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

Basic trimming with the Magnetic Timeline

Trimming, at a basic level, usually involves moving the edges of a clip to see more or less of it. As with many other operations in FCP, trimming is one that starts out being very simple, but has powerful subtleties (slipping, sliding, and rolling — all to come later). For now, we'll focus on several useful ways to make a clip longer or shorter, with the mouse and with the keyboard. But first, a little check — do you have enough media?

Do you have enough media?

Each clip on a timeline represents a link to all or part of an actual clip that was recorded. Put simply, the start and end of each clip can be adjusted to the left or right, making a clip longer or shorter. But that's only true if there's enough media to allow the edit to proceed. If you've added entire clips to your timeline, you might be using the very first or very last frame of a real clip, and each one is a hard limit past which...