Final Cut Pro Tips for Avid People

[sdphotographer]

I'm going to be doing some Final Cut Pro editing tomorrow and this weekend, and was looking for a resource to get me up to speed using it to cut news packages. I've cut with FCP before, but I'm not nearly as proficient as I am in Newscutter and Media Composer.

[<FCP2004user>]

"a","b","n" "apple 'R'", are your best friends. Other then that, real time captureing and slap it together. Anything else that you want to know about? Editing FCP is just the same as others but you have to learn the menus. The rest is up to you. Oh and "I" and "O" are your friends as well unless you have what I have, a contour shuttle pro. Everything is there in one hand.

[Baltimore Shooter]

There's a book called Final Cut Pro editing for Avid Editors. Too late for this weekend, but you may want to get the book anyway. Focal Press or Amazon may have it.

Warren

[sdphotographer]

Is there a way to make subclips in FCP? On Newsuctter, I usually digitize the complete reporter track and then make subclips to break it up. Thanks for the tips!

[PHX Shooter]

Yup, sub-clips are easy. Open your clip in the viewer and set your in and out points. Command-U is the "Make Sub-clip" keystroke. You'll find it under the Modify menu.

Cmd-8 opens up your Log & Capture window. That's also where you can select what drive you want the media to be placed on. Like Avid, your media files should be on a different volume than your app and system.

The A key takes you back to your cursor, handy when your slicing and dicing.

You'll want to pay attention to the track column in the timeline, if it's highlighted yellow, that's where your clip will be placed.

Shift Z zooms your whole timeline to fit your screen.

The J-K-L keys move you back-pause-forward within the clip or timeline.

It's a pretty straight forward app and you can work pretty fast on it. Hope this isn't too basic info for ya!

Good luck!

[ July 30, 2004, 03:16 AM: Message edited by: Lee Media ]

[sdphotographer]

Thanks for all the help. Day 1 went well, except for a few problems getting it to capture SD & HD clips. Luckily a restart fixed the SD problems, and the right patching fixed the HD problems. Now on to day two...