FCP X Tips 001 - Create custom zoom area effects for 4K content [9to5Mac]
**Using 4K Source Media in a 1080p Deliverable: A Deep Dive into Final Cut Pro 10**
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### Introduction to the Series and the Topic
Hello, everyone! This is Chef Benjamin with nine-to-five Mack. Over the years, I have talked about Final Cut Pro 10 a lot, but there’s never been a formal place for a regular, recurring series about it. Since many people often ask me questions about this software, I thought, "Why not?" I decided to create this series to cover tips, tricks, tutorials, hardware reviews, and anything related to Final Cut Pro or the editing room in general.
In this very first episode, we’ll dive into a topic that might seem a bit niche but is incredibly useful for many editors and creators: **using 4K source media and then using that in a 1080p deliverable**. The goal is to take advantage of the extra resolution from 4K media to enhance your storytelling, especially when it comes to tutorials.
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### Understanding the Benefits of Using 4K Media in a 1080p Project
To showcase this technique, I’ve created a 4K project with a 4K image as the background (3840x2160 UHD). On top of this, I added 1080p images. Here’s what happens:
- Adding one 1080p image takes up approximately 1/4 of the frame.
- Adding another 1080p image fills half the frame.
- Adding a third covers 3/4 of the frame.
- Finally, adding a fourth takes up the entire frame.
This demonstrates that **4K is four times the resolution of 1080p**, giving you more flexibility in post-production.
Next, I removed all the 1080p images and placed a single 1080p image in the center. By zooming in on this image, we saw that it could be zoomed in by **200%** while still maintaining HD quality because of the spatial conformity enabled in Final Cut Pro.
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### The Limitations of Native 1080p Media
To further highlight the benefits of using 4K media, I compared the two scenarios:
1. **Using a 4K clip on a 1080p timeline**:
- When zoomed in by 200%, the text remained sharp and clear because the extra resolution from the 4K source allowed for high-quality scaling.
2. **Using a native 1080p clip on a 1080p timeline**:
- Zooming in by 200% resulted in jagged, pixelated edges because there was no additional resolution to work with.
This comparison shows the significant advantage of using 4K media even if your final deliverable is in 1080p. It gives you more flexibility and allows you to maintain sharpness when zooming or panning around the frame.
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### Practical Application: Enhancing Tutorials with 4K Media
To demonstrate this concept further, I created a tutorial using Final Cut Pro. The goal was to highlight specific areas of the frame by zooming in on them:
- **Breaking down the frame**: I divided the frame into nine sections (upper left, upper middle, upper right, middle left, center, middle right, bottom left, and so on).
- **Creating custom effects**: For each section, I created a custom effect that zoomed in by 200% and positioned it accordingly. This allowed me to focus on specific areas of the frame during the tutorial.
For example:
- When highlighting the upper left corner, I cut to the corresponding section and used the custom effect to zoom in on that area.
- The same process was repeated for other sections like the upper right hand corner and the bottom left.
This technique is particularly useful for tutorials because it allows you to guide viewers’ attention to specific parts of the frame, even if they’re watching on a small screen.
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### How to Create Custom Effects in Final Cut Pro
If you want to replicate this technique in your own projects here’s how you can do it:
1. **Zooming in by 200%**:
- Select the clip you want to zoom in on.
- Use the spatial slider to adjust the zoom level until it reaches 200%.
2. **Adjusting the position**:
- Move the X and Y-axis sliders to position the zoomed-in section within the frame.
3. **Saving effects presets**:
- Save each custom effect as a preset in Final Cut Pro under a category like "Area" for easy access.
These steps will allow you to create similar effects for different sections of the frame, giving you the flexibility to focus on any part of the video during editing.
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### Conclusion
Using 4K source media in a 1080p deliverable is a game-changer for editors and creators looking to enhance their storytelling. By leveraging the extra resolution from 4K media, you can zoom in on specific areas without losing quality, making your tutorials and other projects more engaging.
If you found this video helpful, don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and leave your comments below. This is Chef Benjamin with nine-to-five Mack, and I’ll see you in the next episode of our Final Cut Pro 10 series!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhow's it going ladies and gentlemen boys and girls this is chef Benjamin with nine-to-five Mack over the years I have talked about Final Cut Pro 10 a lot right but there's never been sort of a formal place for a regular reoccurring series about Final Cut Pro 10 so I thought hey why not why not do something like that because a lot of people ask me questions about this all the time so with that in mind yeah we're gonna try to do a regular series about Final Cut Pro 10 and that's going to include tips tricks tutorials how to use Hardware reviews whatever the case may be if it has to do with Final Cut Pro or the editing room in general then you can expect it to be covered here so in this very first episode we're going to talk about something kind of kind of inside baseball sort of very particular but I think a lot of people can benefit from it and that is using 4k source media and then using that in a 1080p deliverable and then really taking advantage of the extra resolution that is derived from that 4k source media and using that to zoom around into different places around the video to help with context and help with your storytelling especially helpful for tutorials I found without further ado let's talk about using 4k media in a 1080p deliverable so to showcase this what I've done is I've created a 4k project and that 4k project has a 4k image in the background 3840 by 2160 UHD 4k then I'm going to add 1080p images on top of this 4k image and notice what happens as I add additional images in 1080p so what a play here you could see the background and get the UHD image in the background I add a 1080p image in the upper left hand corner it takes up approximately well exactly 1/4 of the frame right so when I add another 1080p image it takes up 1/2 the frame when I add another 3/4 and then it add another it takes up the full frame oops I almost deleted that it takes up the full frame all right so what does that tell us well it tells us that 4k is four times the amount of resolution or four times the area of 1080p now let's go on to the next test so we're gonna remove all the 1080p images and now we have our our 4k now I'm going to place a 1080p right smack in the middle and then I'm just going to zoom in and then I'm gonna stop once it fills the entire frame so zooming in zooming in zooming in we're at about a hundred and eighty percent when i zoom in some more and they'll we're stopped two hundred percent so basically what this tells us is that if we take a 1080p timeline we place a 4k image only at 1080p timeline we would be able to zoom in 200% while still maintaining full HD or 1080p quality now if you try to zoom in a 1080p native clip on a 1080p timeline 200 percent is not gonna look pretty it's gonna look pretty bad almost immediately because it's gonna be pixelated etc whereas if you take 1080 or if you take 4k source media on a 1080p project and you zoom in 200% it's gonna look virtually the same as 1080p because you know you have all that extra resolution and affords you the ability to zoom in perform foe pans things of that nature and take advantage of the extra resolution even if you're delivering at 1080p okay so to illustrate this we have a 1080p timeline and I have two types of clips on this timeline in 4k clip in a 1080 clip now I have spatial conformity enabled for these clips here so it will automatically is set to fit these clips on the project timeline and in the frame so what this basically means is that when I play both of these clips these first two clips the 4k you can see there in the 1080 you're not going to really be able to discern a difference between those two you could see how they look almost exactly the same because this is a 1080 frame and spatial conformity is making it so that they both fit in the frame perfectly now watch what happens though when we start to zoom in so but play again zoomed in this is the 4k zoomed into 200% now notice how sharp the text is everything looks really good this is the 4k clip zoomed in to 200% now watch what happens when we zoom in on that 1080p clip notice the difference there you can really see how the edges of the text are kind of jagged kind of out of focus just don't look nearly as good because we've zoomed in on a native 1080p clip whereas when we did the same thing here on the 4k because there's that much more resolution it can afford to zoom in 200% and look exactly like a 1080p clip it should look so when we do the same thing on a 1080p that obviously isn't going to look as good so really highlights the advantage of using 4k media even if you're delivering at 1080p and affords you a lot more flexibility in post you can do things like zooming like this to highlight various areas of your video so I know you're probably wondering Jeff where are you going with all this what is the purpose of all this well let me show you one quick example of something I set up here in our example project so this is a tutorial I did earlier last week for affinity photo and while it's nice and it will work perfectly fine just like this wouldn't it be nice if you could zoom into the various portions of the frames like in the upper left hand corner in this instance to better be able to see better highlight exactly what's going on especially if you're watching on a very small screen it would be so much more helpful to zoom into that area and help the the viewer be able to see what's going on the same thing happens over here when I tap in the upper right hand corner you see there would it be nice to be able to zoom into that particular corner to see exactly what's going on and that's exactly what I've done and that's really where 4k media presents some value when it comes to things like tutorials because you can actually zoom in without losing resolution and better highlight what you're demonstrating on the camera so what I've done is I've broken up the frame into basically nine different sections section one is in the upper left hand corner section two upper middle section three upper right and then you have section for a middle left section 5 dead center section 6 the middle right you get the point right section 7 bottom left and this allows us to quickly be able to edit a video and highlight these special portions of the frame where it would be helpful for the viewer so let me show you exactly how this works so let's go to a portion of the frame where we're highlighting perhaps a corner so you can see I'm hiding in the corner there so let me cut this and we're gonna cut here and want to select this portion of the clip and then I'm just gonna double click on one so that is able to zoom right into that particular section like that so let me play it back and you can see why that is so beneficial right and then it jumps right back to the full frame like that so the value of setting up these custom effects really becomes apparent and I've actually set up a special category called area for all these effects all 9 of these effects and basically what it's what we've done is we've zoomed in to 200% on all the effects and then we've just moved the X and y-axis depending on where we want to go in the frame so on the post over at 95 Mac I have all the coordinates set up but you can also download these particular effects and save them to your own project now this will only work with a 16 by 9 project with the coordinates that I have but you can of course configure this to any type of project so let's do a few more we're going to navigate through the timeline and alright so upper right hand corner there so we're gonna basically form a cut there and form a cut right about there so in this case we would select 3 right because it's in the third area as you can see according to the way I have this broken down so we're just gonna double click on 3 and you can even mouse over to verify if you double click on 3 and then we'll play it back and let's see what happens here all right so you can see how helpful that can be especially if you're on a smaller screen really helps to illustrate exactly what's going on in the tutorial so let's do one more scrub through here and find something else maybe we can get another area how about actually we use this to really kind of target the areas where I'm selecting here so so that's about bottom left would you say so bottom left and then maybe middle left middle so let's go ahead and select it bottom left and we'll go here and select left middle let's try that and play it and see what it that what it looks like so there we go bottom left yeah it looks pretty good so you can really see the value of that of course we could continue and really make it immersive and follow my my hand as I go through and select these different points on the frame so let me show you how to go in and create one of these different area selections so you can do it yourself on your own computer if you don't want to download my presets which I will upload so you guys can do that if you want to again this is for a sixteen by nine project but let's go ahead and just go here I've cut that out so we're going to zoom in two hundred percent two hundred and then we're going to use our slider here and we know that's gonna be 960 so just select that 960 and then we're going to move the y-axis like that and that will be negative 540 so that would be in this case number one so all I would do is select save effects preset and then I would create a new category I've created one called area and basically give it a name in this case it would have been one but I've already created that obviously but just to show you guys how you would go about creating all nine of the area selections you can do that so I've just put in one and then save it so ladies and gentlemen that is a showcase of one of the benefits of using 4k source media in a 1080p deliverable if you appreciate this please leave me a thumbs up and let me know what you think down below in the comments this is Jeff with nine-to-five Mackhow's it going ladies and gentlemen boys and girls this is chef Benjamin with nine-to-five Mack over the years I have talked about Final Cut Pro 10 a lot right but there's never been sort of a formal place for a regular reoccurring series about Final Cut Pro 10 so I thought hey why not why not do something like that because a lot of people ask me questions about this all the time so with that in mind yeah we're gonna try to do a regular series about Final Cut Pro 10 and that's going to include tips tricks tutorials how to use Hardware reviews whatever the case may be if it has to do with Final Cut Pro or the editing room in general then you can expect it to be covered here so in this very first episode we're going to talk about something kind of kind of inside baseball sort of very particular but I think a lot of people can benefit from it and that is using 4k source media and then using that in a 1080p deliverable and then really taking advantage of the extra resolution that is derived from that 4k source media and using that to zoom around into different places around the video to help with context and help with your storytelling especially helpful for tutorials I found without further ado let's talk about using 4k media in a 1080p deliverable so to showcase this what I've done is I've created a 4k project and that 4k project has a 4k image in the background 3840 by 2160 UHD 4k then I'm going to add 1080p images on top of this 4k image and notice what happens as I add additional images in 1080p so what a play here you could see the background and get the UHD image in the background I add a 1080p image in the upper left hand corner it takes up approximately well exactly 1/4 of the frame right so when I add another 1080p image it takes up 1/2 the frame when I add another 3/4 and then it add another it takes up the full frame oops I almost deleted that it takes up the full frame all right so what does that tell us well it tells us that 4k is four times the amount of resolution or four times the area of 1080p now let's go on to the next test so we're gonna remove all the 1080p images and now we have our our 4k now I'm going to place a 1080p right smack in the middle and then I'm just going to zoom in and then I'm gonna stop once it fills the entire frame so zooming in zooming in zooming in we're at about a hundred and eighty percent when i zoom in some more and they'll we're stopped two hundred percent so basically what this tells us is that if we take a 1080p timeline we place a 4k image only at 1080p timeline we would be able to zoom in 200% while still maintaining full HD or 1080p quality now if you try to zoom in a 1080p native clip on a 1080p timeline 200 percent is not gonna look pretty it's gonna look pretty bad almost immediately because it's gonna be pixelated etc whereas if you take 1080 or if you take 4k source media on a 1080p project and you zoom in 200% it's gonna look virtually the same as 1080p because you know you have all that extra resolution and affords you the ability to zoom in perform foe pans things of that nature and take advantage of the extra resolution even if you're delivering at 1080p okay so to illustrate this we have a 1080p timeline and I have two types of clips on this timeline in 4k clip in a 1080 clip now I have spatial conformity enabled for these clips here so it will automatically is set to fit these clips on the project timeline and in the frame so what this basically means is that when I play both of these clips these first two clips the 4k you can see there in the 1080 you're not going to really be able to discern a difference between those two you could see how they look almost exactly the same because this is a 1080 frame and spatial conformity is making it so that they both fit in the frame perfectly now watch what happens though when we start to zoom in so but play again zoomed in this is the 4k zoomed into 200% now notice how sharp the text is everything looks really good this is the 4k clip zoomed in to 200% now watch what happens when we zoom in on that 1080p clip notice the difference there you can really see how the edges of the text are kind of jagged kind of out of focus just don't look nearly as good because we've zoomed in on a native 1080p clip whereas when we did the same thing here on the 4k because there's that much more resolution it can afford to zoom in 200% and look exactly like a 1080p clip it should look so when we do the same thing on a 1080p that obviously isn't going to look as good so really highlights the advantage of using 4k media even if you're delivering at 1080p and affords you a lot more flexibility in post you can do things like zooming like this to highlight various areas of your video so I know you're probably wondering Jeff where are you going with all this what is the purpose of all this well let me show you one quick example of something I set up here in our example project so this is a tutorial I did earlier last week for affinity photo and while it's nice and it will work perfectly fine just like this wouldn't it be nice if you could zoom into the various portions of the frames like in the upper left hand corner in this instance to better be able to see better highlight exactly what's going on especially if you're watching on a very small screen it would be so much more helpful to zoom into that area and help the the viewer be able to see what's going on the same thing happens over here when I tap in the upper right hand corner you see there would it be nice to be able to zoom into that particular corner to see exactly what's going on and that's exactly what I've done and that's really where 4k media presents some value when it comes to things like tutorials because you can actually zoom in without losing resolution and better highlight what you're demonstrating on the camera so what I've done is I've broken up the frame into basically nine different sections section one is in the upper left hand corner section two upper middle section three upper right and then you have section for a middle left section 5 dead center section 6 the middle right you get the point right section 7 bottom left and this allows us to quickly be able to edit a video and highlight these special portions of the frame where it would be helpful for the viewer so let me show you exactly how this works so let's go to a portion of the frame where we're highlighting perhaps a corner so you can see I'm hiding in the corner there so let me cut this and we're gonna cut here and want to select this portion of the clip and then I'm just gonna double click on one so that is able to zoom right into that particular section like that so let me play it back and you can see why that is so beneficial right and then it jumps right back to the full frame like that so the value of setting up these custom effects really becomes apparent and I've actually set up a special category called area for all these effects all 9 of these effects and basically what it's what we've done is we've zoomed in to 200% on all the effects and then we've just moved the X and y-axis depending on where we want to go in the frame so on the post over at 95 Mac I have all the coordinates set up but you can also download these particular effects and save them to your own project now this will only work with a 16 by 9 project with the coordinates that I have but you can of course configure this to any type of project so let's do a few more we're going to navigate through the timeline and alright so upper right hand corner there so we're gonna basically form a cut there and form a cut right about there so in this case we would select 3 right because it's in the third area as you can see according to the way I have this broken down so we're just gonna double click on 3 and you can even mouse over to verify if you double click on 3 and then we'll play it back and let's see what happens here all right so you can see how helpful that can be especially if you're on a smaller screen really helps to illustrate exactly what's going on in the tutorial so let's do one more scrub through here and find something else maybe we can get another area how about actually we use this to really kind of target the areas where I'm selecting here so so that's about bottom left would you say so bottom left and then maybe middle left middle so let's go ahead and select it bottom left and we'll go here and select left middle let's try that and play it and see what it that what it looks like so there we go bottom left yeah it looks pretty good so you can really see the value of that of course we could continue and really make it immersive and follow my my hand as I go through and select these different points on the frame so let me show you how to go in and create one of these different area selections so you can do it yourself on your own computer if you don't want to download my presets which I will upload so you guys can do that if you want to again this is for a sixteen by nine project but let's go ahead and just go here I've cut that out so we're going to zoom in two hundred percent two hundred and then we're going to use our slider here and we know that's gonna be 960 so just select that 960 and then we're going to move the y-axis like that and that will be negative 540 so that would be in this case number one so all I would do is select save effects preset and then I would create a new category I've created one called area and basically give it a name in this case it would have been one but I've already created that obviously but just to show you guys how you would go about creating all nine of the area selections you can do that so I've just put in one and then save it so ladies and gentlemen that is a showcase of one of the benefits of using 4k source media in a 1080p deliverable if you appreciate this please leave me a thumbs up and let me know what you think down below in the comments this is Jeff with nine-to-five Mack\n"