Dive Into Your Imagination

Oh noooooo!!! All my clips are offline!! What? Why? How? Oh ya, this is going to happen to you, especially if you use external hard drives, share computers, reorganize, move clips.....edit. There seem to be countless ways of severing the connections of your media. One thing I have noticed, is that most beginning editors figure out how to reconnect media before ever understanding how or why it got unconnected. Perhaps I can explain.

The slip tool is one of the more advanced tools that Final Cut has to offer. It moves your clips on the timeline without changing the in and out points. If you have a timeline that is just perfect, but you want one of your clips to start just a hair sooner or later than you had originally cut, then the slip tool is for you! I find it most useful when I am using transitions like cross dissolves, because sometimes the visual I need gets lost in the transition, so with the slip tool I can adjust the in and out points of my clip without moving anything around it. When you click on the footage in the timeline with the slip tool, you will see a gray box representing you clips entire length.

One of the more advanced tricks in Final Cut Pro is the ability to use the photoshop style composite modes. If you are not familiar with what a dissolve, hard light, or overlay mode is then I hope I can explain. Better yet, I can pull a definition from the internet: Compositing in FCP is the blending or merging of two video tracks to produce a new image which is a combination of the two video clips. There are many variations on the way that we can composite two clips in FCP.

Organizing your browser is a crucial step in maintaining an organized editing station. After you have successfully imported clips, you will have a a bin full of files with names such as 00024G or clip #6 or maybe you gave them a better name during import, but regardless, there is a better way to organize. We already have a great tutorial on binning in our Camera Coach section, which you should also look at HERE. In addition to these tips I introduce the color labels!

FCP allows for some limited controls for your audio, whatever their source plus some included filters to adjust their sound in various ways. For this tutorial I will be using some recorded dialogue from one of our commercials and some stock music to demonstrate a few of FCP's audio controls. I suggest you listen to the video with headphones on so you can really notice what I do with audio. note: Audio is not really Final Cut's responsibilty when it comes to production, most professionals will use programs like ProTools for the final product.