Book Image

Final Cut Pro Efficient Editing

By : Iain Anderson
Book Image

Final Cut Pro Efficient Editing

By: Iain Anderson

Overview of this book

Final Cut Pro (also known as FCP, previously Final Cut Pro X) is Apple’s efficient and accessible video editing software for everyone, offering powerful features that experienced editors and novices will find useful. FCP is the quickest way to transform your raw clips into a finished piece, so if speed is important, make this a key tool in your editing arsenal. Final Cut Pro Efficient Editing is a comprehensive best practice guide for all editors. You’ll not only learn how to use the features but also find out which ones are the most important and when you should use them. With the help of practical examples, the book will show you how typical footage can be assembled, trimmed, colored, and finessed to produce a finished edit, exploring a variety of techniques. As you progress through the book, you’ll follow a standard editing workflow to get the feel of working on real-world projects and answer self-assessment questions to make sure that you’re on track. By the end of this Final Cut Pro book, you’ll be well versed with the key features of this app and have all the tools you need to create impressive edits.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Importing and Organizing
7
Section 2: Rough Cut to Fine Cut
13
Section 3: Finishing and Exporting

Softening audio with split edits (J- and L-cuts)

Way back at the rough-cut stage, the emphasis was on making an edit sound good, and then to hide the edits with B-roll. That's still a great way to work, but split audio edits allow you to trim the audio and video components of a clip at different points from one another, allowing you to hear a speaker before you see them (J-cut) or hear them after you see them (L-cut).

Cutting the audio and the video separately softens the edit, and (crucially) it's not something that's easy to do with simpler editing software. Using this technique will lift the quality of your edits, even if the client isn't quite sure why. You can see an illustration of this here:

Figure 8.20: The rightmost clip here has expanded audio that starts before the video does — a J-cut

Figure 8.20: The rightmost clip here has expanded audio that starts before the video does — a J-cut

In this section, you'll learn how to expand and collapse audio, and some of the things you should avoid. You'll also...