Making Some Tweaks

Once I had (what I considered) a final edit of my film, I started to make some final tweaks. Two of those being doing some colour grading, and "cropping" my film to create a more cinematic look.

Colour Grading
I've had a little bit of experience with colour grading before, but I wouldn't say I am knowledgeable of the skill - there are people who's job is to purely colour grade. What I was aiming for was to sharpen and create deeper contrasts on some of my shots - have "proper" blacks and striking shadows. I played with a few presets that are available, but didn't really like the look of any of them.

Brighten

Contrast

Dew

Fall Sun

I decided to make some manual adjustments. I played with the exposure - the shadows, mid tones and highlights - and the colour levels.

Before correction

After correction

Cropping
In order to adjust any effect in Final Cut Pro X, you must open the 'Inspector'. This is found below the live preview screen (where you can see what you're editing). Once selected, it glows blue and shifts the entire top half of editing windows along to make room for the inspector window.

Once that was open, I expanded the "crop" panel, and started to make adjustments. I knew I wanted to crop the top and the bottom of the frame - to create "black bars" - but I wasn't sure by how many .px I should adjust it. I started to play around, and found that around 100px seemed to work well, so I stuck with that. 

0px, (no crop)

 100px (top and bottom crop)