How to Save in Final Cut Pro

In case you didn’t know, you can’t save in Final Cut Pro. That’s right, you can’t save your work but don’t worry, it won’t get lost. In this video, I’ll show you how Final Cut Pro automatically saves and how to use backups so you never lose important work. Stick around till the end and I’ll show you how to save your video with the best settings. 

The magic of Final Cut Pro is that it saves all the changes you make as soon as they’re done, so there’s never a need to manually save them. That means you won’t see a save option under the File Menu like you see in other programs. I’ll trim this clip, add a transition, delete this clip and change the text in this title. These changes have already been saved. I’ll quit by going to the Final Cut Pro menu and selecting Quit Final Cut Pro or even quicker, pressing Command + Q. I’ll reopen Final Cut and lookie lookie, the changes I made are still there. 

If something goes wrong with your project or you made a mistake, just press Command-Z to undo or choose Edit and then Undo. You can undo all of your changes up to the last time you quit and re-opened Final Cut Pro. That means as long as Final Cut is still open, I can undo my changes but as soon as I quit it, I lose that undo history.

Final Cut Pro makes automatic library backups every 15 minutes while you’re working on a project. If you lose your undo history, you can restore a backup. Keep in mind that backups only include the database part of libraries and they don’t include media files like videos and pictures. Library backups are also automatically deleted after several days.

Step 1 to restore a backup is select the library you want to restore.

Step 2, go to File, Open Library and click on From Backup.

Step 3, pick your backup from the Restore From pop up menu and then click Open. The backup is added as a new library and is labeled with the date and time the backup was made. Now you can go to your event and project before everything went wrong!

Are you feeling more confident in Final Cut Pro? Has this video been helpful so far? If so, give it a like. Thanks!

Final Cut Pro saves the backups in the Final Cut Pro Backups folder found in the Movies folder. Backups are labeled with the time and date in the filename. This one was just saved a few minutes ago. You can also open a backup library by double clicking it. You can change where your backups are saved. Select your library and in the Library Inspector click on Modify Settings and under the Backups pop-up menu click Choose. Find the new place you want to save your backups and then click Choose then OK.

You can save video effects and video effect parameter settings as a preset and then use it over and over again like a normal effect or share it with another editor. Let’s say I want to reuse this combination of Teal & Orange and Vignette effect. Instead of applying the effects to my clips and changing them, I can save them as an effect preset. After making changes, click on Save Effects Preset at the bottom of the Video Inspector. Name your preset and select where you want to store your new preset. Select the video effects you want to include in the preset. In this case, I’ll keep Teal & Orange and Vignette checked and click Save. Now click on the category where you saved it and drag and drop your effect preset onto another clip. Look at that!

When you’re done editing and ready to save or share your video, click on the Share button in the upper right corner and select your share destination. For sharing online, set Format to Web Hosting, Video Codec to Better Quality, click Next, select where you want to save your exported video and click on Save. 

Now that you know how to save in Final Cut Pro you may want to check out this video my buddy Reggie made called How to Create a New Project in Final Cut Pro. Click here to check it out.