Hey, it’s your pal Quick Tip King here, giving you the best tips on saving time and cutting corners.

In this Final Cut Pro tutorial we’ll be looking at how to quickly and precisely change the duration of a clip or multiple clips.

First select the clip or clips that you want to change the duration of.

Click on one clip, hold down command and click on multiple clips, or drag an area to select multiple clips.

Next press Control + D on your keyboard.

Doing this changes your timecode to blue and changes the icon to that fun new blue one.  This is where you can type in a new duration.  You will notice that as you type the numbers change in an odd way.  Try typing in “60” and depending on your timeline a different setting will appear.  If you have a 60p timeline the timecode will change to 1 sec and 00 frames.   What FCP is doing is simplifying your inputted numbers.  Since there are 60 frames in a second it is updating the setting to 1 second.

Type “600” and the timecode will change to 6 seconds and 00 frames.

Type in the new duration and hit enter.

If you click anywhere it will clear out any numbers that you hit or you can simply hit “esc” to clear out any unwanted changes.

Quick Tip!

Try changing the duration of multiple clips when you have a project that is mostly photos and you need to fit it to the length of a song.  Select all of the clips and change all of their durations until you get them to fit perfectly with the song.

Bonus Quick Tip!

You can also use this trick to change the duration of transitions.  With this tool you can change the duration of your transitions with precision!  But be careful that when you are selecting a clip or multiple clips that you are not selecting the transitions as well!

Hey,  this trick saved me a bunch of time!

You know how you need to take a section of audio down a notch or out completely?

You’ve probably manually set keyframes by using the arrow tool and holding down option and clicking on the timeline to set four distinct points.  And then dragged the middle section down.

Would you be pumped if I told you there was an easier way?

Well, let me pump you up!

First press R on your keyboard to choose the Range Selector Tool

It’s that barely used tool that is actually pretty dang useful!  Good guy, that range selector.

Next select the section of audio that you want lowered, raised, or eliminated

You can also do this by setting the in and out points on your project timeline.  (You press “i” on your keyboard at the beginning of the desired area and “o” when you are at the end of your desired area of the clip)  Use whichever method you find to be faster, because as you guys know, I’m all about speeding up your editing time.

Now drag the audio bar down (or up if you want)

And voilà you have four audio keyframes automatically added to your timeline!

What are you going to do with all of the seconds that you are going to save?  Make me a cake?  You shouldn’t have!