Dive Into Your Imagination

Creating a slide show using your still images in Final Cut Pro can be fun and give you a very professional look. So lets get started! First, you need to properly resize your images and make sure your color space is correct. Full resolution High Definition video has a width of 1080 pixels. So assuming the best device that someone would have to watch your slide show would be an HDTV, 1080 pixels on the long side should be plenty. Next, you should make sure your images are in RGB color space rather than CMYK. The reason for this is that CMYK images tend to have over saturation problems as well as other issues in Final Cut Pro. To change this in Photoshop, simply pull down from the menu bar: Images>Mode>RGB. Lastly, it's good to know what formats FCP will accept. I prefer .JPG because they are small in size and work well, but here are formats that FCP will accept:

Uploading video to an online video sharing site has become very easy. Many of the major video sharing sites now supports high-resolution videos so you can upload your HD videos very easily to the web. The bigger sites like Youtube and Vimeo usually have a maximum file size of 100 megabytes without having to pay for the serves. This mean that you have two main options as far as exporting and compressing your video goes. The best quality for the web would be full resolution H.264. The problem with this though, is that it creates larger files and if your video is in some form of High Definition and more than a minute or two long it will exceed the 100 megabytes limit. Your next best option and a more likely solution is to export your video as a .Mpeg4. This still gives you good quality and is much smaller.

There are times when I capture a great image and would like to either print it or post it online but its from a video camera! What do I do? Well Final Cut has a way to get a still out and give it life somewhere else outside of your timeline. After I capture the image I take it into Photoshop and bring out many of the values and color, this can also be done in Final Cut before I export it ,but Photoshop just has easier controls that I am used to.

I admit, I am not a Final Cut Pro genius. I have been using Final Cut for years, but like many programs out there, I work on a need to know basis. Meaning, I don't know that much about the parts of FCP that I don't use. Doing these tutorials for our website has sent me on a quest for topics to cover that I have never dealt with personally.

Exporting is often the most confusing part of the whole filmmaking process, at least from what I've noticed with beginners. With so many export settings, formats, and aspect ratio's out there, it is a bit overwhelming to deal with especially if you have deadlines. Sometimes you will want a DVD export, or internet, or maybe even HD but you're not sure what the right settings are and you don't want to sit and wait for a whole movie to render and export just to find out that it's not going to work! Well one tip I have that you may find very helpful is the ability to export just a small piece of your movie. A timeline snippet.