That's the question we tackle on this week's episode of MacBreak Studio.
I start by showing Steve Martin from Ripple Training a simple storyline of clips, where I want to audio portions to overlap, yet I want to retain straight cuts on the video. Accomplishing this takes more steps than it should in my opinion: you need to expand the audio and video first (you can do it for all the clips by selecting them and pressing Control-S); then at each edit point you need to extend the audio for each clip to create the overlap, and then you drag the fade handles to fade out of one clip and into the next. At each edit point, that's two trim operations and two fade adjustments. Multiply that by a large number of clips in timeline, and although you have a great deal of control over the handle length, fade length, and even the type of fade, it's a laborious process.
But there is a much faster way to accomplish the same thing, and all it takes is a little Motion. So little Motion in fact, that anyone can do this trick, even if you've never touched Motion. All you have to do is launch Motion, select the Transition project type, open it, and then save it (giving it a category and a name). That's it! Couldn't be simpler.
Doing so creates a new transition in Final Cut Pro X's Transitions Browser. Back in Final Cut, you can apply this new transition to all your targeted clips at once by selecting them and then double-clicking it (or, you could right-click it, set it as the default transition, and apply it to any selected clip by pressing Command-T).
This action applies both a video and an audio transition but the video transition doesn't actually do anything – you get a straight cut on the video and perfect audio cross fades. This happens because the default transition template in Motion is a straight cut. Want a different duration? Change the default in Preferences before applying the transition. Check out the video to see just how fast and easy this is.