I recently finished an exciting project I’ve been working on for quite some time. The whole video is made up of stock video clips. However, this particular project was edited as it was designed, meaning, we didn’t have a set script to follow ahead of time.

It was a work in progress most of the time. We knew the basic story and emotions we wanted to convey; it was just a matter of finding clips and putting them together to convey that message. So as I searched the clips, the site I found, Pond 5 (affiliate link), allows you to download a low res version of the clips you want. So along the way I downloaded about 30-40 clips that I worked with until I had the final video as I wanted. It ended up being 21 clips, including sound effects and music, that I then purchased.

Seeing as I wasn’t just looking for specific clips to place in a video, being able to use draft clips to create my project then replace them with the high res ones, enabled me to fluidly create my project, getting a pretty good feel for what it would look like, then purchasing just the clips I needed without having to buy clips I won’t need, or changed my mind on. Of course the video clips are much lower quality and have a watermark on them, and the sound effects and music have an audio watermark, but for design and creation purposes, it didn’t matter. Even my client didn’t mind.

This video shows how I replaced all those draft clips with the HD ones without having to, in essence, re-edit the entire video. It’s pretty much cut and paste.

One Thought to “Replacing a Clip in Final Cut Pro”

  1. Sweet function! I just got my first Mac! Very excited, but haven’t done any video on it yet.

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