Section 1: Importing and Organizing
In this section, you will understand what we are trying to achieve, in terms of bringing the footage in and organizing it for an efficient editing process.
This section comprises the following chapters:
- Chapter 1, Quick Start: An Introduction to FCP
- Chapter 2, Before the Edit: Production Tips
- Chapter 3, Bring It In: Importing Your Footage
- Chapter 4, Sort It Out: Reviewing and Keywording
- Chapter 5, Choose Your Favorites: Selecting, Rating, and Searching
Chapter 1: Quick Start: An Introduction to FCP
"FCP X was built for the future as we saw it developing — more cameras, much more footage, reliance on metadata, the need to simplify complex and technical tasks to focus on creativity. You can see that this imagined future is exactly where we are right now."
— Steve Bayes, Final Cut Pro X and ProRes Product Manager, 2010–2018
After 10 years as a video editor in the 1980s, Steve became the first certified instructor for the Avid Media Composer and eventually the Principal Product Designer. In 2006 he became Apple’s Senior Product Manager for FCP. From 2010 he product managed the development and release of the ProRes video codec and FCP X, including the almost 30 subsequent releases. Steve retired from Apple in 2018 and continues to consult and invest in developing new technology for film and video.
(www.thestevebayes.com)
Welcome. In this book, you’ll learn how to use Apple’s flagship non-linear editing application, Final Cut Pro, from a standing start — and it’s going to be fun. As I won’t be assuming that you already know how to edit, this chapter will guide you through a few of the fundamentals of editing, give you a broad overview of the interface, show you how the editing workflow functions, and give you a few tips on what kind of hardware will help you down the track.
Video editing is a huge field, and there are many, many ways to proceed, either on your own or as part of the wider industry. You’ll hear many opinions on best practices, and, indeed, not all of those opinions will agree with the advice I’ll give you here. And that’s fine! Wherever there are conflicting opinions, I’ll do my best to explain why I’m making my specific recommendations, and you can feel free to go a different way if you have different needs. It’s all good.
Before I get into the details of Final Cut Pro — frequently abbreviated to FCP — I’d like to take you on a quick tour of video editing more broadly. You can tell a story with any software, but the technical details do matter, and a lot has changed. This book has been completely updated for the 10.5 release, where Final Cut Pro X became Final Cut Pro. All the recently introduced features will be pointed out throughout the book so that existing users can easily discover them.
This chapter will cover the following main topics:
- A brief history of editing
- Interface basics
- An editing workflow overview
- Hardware recommendations
By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a great understanding of what the app is about, what this book’s about, the editing process that you’ll learn, and the gear you’ll need to put it into practice.
A brief history of editing
Cinema has been around for a little over 100 years, and for a long time, the editing process was straightforward. Each frame of film was a single image on a continuous strip of celluloid, and, to combine multiple shots in a sequence, the film was physically cut and then taped to another piece of film. Every cut took real physical effort and time, and revisiting your earlier edits could be difficult, expensive, or impossible, depending on when the decision was made. And then, the arrival of video in the 1980s made it more accessible, but also worse.
Tape-based editing meant that an editor didn’t have to physically cut film, and because it made the process much cheaper, an entire generation of teenagers could explore movie making on a budget. However, images recorded on magnetic tape cannot be easily reordered. To rearrange shots A-B-C to B-A-C means offloading the whole sequence to a second tape, then placing them back on the original tape in a different order, and often with a degree of quality loss. Linear editing surely democratized the industry, but it came at a cost.
Computer-based non-linear editing changed it all for the better, giving editors the low cost of tapes, the ability to change the image without chemicals, far easier access to special effects, and, thankfully, the return of easy clip reordering. Today, this is normal and natural, and a new video editor need not consider how things used to be done. Still, most Non-Linear Editing applications (NLEs) work in a way that’s driven by the tape-based metaphors of the past. For example, the common Overwrite and Insert operations come straight from video tape decks.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with these operations (and, indeed, they exist in FCP), they come from a paradigm with a heavy emphasis on tracks, and a linear timeline structure. Just as with tape, nothing moves unless you explicitly tell it to. These...
