Loupedeck CT Final Cut Pro Master Profile

If you already have a Loupedeck CT or thinking about getting one to 10x your Final Cut Pro editing, the #1 hurdle is the time it takes to learn and setup all the button shortcuts. Many people give up, but now you don't have to.

Creating this Loupedeck CT Final Cut Pro profile took me nearly two years, with lots of testing and asking my editor friends for feedback. I really wanted this tool to actually speed up my workflow, rather than become yet another distraction.

Now you can skip past the learning curve that I and others have suffered through - start using the Loupedeck CT to rapidly increase your FCP editing today.

The Background

I’ve been using FCPX since the day it came out, and like many FCP users over time I’ve become pretty good at editing quickly without stumbling over keys or menu items.

But there are some actions that really slow me down, either because they require a combination of 3 or 4 hotkeys, or they require a lot of mousing around, or both. Maybe a whole new way of keying in edit commands is in the cards?

After looking at all the various hardware control surfaces, I settled on the Loupedeck CT because it appeared to offer the most versatility for a reasonable price.

Right from the start, I encountered the same problem that plagues every other FCP editor who went down this path: it’s really cool but it’s going to take forever to customize.

Other Final Cut Pro profiles for Loupedeck CT

The official Loupedeck software is very intuitive, but the customization for FCP is extremely limited. It’s more like adding another control surface to have to learn, in addition to the keyboard, rather than actually speeding up your workflow.

There are also icon packs with templates you can purchase, and I tried all of them, but now you have dozens and dozens of control banks that replicate literally every keyboard and menu command imaginable.

Although these icon packs are a start, pairing them down to just the useful tasks would take weeks or months of customization.

The Mission

Ultimately, I wanted to create a custom Loupedeck CT interface that did not just replicate every single FCP option on the planet. The goal is to create a hardware interface that utilizes the most essential commands, while speeding up the tasks that slow down every FCP editor.

The goal isn’t to replace the mouse or keyboard. It’s to create a blazing fast hardware interface for the most common FCP tasks that every editor uses.

Or at least the start of one. Where you can now customize the template to your own needs, without having to spend weeks learning how to setup your brand new Loupedeck CT.

To summarize, the mission of this master profile is to use the Loupedeck CT to speed up the FCP editing process, not to replace the keyboard and mouse setup for no reason.

The End Product: 4 Banks of Shortcuts

After testing heavily for over a year and a half, and asking editor friends to give their feedback, I ended up with a 4 Bank system that shares the bottom controls among all the banks, while the top controls change based on whether you’re doing general edits, fine tuning audio, animating motion, or color grading.

For the shortcut icons, I chose to use a basic text system rather than visual icons, because during testing I found I could recognize text much quicker than fancy icons.

The installation guide has all the details on how to install this profile, along with tips on how to customize your own shortcuts in CommandPost if you'd like.