So, you’ve taken the plunge and purchased Final Cut Studio 3 -- congrats! You won’t have too much "paper shock" when you open the tiny little box in FCS3, at least compared to the enormous boxes for the previous two versions, which featured multiple, Biblical-scale tomes pretending to be "instruction manuals."

But that doesn’t mean that Apple has made the programs any easier to use -- quite the contrary. Each new version has ladled on a plentiful helping of new features, which has only upped the confusion factor for those of you just joining the video editorial world that some of us take for granted.

So where can you turn? Thankfully, your friends here at MacLife.com have you covered. Herewith, we present a look at getting started with Final Cut Pro 7, the main hub of Apple’s Final Cut Studio bundle. Fire up your software and cozy up to your browser, but be careful: In the words of Bill Cosby, "You might just learn something."

Capture: Just The Facts, Ma’am

Before you can do much of anything with Final Cut Pro, you’ve got to get your footage into the software. Although this may seem at first glance to be a brainless, non-creative task, you’ll soon discover it’s better to set things up correctly right from the start and save yourself a lot of grief later on. It doesn’t much matter where your footage is coming from -- for the purposes of this how-to, we’re going to assume that you’re going old school with some kind of camcorder that still records on a tape format (let’s go with HDV) via a Firewire connection.

(Side note: Final Cut Pro doesn’t play nice with some flash-based cameras such as the popular Flip MinoHD. While the files will import just fine, you’ll have to render the non-standard audio in those H.264 clips before you can even begin to edit, and then again every time you make an edit. We recommend you stick with iMovie ’09 for editing such content until Apple corrects this oversight.)

Jack your Firewire cable into the available ports on your computer and camcorder. You’ll need a 4-pin to 6-pin cable, which should have been included with your camera. If you have a recent Mac, you might also need a Firewire 400 to 800 dongle, or cable for some (blame it on Apple for making this more complicated than necessary by removing the standard FW400 ports from newer systems.) The small end (4-pin connector) goes into the camcorder, which is most likely labeled DV Out or i.Link (for Sony cameras). The larger end (6-pin connector) goes into the computer’s Firewire port (or adapter for same).

With your camcorder plugged in and turned on in playback (VCR) mode, fire up FCP. Under the Final Cut Pro menu, select Easy Setup and under Format: select “HD” to filter your choices to only those relevant to high-definition video. Pull down the Use: option and select HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i60. This will be the quickest & easiest setting for a common HDV camera such as Sony’s HDR-FX1, which records its HD image with 1080 interlaced lines. (Consult your camera’s instruction manual if in doubt and adjust accordingly.)

Now, you may have noticed there are other capture options that Apple has included for HDV. But here’s the dirty little secret: HDV is great as an acquisition format, but its MPEG-2 compression was not really designed for editing. Selecting a native HDV workflow will likely result in a lot of hair-pulling (and long render times) while editing. Apple got around this nightmare by creating their own edit-friendly format, Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC), which transcodes the HDV format as it’s being captured and makes life easier for you, the end user. So trust in us and just select the option we’ve asked you nicely to, hmm-kay?

Click the Setup button and you’ll go back to the main layout of FCP. Now is an ideal time to select File > Save Project and give your new session a name. It’s good practice to save projects on your internal hard drive (preferably in the default location, your user Documents > Final Cut Pro Documents folder), keeping your captured media on an external drive. Why? Your gigabyte-gobbling media is still safely on a tape where it can be recaptured in the event of a drive mishap, but your project file is much smaller and not so easily replaced. You’ll want to save your project files on a drive where you’ll have a regular backup, such as Time Machine, the system-level utility included with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 or Snow Leopard 10.6.

While we’re at it, go into Final Cut Pro > System Settings and choose the external hard drive you’ll capture your media to. By default this will also be the Final Cut Pro Documents folder within your user’s Documents folder, so click on the first Set… button and use the file requester that comes up to select a new location. We also recommend if you’re capturing from a Firewire camera that you save your footage to a USB 2.0 drive to avoid any potential conflicts (especially on a slower or older system).

Now, cue your tape to the beginning of the tape you want to capture and select Log and Capture from the File menu. You’ll be presented with an HDV Capture window asking for the name of your first file. Type in something that will make it easy to understand later (we’ll go with “MacLife tutorial footage”), press the Capture button and your camcorder will start rolling as Final Cut captures the media and transcodes it on the fly from HDV to AIC. (Note: You’ll see your video, but won’t hear the audio unless you have the external speaker on your camcorder going. Don’t be alarmed, the audio there will be out of sync with the video on the computer screen, this is normal.)



Also keep in mind that the Log and Capture window will be completely different for other formats; if you switch your Easy Setup to one of the non-AIC HDV presets, you’ll be presented with the Log and Capture screen pictured here -- there are a ton of options on that screen, but all you really need to know for now is you can hit the Space bar to play the tape from your camcorder, then press Capture > Now to get the ball rolling. You’ll want to type a clip name into the Name: field first, otherwise your captured footage will all be called “Untitled,” which isn’t terribly helpful for later.

In either case, when you’re finished, press the Esc key on the keyboard to stop the capture. If Final Cut Pro runs out of recorded footage or reaches the end of your tape, it will suspend the capture process so you’re not wasting valuable drive space, but you’ll still need to press the Esc key to close out of the capture screen. We also recommend that you capture your footage in complete reels -- you can always organize them into smaller clips (called “subclips”) later.

Windows to Your Soul

With the mundane task of capturing out of the way, you’re probably now sitting looking at a four-paned display, which is your blank canvas. (If you’re seeing something else, we recommend going to Window > Arrange > Standard to get the default window layout before going further.) So what are all those windows, and how will they help you master the art of editing?



In the upper left is your project, which should show a list of the footage you’ve captured thus far. To the right is the Viewer, which is where you’ll open and scan through clips to start the editing process. In the upper right you have a similar window, the Canvas, which basically is the output from your timeline or Sequence, the window that fills the bottom of the screen where your edited clips will soon call home.

There are many ways to use these windows efficiently and everyone has their own style, but we’ll show you the basics and once you get comfortable enough with FCP, you’ll start to find your own method. The basic workflow is something like this: Open a clip from your Project, scan through the clip in the Viewer, mark your in & out points and then drag the edited clip to the Canvas, where it gets inserted into the Sequence below in your timeline.