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

Adding your media in a few different ways

From Chapter 5, Choose Your Favorites: Selecting, Rating, and Searching, where you organized your media with Keywords and selected the best parts as Favorites, you're way ahead. Now, you'll finally learn how to add things to a timeline, creating the first stage of a rough cut. You'll learn how to add real clips (and placeholders with the keyboard and with the mouse).

To summarize, you'll be selecting each clip you want to add, one at a time or as a group, and pressing E to append, W to insert or dragging and dropping. But the process is (of course!) more subtle than that, and you'll learn why you'd want to add clips in these ways, how to fake it if you don't have your media yet, and why keyboard shortcuts are often the way to go.

Appending with a button or shortcut

On the left side of the central bar in the interface, you'll see the word Index, then four icons. They correspond to Connect, Insert...