The Basics of Final Cut Pro

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Hello everyone and thank you for tuning in the Inside Geek Canada, my name is Evan Thies and today’s application tech feature, I am going to be giving you a basic tutorial on Final Cut Pro. Now when I say basic, I mean very basic, if you have ever done with Final Cut in the past, you would probably find this really redundant and you probably would not need it.

This tutorial will be for beginners and basically opening the program for the first time and you are seeing all these stuff on the menu you are going, I have no idea what to really do, what this all means. So, I am just going to go through and explain some of the palettes and just some of the basic tools and how to basically import footage. I am not really going to go over any editing techniques or different transitions, I am just going to show you where they basically are located in the program and how to navigate our way around. And in future tutorials I will show you how to bring things on the timeline property, how to cut, how to edit, how to do transitions, stuff like that. But for now I just want to kind of explain the basic lay out and how on your editing system like final cut works.

If you had experience then you can like Adobe Premiers, Sony Vegas, this probably pretty easy for you to jump in to, final cuts pretty similar. If you have dealt with the program like IMovie or Windows Movie Maker, it will probably be a bit of a change because they use a very simple drag and drop interface, this is quite a bit more complex and does have the more in depth interface.

So I am going to go on a computer here and just show you basics. So here we are in Final Cut Pro, now when you first start Final Cut Pro, you may hear the different dialog box, this is assuming that maybe you have never started on that computer and that dialog box may see some link, set the frame rate and whether it is going to be in relate to progressive. For now just ignore that or cancel a lot of it and simply go to file, new project. And for now, do not worry about the settings because we are going to use the source material that we are importing actually to find the settings for out sequence. Before that we do that, I just want to explain basically the general interface of Final Cut Pro.

So up here in the left we have the browser, essentially the browser is where you browse all your source material, this is where you import your images, your audio, your video, everything will be here and it is kind of like you know on the finder. Anywhere else in Mac OS10 or any kind other folder structure, if there is structure, you can make different folders called bins, we can actually organize and have a nice kind of lay out of all your material.

Up here you also notice there is another tab here, this first tab here actually is Final Cut Pro basics that is the name of my project, that is what I have saved it, so that is where the project is named. Next is with effects, now if you go to effect is, this is where all the transitions, all the video filters, all the audio kind of work that you might do. It is all in here, this is where all of the Final Cut Pro actually comes from is, this kind of generals in transition and stuff like that, I am just going to go back to this tab here.

Next two in here these two windows are basically where you will be looking through your footage. The viewer is basically, you can consider this a work in progress, this is where you will drag footage that need to be cropped or marking out points or look at time code or just generally scrub through clip to see if that is what you want.

The next one here is called the canvass, and that is basically the final product, that is where your final edit is going to look like and what the video that you are going to export is going to look like in the end.

Under right here, we have the tool palette and this is basically all your different tools that you are going to need to edit, and I will go over a cou