Using Fades in Final Cut Pro X

Welcome to Final Cut Pro X in Under 5 minutes. I’m Steve Martin from RippleTraining.com. In this episode, I’m going to show you one of my favorite time saving tricks of all-time. If you have a stack of video layers or graphics and you need them to all fade out or fade in at once, you can use a single generator to accomplish this. Let me show you how, it’s awesome! Here’s a stack of graphics that make up an end title. As I skim over it, you can see it’s a text build and we want to fade out all of those text graphics at once. Now you could select each individual clips end point and press Command T to add a dissolve at the end of each graphic. But as you see, this can be quite time consuming and if you have alot of layers, say more than I have here, this could be quite tedious. I’ll go ahead and undo those last three steps. There’s a much better way and I call it “One Fade to Rule Them All” and it involves using a solid generator. Let’s set up a three-point edit. My playhead is already parked at the end of the timeline and before you create the fade, you need to decide how long you want to make the fade. In this case, I’ve decided that I want a 12 frame fade out, half a second. With the playhead already parked at the end of the timeline, I’m going to tap minus 12 enter. That will move the playhead back exactly 12 frames, I’m going to set an end point by pressing I. Notice the out point is already set at the end of the project. So you can better see what’s going on, I’m going to zoom in by pressing Command + a few times. Now we have our in and out point. We simply need to open the generators browser, locate a solid and press Q to connect the solid at the top of the graphic stack, honoring the in and out points we set. Notice as I skim over the graphic and I get to the graphic, when I get to the generator, it cuts to black. Select the generator and press Control V, then open the opacity parameter by double clicking on the bar at the lower part of the animation editor. Here you have fade handles at either side of the generator. We want the generator to fade in so grabbing the fade handle, I’m going to drag all the way over to the right. As you can see from this graphic, the fade starts and 0 and ends at 100 or 100% black. Notice as I scrub the playhead over the generator, this clip has a master fade layer for all the layers below it. As I said “One Fade to Rule Them All”. You can also do this in reverse. We’ll go ahead and close the animation editor, make sure the generator is selected, then press Command C to copy. I’ll press my home key, jump my playhead to the beginning of the timeline and I’ll press Command V to paste that generator. I’ll open the animation editor by pressing Control V, double clicking on the opacity bar, and then I will reverse the fade direction and this time I’ll do a fade in. And now we are using the same generator as a master fade in layer. Click the subscribe button below, if you have an idea, comment or suggestions, leave those below as well. Go to RippleTraining.com for fast professional training on Final Cut Pro X, Motion, DaVinci Resolve from industry professionals.