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24h hours to learn Final Cut Pro X after using Premier Pro for 10 years! // Will I switch? 🤔
I recently challenged myself to learn Final Cut Pro X in 24h after using Adobe Premier Pro for more than 10 years. The results are shocking! But will it be enough for me to switch?
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- Edit your first video https://youtu.be/2-GDwy4Y-gg
- 10 truths about starting on YouTube https://youtu.be/ialdZd6sQLA
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#finalcutprox #learnfast #premierepro
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Intro
00:33 - My gear
00:45 - My first tip to learn any software fast
01:01 - Step 1: Creating the first project
01:54 - Second tip to learn a software fast
03:01 - Step 2: Add the clip to the timeline
05:02 - The most annoying part: syncing audio
06:54 - Progress up to now
07:19 - Step 3: Audio
08:59 - Step 4: Color correction
10:32 - Step 5: Titles & transitions (worse part?)
11:38 - Step 6: Exporting the video
12:43 - Comparison: Final Cut Pro vs Premiere Pro
16:13 - Will I switch to Final Cut Pro?
17:15 - Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
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- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo https://geni.us/dji-pocket-2-combo
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- Canon 6D Mk https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-70-200
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD https://geni.us/vanguard-veo-265cb
- DJI MAVIC AIR https://geni.us/lba-dji-mavic-air
🌍 MY PERSONAL WEBSITE 🌍
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:33 My gear
- 0:45 My first tip to learn any software fast
- 1:01 Step 1: Creating the first project
- 1:54 Second tip to learn a software fast
- 3:01 Step 2: Add the clip to the timeline
- 5:02 The most annoying part: syncing audio
- 6:54 Progress up to now
- 7:19 Step 3: Audio
- 8:59 Step 4: Color correction
- 10:32 Step 5: Titles & transitions (worse part?)
- 11:38 Step 6: Exporting the video
- 12:43 Comparison: Final Cut Pro vs Premiere Pro
- 16:13 Will I switch to Final Cut Pro?
- 17:15 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
good morning everyone there's already a million videos on how to switch to final cut pro so i don't want this to be the focus of my video instead i gave myself 24 hours to create a video from a2z and i want to teach you how you can learn as fast some software too for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahalford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art i just installed final cut pro 4 days ago so you're really gonna get my first thought about this software i'm also using my 2016 macbook pro the base model so it's really not a high performance machine which means it can be much more real-world experience than other people that are using the m1 macbook right now my first tip to learn any software might seem kind of obvious but it's actually just to use the software right away instead of trying to learn everything there is about it so whenever i see a lot of people is actually to go online and try and learn everything there is about the software before even using it so let's get started right away so we're going to open final cut pro here as you can see there's 86 days left to my trial so let's click ok and create our new project so we're going to come here click new project okay so one pretty important thing i see right here is that we're going to want to select on the side right here leave files in place i don't want to be creating proxies because that's the main goal of this video is actually to see if the performance is good without creating proxies first okay so now we have our footage here and we're able to scrub through it this is in the most hard footage it's actually mostly 1080p so i expect it to be nice but let's come here let's go on dji mavic air let's see how this plays so if you come here start playing this clip oops it does seem to lag a little bit but once it start playing if i pause it play it does seem to be playing dji footage pretty well right here okay so the next thing i'm gonna do is actually one that might seem a little bit weird for some people but it's actually gonna be clicking through all the options there is inside of the software and this might seem weird as a technique to learn a software really fast but it's a really great thing because once you click through all the menu options click through all the preferences you actually know if you can change something or not once you arrive and you want to do it so you see like right now i don't understand everything so there's things here like connect to primary storyline i don't really know what is a storyline for them so there's still things i'm gonna have to learn through other projects but for now i don't really stress that i don't know what they mean because they're not useful at least for now for me okay yeah so that's something i heard inside of most videos that you use a lot of keywords inside of final cut pro to organize the content so that's something i'm going to have to learn definitely before using it more i'm very curious to understand like the different options here so here i guess this is going to be to reframe a clip then we have options here about color so we seem to have options to balance the color and also match the color so this is again definitely something i'm going to test out when i'm going to be color grading because if i can match colors between clips automatically that's going to be a huge time saver you might think it's a little bit weird i went through all these options without even adding a clip first on the timeline but i think that growing for all these options actually gives me a really good idea where everything is located in the software so now i'm ready to start putting clips inside of the timeline i just finished placing everything on my timeline i came back inside because it was one degree celsius outside so it's freezing when filming the intro of this video the next thing we're going to look at is actually the performance and it's incredible how fast it is so if i just scrub through the content here you can see there's no lag at all and i'm really not used to this because instead of primary prayer there's always a little bit of light the next thing i really like inside of final cut pro is actually the waveforms that we can have here when proving the content so for this you have to go into the little option right here then select waveform and you can toggle them on and off this is super powerful because if we take a clip like the one right here we can actually see that i started the first time did an error start a second time so i can quickly visually see that inside of the waveform i don't have to listen to the full clip to be able to set my in and out points another little neat feature that i found is actually these little bars at the bottom here that tell us which portion of the video is being used inside our timeline and i realized apple's called this a storyline not a timeline not sure why they use this term but whatever if you come inside a view here you go in browser you can enable use media range so you can enable or disable this and this is really great to easily be able to see which parts of your clip is being used one of the best features up to now that i found inside of final cut pro is actually being able to select multiple clips here and then have the option to modify them all at once inside of our property panel so if i want to move it around i can actually visually do it here and just select this tool right here and click on shift and move around my clip like this and keeping everything perfectly aligned so this is a really cool feature and the fact that i can visually move things around really makes it easy to use and to make changes for the content here let's talk about one thing that annoys me and it's how we can sync the audio so if we drag and drop the clip here where i'm talking and then go find my clip of my overly of my phone and drag and drop it on top here instead of premiere pro it's really easy to sync these two you can simply select both of them do a right click and then sync them and i saw a sync option inside of the menu here so i thought that i could simply select both clips then go inside of our clip menu here and click on synchronize clips so that's actually not possible but up to now what i found is that i need to find the first clip inside of here select it then find my second clip now i can right click and click on synchronize clips this is going to create a compound clip and i want to make sure that i didn't disable the audio component for this i click ok then we're going to see that if we open this up to now sync here so now we're going to take this drag and drop the compound clip and now we have both videos but if i wanted them to be separated i can actually use a command shortcut command shift g to ungroup i guess and now we have both of these clips so the problem is that they're not in the good order so that really took me some time and probably took like 30 minutes to figure it out um so i wasn't sure what to do in this case we're gonna take this clip bring it down under our main clip then we can take this clip do option command and bring it up so this can lift it up we're gonna actually override to primary story time and now we have the clips on the good order but you see it was a lot of steps to get there and this is something i do really frequently synchronizing the audio of multiple clips uh so i don't know if it's really worth using the automatic synchronizing option or if i'm just gonna try and do it visually like i could just by zooming in but that's definitely something that would be really nice if you could simply select two clips on the timeline and synchronize them afterwards so it's now about 2pm so i'm gonna take a break to eat my lunch and also go and take a nice walk because it's pretty nice day outside i also realize i forgot to film some b-roll footage for this video so i'm going to finish filming that so i'm going to put a pause on the timer so we have about three hours in up to now of editing and we're going to come back a bit later to add the music start adding some graphics and finally do the color correction for this video now let's talk about audio because i think these are very strong points of premiere pro because with just a few sliders you can repair your audio but there's two functionalities i really like inside of it the first one is a one click button to auto normalize your audio and the second one is auto docking so you can just dock your audio so when you're talking diminish the volume automatically so i was really scared of changing to other programs because it didn't seem to have as much of these functionalities so if we come inside of final cut pro right here um so actually for the normalization i didn't really find how to do it i know there's some plugins that exist so maybe i'm gonna have to buy a plug-in to do it automatically but for this video was a big problem because i use the same camera all along so i have pretty much the same levels for my voice when i'm talking throughout the video so this wasn't a big problem and for uh audio docking there's actually something that i found a few days ago uh when watching another video that's actually why i decided to install final cut because i realized i was going to be able to fix this so if we come here and we have some b-roll right here but if we come here and we select the range tool so we go in our tools here and select range it's also the keyboard shortcut r and then just select the range right here of our b row i'm going to zoom in so we can see a little bit more what i'm doing now just go on the audio here we can actually bring it back up just for this point so we're gonna go around minus 20 db minus 20 so now we have a nice fit and you saw that the automatically added some key points to fit it up and down when we play it so this is actually really cool that with just that you can actually fade your audio and it's pretty easy actually to fix it right away let's talk about color correction inside of final cut pro it's definitely not a strongest point but i think that's good enough for me at least for now one really big problem i had is that didn't have adjustment layers by default so i went online and did a little google search and i found on motionary a free plugin we can use to add some adjustment layers which are a must when you're color grading multiple clips at the same time so you can just drag and drop this plugin right here and then just resize it and look how cool it is when you resize this and that just all the clips automatically just jump one layer above like that's definitely not something that's possible in premiere pro we just overwrite everything here they just automatically uh go up so this is really cool so then if you click on our adjustment layer and we go on our color correction tab so if we come here it's actually right here it's actually a very basic color correction options so the first thing we're going to do is come inside of exposure and bring up our mid tones bring it down a little bit the blacks just tried a little bit more contrast because we removed some when we bought it back up and just bring down the highlights so this is looking already better maybe just bring up a little bit more the mid tones i think now there's missing a little bit saturation so we can just come here and saturation bring up the saturation and if we want it's a little bit too cold to my taste so i'm just going to bring the mid-tones a little bit towards the yellows and that's pretty much it uh that's pretty much all the options you have for color grading so it's pretty limited uh but it works well enough for me and if i want to have more options because i definitely want to learn more about color correction but for that i'm going to have to buy the plug-in which is cinegrade so that's gonna be a much better plugin to learn how to do color grade but at least for now it's decent enough to get the job done now i want to talk about the worst part of final cut pro and this is by far the titles and the transitions so they just look like if they were coming directly from imovie so i'm pretty sure like some have here are actually titles from um imovie which is just really weird the good news is that there's actually a few free plugins so you can come here from linofx they have a simple title pack that actually looks pretty good and these are 100 free so i definitely recommend getting these to get more professional titles inside of your videos if you're using final cut pro but i actually decided to go and buy the m bundle vlogger from motion vfx it's pretty expensive but i think it's gonna be worth the investment because they have so many good things for final cut pro that i'm ready to pay to use it because i'm producing videos every single week so if i can have things that just saves me time and i can just drag and drop some titles uh some other effects and things like that for my youtube videos just gonna be 100 worth it okay so the moon i have been winning since this morning has finally arrived so we're gonna go on our export option right here we're gonna export master file we're just gonna check your settings here so we have computer x 4k that seems to be all good save only as an option so i just started recording here here wait a second so we're gonna click on next we're gonna select where we're saving it and it's started so i'm gonna start my timer here and we're gonna open up the export dialogue [Music] and it took only 8 minutes 48 seconds that's incredible just to give you a comparison usually exporting about a 10 minute video inside of premiere pro takes about an hour to an hour and a half in normal time so this is incredible how fast this is this means if i make an error or something like that i'm gonna have the time to re-export the file and change it afterwards okay so now before ending the video i want to do a quick comparison between final cut pro and premiere pro and let you know if i'm going to be switching or not so the first thing we're going to talk about is performance and it's incredible how fast final cut pro is i didn't expect it to be this good i heard everybody saying that it was really good but really didn't expect it to be this good at this point the fact that i had to not create proxies at all was a huge benefit here because proxies inside of premiere pro might take two to three hours to create at the beginning so this really slows down my process but here i just bought everything and was able to edit everything even when adding color grading or things like that it was no problem at all the second thing is the export time which is just incredible in final cut pro time is money so that's a huge increase for me and very something beneficial then there's a one problem with final cut pro and it's the space efficiency so i'm using my projects on my disk for premiere are around 5 to 10 gigabytes maximum including all the proxy files but here the cache file went over 60 gigabyte which was just a crazy amount of space and i don't have a lot of space on this computer so this is definitely a downside of using final cut pro the next thing is the built-in functionality so here i think premiere pro is probably much better because you don't have to buy any plugins or anything like that pretty much everything is already built in so that's really great if you just want to have one option and have everything built in but both of them have very good support for plugins and both have really nice vibrant ecosystems for plug-ins so if you want to add plugins for one or the other it's not a problem at all then we have the audio tools so i think the other tools are definitely better inside of premiere pro but they were not as bad as i thought inside of final cut pro so it's definitely not going to be a problem if i want to switch over now the next thing is color grading and the options inside of final cut pro are very basic but i think they're good enough for me at least for now and instead of problem pro you can definitely go more advanced and have much more options but i didn't use most of the most advanced options anyway so it's not a big difference in the end for me another pretty important thing for me is customizability so that's a huge advantage inside of premiere pro because you can really customize everything as you wish but i didn't miss as much the fact that i couldn't customize and everything inside of final cut pro because i think the ui is really well done and one advantage here is actually that when you switch between the different options for the ui so if you hide your effects if you hide your timeline and things like that it's actually instant so it's not a problem at all toggling on and off these things to get more space on your screen uh so i'm going to give points to both of them because that's really annoying inside of permanent print when you click a tab to switch spaces it actually always bugs out and sometimes it just crashes so that's just so annoying the last thing is actually ease of use and i think that final cut pro is much easier to use so it took no time for me to understand how to use it and create a video inside of it and if we actually look at it here so i have my screen time and i passed five hours 25 minutes inside of final cut pro which might seem a lot but it's actually not that bad when you consider that i edited a three hour video the other day and it took about three hours and 15 minutes which is pretty similar because i had to learn a whole new software so only two hours more to learn a whole new software really isn't bad at all so that just proves how easy it is to use and how quick you can actually learn to use it now the big question is am i going to switch to final cut pro and i actually think that it might be a yes i'm actually going to be using it for my next few it is just to really see if i still like it as much as i do today but everything overall inside of the program was just way more performant than adobe premiere pro and the fact that i'm paying 75 dollars per month for adobe premiere pro and that it crashed five times the other day when i was editing a video it's just unacceptable so even though i really like premiere pro for the last few years and i don't really like the fact that final cut pro only works on mac computers i think that it's time to make a switch because i passed so much time every week editing videos that if i don't have a software that allows me to go quickly and really move fast that's a problem for me and it's just a bottleneck in my process so for that reason and the performance of final cut pro and the ease of use and just overall experience that was really fun using i'm gonna say that probably that's gonna become my new editor of choice if you enjoyed this video please let me know by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing to the channel for more content on photography and filmmaking if you have any questions on final cut pro or if you would like me to make more tutorials about it definitely let me know in the comments down below see you in the next one bye you
Video Links
- Edit your first video
- 10 truths about starting on YouTube
- Zhiyun Smooth Q3 Gimbal
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- TikTok
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
I decided to challenge myself: learn Final Cut Pro from scratch in 24 hours and edit a full video start-to-finish, all while comparing it to the 10 years I've spent in Adobe Premiere Pro. This isn't another typical switch-to-FCP video—instead, I'm sharing the learning techniques that actually work and whether this software is worth abandoning what I know.
The results surprised me. Here's what I learned: my first tip for picking up any software fast is to use it immediately rather than memorizing every menu option beforehand. Start a project, click through the menus to see what's possible, then dive in. I did exactly that, and within hours I had a working editing workflow.
The performance difference is honestly shocking. On my 2016 MacBook Pro base model (not even an M1), Final Cut Pro handled 1080p footage without needing proxy files—something Premiere Pro would force me to create, eating up 2-3 hours upfront. Scrubbing through the timeline felt instant. When I exported a finished video, it took just 8 minutes and 48 seconds. With Premiere Pro, that same export typically runs 60 to 90 minutes.
That said, Final Cut Pro isn't perfect. Audio syncing took me longer than expected—there's no simple "select two clips and sync" option like in Premiere. The color grading tools are basic, though functional. The built-in titles look dated (reminiscent of iMovie), so I ended up buying third-party plugins. And the cache files ballooned to 60GB, which is a real problem on my limited storage.
What impressed me most? The ease of use. The interface is intuitive, and compound clips handle multi-layer work elegantly. I spent only five hours and 25 minutes total in the software while learning it—barely two extra hours compared to my normal editing time. The waveforms are excellent for precise audio editing, and I can visually move clips around the timeline without fighting keyboard shortcuts.
After this challenge, I'm genuinely considering making the switch. The performance gains alone matter when you're editing weekly. Yes, Final Cut Pro is Mac-only, and yes, you'll need to budget for plugins. But the speed, the stability, and the overall experience feel worth it compared to Premiere Pro's crashes and sluggishness. I'm going to test it on my next few projects to be sure, but I think this might actually be my new editor of choice.