Now let’s go through that workflow in more detail so it begins to make sense. To move a clip from your Project to the Viewer, click & hold on it and drag it to the empty Viewer window. You’ll see all four sides of the Viewer window turn white, which lets you know it’s okay to let go of the mouse. (You can also double-click on a clip in the Project window to open it in the Viewer in the same manner.)

Now that you have a clip in the Viewer, you can play it by clicking the space bar on your keyboard, or using the center Play button under the video (the one that looks like a sideways triangle). Stop the playback by doing the same whenever something is playing.

Just below the video is a tiny, inverted yellow triangle with a line coming out of the bottom -- this is your playhead, and the horizontal strip where it resides represents your entire clip from start to finish, letting you know exactly where you are at any given time. The playhead also doubles as a scrubber tool; If you click & drag it, you can zip through your video clip as fast or slow as you’d like, then use the left & right arrow keys on your keyboard to step back & forth frame-by-frame to find the exact spot you’d like a cut to begin or end.

There are two other methods of playhead control to note in the Viewer, just below the scrubber area. On the left side is the shuttle control; grab the center by clicking on it with the mouse and you can move back & forth through your clip, with the speed varying by how much you move either way (slower toward the center, faster as it moves to the outside). On the right side is the jog control, which is good for moving through the clip at a slower pace.



In order to start editing, you’ll use the tools we’ve just outlined to find the spots where you want a given clip to begin and end. Scrub, shuttle or jog to the point where you want the clip to start, then press the “i” key on the keyboard -- congrats, you’ve just marked your first in point! (You’ll see a sideways triangle pointing right in both the scrubber area and the Viewer window itself to indicate your success.) Now move to the point where you want the clip to end and select the “o” (that’s a letter, not the number zero) key to mark the out point.

With an in & out point selected, you can simply click & hold anywhere in the Viewer window and drag the new, shorter clip down into the Sequence window. You’ll see your cursor change with a small icon of whatever frame is currently selected, so you know you’re doing it correctly. As you hit the Sequence timeline with your new clip, you may see the cursor change to an arrow pointing down or to the right, and it will change if you move the mouse slightly up or down. Since this is your first clip, it doesn’t matter where you drop it in the timeline, nor which direction the cursor faces when you do so -- but that will become more important shortly.

The first time you do this with a new Sequence, you’ll see FCP pop up an inquiry: “For best performance your sequence and External Video should be set to the format of the clips you are editing. Change sequence settings to match the clip settings?” Apple introduced this option (which you can also turn off in preferences) with Final Cut Studio 2, and it’s a welcome addition for beginners in particular, since it takes the guesswork out of setting up your Sequence for the first time. If you select Yes, you’ll be assured that your new Sequence will have the same settings as your clips, which will eliminate a lot of voodoo and unnecessary rendering time as you build your timeline. (As a safety mechanism, even if you select No at this point, your new Sequence will still be correct since we used Easy Setup to set things up in the first place. Now you have some idea why that’s a good first step in setting up your project.)

While you’ve just added your first clip to the Sequence, there is another way which is easier as your project becomes bigger. Click & drag your Viewer image but instead of dropping it into the Sequence, move it right over the Canvas window -- as you do this, you’ll see a new bar pop up on the right side of the Canvas with several options. Top to bottom, they are Insert (yellow), Overwrite (red), Replace (blue), Fit to Fill (green) and Superimpose (purple). Both Insert and Overwrite have the option to put your clip into the Sequence with or without a transition, such as the default cross dissolve (the most common type of transition, which gently fades between two clips). For the moment, don’t worry too much about all of these options -- you just want to drag your new clip from the Viewer and onto the yellow Insert box of the Canvas window.

Did you see what happened in the Sequence below? If not, select Edit > Undo (or Command-Z on the keyboard) to go back one step and try it again, this time paying attention to the Sequence window. The Insert command in the Canvas places your new clip in the Sequence timeline, exactly at the point where you have placed the playhead. You can try this yourself by clicking the mouse anywhere in the top of your Sequence window (the area where the timecode numbers count up from left to right) and then clicking the Space bar to play.

There’s another way to do an insert edit, too. Remember when you dragged the first clip down to the Sequence and moving the cursor up & down before you dropped the clip showed an arrow pointing down or an arrow pointing right? If you drop the clip anywhere when the arrow is pointing right, you’ll do an insert edit -- even if the playhead is in the middle of the clip. Any clips to the right of your new edit will shift later in time according to the length of your new clip. If you drop the new clip while the arrow is facing down, you’ll do an Overwrite edit -- which replaces whatever is underneath with the new clip. More on that shortly.

Believe it or not, you’ve just conquered the basics of editing! Click in the scrubber area of your Viewer and find a new in point, mark it and do the same for the out point. Drag this second clip to the Insert area of the Canvas window again, and now you’ll see the second clip magically appear right at the end of the first one in the Sequence -- by default, Final Cut Pro jumps to the end of the clip you’re inserting so you can immediately select another clip, do the same and then repeat as necessary.