, otherwise, use Change Speed.

You can also use the Speed tool like the Roll tool, where you adjust the edit point between two clips. Rather than changing the in and out points of the clips, however, the Speed tool will change the speed of the two clips. This is useful when you want to move the transition point between the clips while continuing to show all frames from both clips.

Figure 5. Let's slow clip MVI 9334.mov to 50 percent speed.

The next scenario is probably the most common: I have some footage that I'd like to speed up or slow down. In this example, it's clip MVI_9334.mov, which is already on the timeline, nestled between clips MVI_9331.mov and MVI_9335.mov. For the purposes of this example, I've toggled on clip keyframes (via the control indicated by the red arrow in the lower left) to reveal the keyframe graph area. As you'll see, this view will help you understand what's happening with the speed controls that I'll be using.

Figure 6. Final Cut Pro's Change Speed control.

To adjust the speed of the clip, right-click the clip and choose Change Speed, opening the control shown in Figure 6. As shown, you can control the speed by specifying a duration, or rate. Rates less than 100 percent slow the clip down, and rates greater than 100 percent speed it up. You can also click the Reverse checkbox to make your clip play backwards.

Let's quickly review the other controls.

The Start and End buttons control how the speed change is ramped in and out. You have four options, as follows:

Figure 7. A linear speed change, with no ramp in speed.

• Linear, which means no transition at all. The clip starts at the adjusted speed and ends at the adjusted speed. This is the approach shown in Figure 7. To explain, the distance between the ticks in the keyframe graph area show the relative speed; the ticks are twice as far from each other in the MVI_9335.mov clip because we've slowed the speed by 50 percent. As you can see, there is no ramp; the 50 percent speed change starts immediately and lasts until the next clip. Note that this is not the option we choose in Figure 6; we chose the next one.

Figure 8. A Linear to End speed change, with a 60-frame ramp.

Beyond the transition options, you can also check the Ripple Sequence checkbox, which will shorten or extend the length of the clip that you're editing and ripple that edit through the content located after the affected clip. Before, if you were slowing a clip down, Final Cut Pro didn't ripple the edit through, maintaining the overall duration of the clip but deleting content from the end.

If that's what you wanted, that was OK, but most of the time, I had to manually push back all content subsequent to the clip, slow it down, then delete the gap. The new Ripple Sequence checkbox saves those extra keystrokes.

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The Frame Blending checkbox uses the eponymous technique to smooth the motion effect, particularly for slow motion. I typically enable this in all instances in which I'm slowing down footage shot at normal speed. If I shot at 60p to slow the footage in editing, I wouldn't apply Frame Blending, because it can create some tweening artifacts. Preview carefully whenever you use this filter to make sure that the cure (potential for artifacts) isn't worse than the disease (jerky slow motion).

The Scale Attributes checkbox scales all time-based attributes, such as markers and keyframed effects. For example, say you had a marker 2 seconds into a 4-second clip. When you slow down the clip to 8 seconds, checking the Scale Attributes checkbox moves the marker to the 4-second point. If you don't check Scale Attributes, the marker would stay at 2 seconds.

Finally, the Remove Speed button removes all speed effects and returns the clip to normal. As always, click OK to apply the effect and Cancel to cancel.

By adding the transition controls and Ripple Sequence checkbox, Apple made the Change Speed control much more useful and usable. It should suffice for most productions. However, all it really does is take you from 100 percent speed to your target speed and then, if desired, back to 100 percent. What happens when you want to vary the playback speed over the duration of the clip?

Well, that, dear reader, is a horse of an entirely different color. Check back in two weeks for the rest of the story.