Taking a tour of the FCP X interface

It's time to start getting our feet wet in the Final Cut Pro X editing environment. In order to show you around, I'm going to first show you what everything looks like when you open the software without anything loaded, and then I'll take a look at the software populated with media and projects. So let's first take a look at this empty interface. Now, your interface will only be empty if you haven't yet loaded the exercise files. So if you've already loaded them, just sit back and watch for now. So, as you can see, we have three basic windows. The browser, which contains the library's pane. And this area for previewing clips, and we have the viewer, and the timeline.

Now within the libraries pane are the various libraries that housed our events and projects. Now because Final Cut Pro X must have at least one library loaded, you can see that I have an untitled library, with this date stamped event. And so while there is one event here, which is used to hold my media, you can see that there aren't any projects yet. When I do create a project, however, it'll be housed here in the library pane. Now this is different from prior versions of Final Cut Pro X where all of the projects were housed down in this area, in a pane called the project library.

So, instead, down here is just the timeline where we are going to construct or edit. And in this default view, the viewer functions to show the visual output of the material in both the clips within my library, as well as the clips within my timeline. So doesn't make a lot of sense, because everything is blank right now. So I think what we'll do is load up some media and projects, to give us some context. But don't worry as we get it more into the course, we're going to do all of this from scratch. Again, if you've already loaded the exercise files, yours is already ready to go.

So I'm just going to go to file>open library and I'm going to navigate to Final Cut Pro X Essential Training, and bring that online. So now I have two libraries. I have my Final Cut Pro X Essential Training Library, and that untitled library. If I want to close that, it's very easy, I can just right click and choose close library untitled. And that goes away, and I'm just looking at my Final Cut Pro X essential training library.

And just to go a step further, I do have another library here, which you do not yet. But let me show you this. Again, I go to File>Open Library, and it actually has it under Recently Opened Libraries. It's the demo. I'm going to go ahead and open that one. And now I conveniently have two libraries here which contain different media and different projects. So as you can see I have my Final Cut Pro X essential training library. I have three events, two of which are storing media. One is called Castles and another is called Firm To Table.

Now these events are essentially repositories where you store and organize all of your media, your video, your audio, your still images, graphics and so on, that you used to create your program. And as you can see here in this Firm To Table event, I have a lot of keyword collections, which we'll touch upon later. To the right of the Libraries pane I have my, clip viewer where I am able to basically take a look at these clips, and as I skim over them, you can see that I get a visual output here in the viewer. Now, I'm not actually clicking my mouse as I drag, I'm just skimming.

If you're hearing the audio as you drag, then you also have audio skimming on, which is an option up here in the View menu, right here. Mine's off, I like to have mine off, so if you are hearing the audio as you drag, you may want to turn it off, it's right here. So what else? I'm going to come down here to this slider. Right now it says All, and what that means is that every clip in my browser, regardless of length, is represented by one thumbnail. Now if I drag this to the right, you can sort of start to see these spread out.

So now, it's at ten seconds so each one of the thumbnails within my browser here, is represented by ten seconds of time. So it gives me a better visual indication of how long each one of these clips is. You can see that you can go all the way to half a second, so that each one of these is represented by, a half a second. Now I think that's a little bit overkill. I don't really know anyone that works that way. And I like to have mine probably about ten seconds. I think that's a good indication of length without being too overbearing.

Now coming down into this button here, you can see that you can actually show audio waveforms, where you get a visual indication on which of your clips has audio, and which do not. You can also control your clip height. So if you want to kind of increase the size here you certainly can. Make these very large and you can also give yourself more real estate by dragging over to the far left. Again I like kind of a happy medium there, and I'm going to turn off my waveforms for now. So that's a little bit on clip navigation. Now let's talk about projects.

Now in Final Cut Pro X, projects are just simply sequences. Which are essentially the edited program made from combinations of clips. In prior versions of Final Cut, you can have multiple sequences in one project. But with the advent of Final Cut Pro X, each project can contain only one sequence. Now again, as of Final Cut Pro 10.1, projects are housed within events. So if I come up to my Castles event, I could just right-click say, New Project, and title this, Castles Rough Cut 1, and okay.

And, you can see that now I have a project living within my event. And, frankly, most of the time you're probably going to do this. You're probably going to store your projects within the events of the media that it corresponds with. In this course, however, what I've done, is I've put all the projects that we're going to be working on in their own event. I think that's a little bit better for following along within the Lynda course so as you can see, We've got it broken down by chapter, and also by movie. So, if I want to go into the 1.3 movie and load the from the table intro for example, I just double click, and the project is loaded.

Then, if I drag my play head, you can see that I am skimming my project content. To go back up and skim the clips within my events, I just come back up here, and now I'm skimming over these clips. And the viewer just shows me those. Now you can break this out if you want to show two viewers. One for your clip data and the other for your project. Just come up to your Window menu and then Show Event Viewer here. Now, as you can see, I can skim my Event Viewer, which is showing my clip data. And then I come down here and I'm showing my project data.

For this course, I'm mostly going to be working with just one viewer. But this dual display is typical of many other editing programs. So you might want to work them this way. I'm just going to turn this off right now. Hide Event Viewer. Now, let's talk a little bit about the different ways that we can view the clips within our project. If I come down to this little piece of film here, I can change the way I see my video in relation to my audio. For example, if I just want to see audio, I can select this one on the left. I'm just seeing the audio waveforms, no thumbnails here in the timeline.

And then if I go to the right here, you can see smaller thumbnails, larger ones, and as I keep going to the right, you can see that this is just showing the video, no audio data at all. And then here's just bars. I think I'm going to stick to this view right here. I can also change my clip height right here. And we're going to talk about these other two options a little bit later. Right now I'm just going to close this. And I just want to go over a couple of ways to navigate the sequence. We'll just touch up on a few. To play the sequence I press space bar. >> There's definitely a move. >> And I press space bar again to stop.

If I want to go to the beginning of a sequence, I press the Home key, Function + left arrow on a laptop. And if I want to go to the end of the sequence, it's the end key, or Function + right arrow on a laptop. If I want to move from clip to clip, I can use my up arrow and down arrow. So as you can see right now, I'm pressing the up arrows then I'm going back one edit at a time through the sequence. And my down arrow moves me forward one edit at a time through the sequence. As you can see, when we move through the sequence like this, we get a readout of our time code, right here.

Which is a time-based readout of where we're at in the program in hours, minutes, seconds and frames. Now in this general area is also a tool bar. We'll go over all of these tools throughout the course, so we'll hang on to that for now. And just one last thing. If I want to select the browser, I can press Cmd + 1. So right now the browser is selected and any commands that I input are going to be effected within the browser. If I want to select the timeline I press Cmd + 2. And if I want to select the viewer, I press Cmd + 3.

Now as I go through these options, you can sort of see each of these areas becoming highlighted, and thus, they'll respond to the commands I input. So that can be handy. Now obviously, this was just a very quick introduction to the major elements of the interface. With that foundation, however, we're ready to continue learning all about the various windows, tools, and buttons in later movies.