From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

The fundamentals of video editing - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

The fundamentals of video editing

“

- [Instructor] Before we start to dive into Final Cut Pro X, it would be great if we were to look at the fundamentals of video editing because for a very long time these have remained the same, that video editing workflow. And when we talk about video editing, we can really break it down into three simple stages. The first stage is ingest or import. So grabbing that material from your camera or whatever you use to record your media into your non-linear editor. You then got edit, which takes place in a series of sub-stages, such as your rough cut, your fine tune cut, and then we've got all the effects, color correction, and audio work that's involved with that as well. And then when you have your final project, you then go into your export phase. So these principles of video editing remain true for all non-linear editors. So how does this look specifically inside of Final Cut Pro's workflow? This chart resembles this the best. So we've got import again, edit, followed by share as Final Cut likes to call it. So sharing your projects with the world. And here are a number of things that take place in each of these stages. So we've got an import ingesting material, from let's say, a compact flash card or a SD card. You also can create camera archives from your material. You can place these on your system. And then load in your materials from a camera archive inside of Final Cut Pro X. Now, this material, whether it comes from a camera archive or you've ingested it from a camera card, has to be organized, and Final Cut offers a variety of organizational tools for rating your clips, creating keyword collections, smart collections, and even roles. Now, once we're done with our organizing, we begin to edit our clips inside of a project. So we've got our rough and our fine tune editing tools. This little picture above that is a great example of the tools available. And from that fine tune cut, we start to add those effects like I mentioned, so adding titles, transitions, and effects to spice up our footage. And then we do a number of finishing techniques. Some of those are color correction in nature. Some of those are audio in nature. And then it comes to sharing our project with the world, for people to look at it. We obviously want to have a full resolution copy of our media, but that full resolution copy might be too big to place on various social media places, so we'll then also export our project to multiple destinations, some of these might be meant for the phone, while others might be meant to be playing on social media. Last, but not least, we could expand the options that we deliver our projects to by purchasing compressor and creating customized delivery formats. So the fundamentals of video editing, from import, to sharing your projects, are all within Final Cut. And having a knowledge of these fundamentals is going to make it a lot easier, as you will follow along with our essentials course.

Contents