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Final Cut Express: the (very) basics

June 23rd, 2008

adn.com video kit

As part of our newsroom training effort at the Daily News I’ve created a handout on FCE for reporters and photographers. It’s a very surface treatment of a very complicated program but here are what I consider the highlights:

  • Inexperienced FCE users will often rewind their tape completely, which prevents the program from finding the camera in capture mode. Move forward on the tape 5 or 10 seconds so the timecode appears on the camera’s display and try launching the capture window again.
  • If you choose to use cross fades, make sure you have enough of the shot to blend. The program will make use of what it has — if there’s not enough material the cross fade will be short or one-sided.
  • You can control the length of the cross fade by double clicking on the cross fade icon. 1 = 1 second, 15 = 15 frames or .5 second.
  • If you’re importing audio into your project, FCE prefers .aif files. Double click on the audio track to bring it up in the editing window.
  • Learn the quick keys! They will save you time.

  • Apple has a very good series of video tutorials for FCE and the Knight Digital Media Center at the UC Berkeley has a great FC Pro tutorial.

    My more superficial document (1.4 meg download) is available here: adnvideo.

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