Book Image

Final Cut Pro X Cookbook

By : Jason Cox
Book Image

Final Cut Pro X Cookbook

By: Jason Cox

Overview of this book

As technology becomes more and more accessible and easier to use, we are expected to do more in less time than ever before. Video editors are now expected to be able not only to edit, but create motion graphics, fix sound issues, enhance image quality and color and more. Also, many workers in the PR and marketing world are finding they need to know how to get viral videos made from start to finish as quickly as possible. Final Cut Pro X was built as a one-stop shop with all the tools needed to produce a professional video from beginning to end.The "Final Cut Pro X Cookbook" contains recipes that will take you from the importing process and basic mechanics of editing up through many of FCPX's advanced tools needed by top-tier editors on a daily basis. Edit quickly and efficiently, fix image and sound problems with ease, and get your video out to your client or the world easily.No program gets you from application launch to the actual editing process faster than FCPX. After covering the basics, the book hits the ground running showing readers how to produce professional quality videos even if video editing isn't your day job.The recipes inside are packed with more than 300 images helping illustrate time-saving editing tools, problem-solving techniques and how to spice up your video with beautiful effects and titles. We also dive into audio editing, color correction and dabble in FCPX's sister programs Motion and Compressor!With more than 100 recipes, the Final Cut Pro X Cookbook is a great aid for the avid enthusiast up to the 40-hour-a-week professional. This book contains everything you need to make videos that captivate your audiences.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Final Cut Pro X Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Importing iMovie projects


We all have to get our feet wet somewhere when it comes to learning how to edit video, and rarely do people start right off the bat in something as grandiose as FCPX. Many of us get our hands dirty in a simpler program such as iMovie before making the leap into more professional editing. Even if you've got a bunch of projects sitting in iMovie, you can easily import them into FCPX to take advantage of its far wider range of features and capabilities. The process is incredibly easy, but there are a few things you should know about when going through the process.

Getting ready

All this requires is an active project in iMovie '11 or later:

How to do it...

  1. 1. In FCPX, select File | Import | iMovie Project.

  2. 2. Select your iMovie project file and select Import.

  3. 3. FCPX will take a few moments to copy over the necessary media, creating both a new event and a new project. Double-click on the project and begin editing!

How it works...

The transition from iMovie to FCPX is very smooth. Not only are the interfaces very similar, but FCPX has every title, effect, and transition that iMovie possesses (and obviously many more). One of the only caveats is with the Movie Trailers feature of iMovie. These will not import into FCPX properly unless you go to File | Convert to Project in iMovie before you try and import the project into FCPX.

There's more...

Importing just your iMovie events

If you didn't have an active project you wanted to import from iMovie into FCPX, but simply wanted to take all of the media from your iMovie events, you can do this as well. In FCPX, just go to File | Import | iMovie Event Library. This will import every event you have in iMovie. It's an all or nothing deal!

Analyzing iMovie footage

Even if you have your preferences set to analyze all imported footage for people, stabilization, and so on, FCPX skips over this when importing iMovie projects. If you want to override this, you can have FCPX review your footage after the fact by selecting your clips, right-clicking, and choosing Analyze and Fix....