Use Montage Maker in Final Cut Pro for iPad

Okay, picture the scene. You’ve just got back from a school trip. Maybe you’re on the coach or the train now, and you’ve taken loads of videos on your iPad of your students exploring the environment they’re in. You want to make a really short film to share with them on their learning platform, or perhaps put on the school website for parents to enjoy.

Well, you could go through every single clip you’ve taken, make a brand-new project and painstakingly edit everything together and put some music on. Or you could use this feature in Final Cut Pro that does all of that for you. I know which one I’d rather do. Let me show you how it works, because it’s really simple and the result is brilliant.

And before I do, if you’re new around here, then hi, I’m Jacob. I’m a former computing teacher and now a tech expert here on YouTube, to help you make the most of your devices, whether that’s at home or at school.

Okay, so I’m using the Final Cut Pro app on my iPad here, and if you’ve not used it before, don’t be scared. It’s like iMovie, but way better. We’re going to take a load of footage from a school trip that I’ve been on. Except I haven’t been on a school trip, and I’m not going to use students. So instead, there are a bunch of clips of me at Glastonbury a few years ago.

I’ve got these in the Photos app in an album, so in Final Cut Pro, I can simply go to Import Media at the top, find that album in my photo library and then select each of those videos. You’re going to notice in the top right-hand corner that I’ve now got those individual clips there in the browser. But right now, at the bottom, my timeline, where the video is going to be built, is completely empty.

Well, not for long, because we’re going to tap on Create Montage here. Final Cut Pro is then going to look at all the different clips in my library, and it’s going to create a short video for me using the best parts of each clip. Now, the initial result is probably going to be 80% of what you want. You can press play and watch it, but we can actually customise a ton of stuff here.

So, first of all, I want this video to be shorter. Right now, it’s about 30 seconds long, and that’s too long. So, at the bottom, on the new toolbar of options, we can go to Speed at the end, and we can make it faster. If you want to make it slower, you can do that as well. Now the time is about 18 seconds, and the next thing to do is to play it back and see how it looks.

That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good for a first go. The problem is, a lot of the clips are very similar colours, and I want to rearrange them. Well, I can do that by simply dragging and dropping to rearrange the order of those video clips. Final Cut is then going to automatically re-cut them to fit the music, which we’ll come to in a second. That means it’s going to look really good, whatever order the clips are in.

Now, I don’t want it to be a widescreen video. I want it to be more social-media-friendly in this case. So, I’m going to go to Aspect Ratio, and you can change it to square, to 4:3, whatever you want, even portrait if you’d like. I’ll go for 4:3.

And then you’re going to notice that my video clips have got black bars at the top and the bottom. That’s no good. So, I’ll go to Auto Crop and turn it on for videos as well. Now, Final Cut is going to re-analyse those clips and make them fill the screen, and it will make sure the key bits are shown on screen at all times. You’re not going to miss someone halfway off the screen.

There are loads more things that we can do here to customise how this looks. For example, we can tap on here and then choose the actual part of the video that’s being featured. So, on a ten-second video, you might choose the first three seconds, or these three seconds, whatever you like.

And we can choose the soundtrack as well. I’m going to go on to Music. I’m just going to choose one at random here, but obviously you’ll spend a bit more time doing this, I’d imagine. When you’ve chosen that soundtrack, it’s going to re-edit the whole project again for you. Every change you make, Final Cut’s editing it again, to make sure it looks the best it can be.

And then, when you’re finished, we can simply tap on here, and now it will be added to your timeline in Final Cut. You can see each clip, and you can see the music underneath. And now, what’s really good is, if I press play, those clips are going to move and change in time to the music. It’s going to put effects on there to make it feel energetic and exciting, or perhaps a bit slower-paced, and it’s going to create this montage for you, which you can then simply export and share however you need to.

That’s taken four minutes: your whole school trip recorded in one video, and you can share it before you even get back to class. And if you want to see what else Final Cut Pro can do to save you time as a teacher, and to be even more creative, I think you’re going to really enjoy this QuickTip next.