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Introduction

Lesson 1 from: Final Cut Pro X

Rob Adams, Vanessa Joy

Introduction

Lesson 1 from: Final Cut Pro X

Rob Adams, Vanessa Joy

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Lesson Info

1. Introduction

Lesson Info

Introduction

Just real quick for those of you who don't know us, we just want to kind of walking through who we are and just where we come from and why we're up here and what let us tow to be here on creative life. Rob adams is my name on the wedding cinematographer have been doing it since nineteen ninety seven, formally trained in radio, television and film it's been my primary business since two thousand six. I've had rob adam's films since that time, and even before that I was working in the field, you could find my work at rob adam's films dot com and I started out editing years ago with non linear editing. I was actually trained on a linear editing system tape tape. Um and I was actually the first guy at my university to use their first non linear editing system, and this is back in the day when the commodore amiga was one of the first graphics you know, home consumer, pro sumer graphics interface computers and when premier hit the market, it was just so weird toe work with video files on the...

computer. So I really was there from the from the conception of it from a pro sumer and consumer standpoint, and I was able to kind of grow with the industry from that point on, so I started out as an adobe premiere user I used adobe premiere, probably up until two thousand five, and then I switched over to final cut legacy. We call it legacy now, because it's, no longer supported by apple, so using version numbers, will identify the different versions of the program. But final cut pro seven was the was the end of that line, final couple tennis, a complete revamp, it's, a completely new program s o we refer to the old final cuts, his legacy, and I will do so continue to do so through we're going to make a lot of different comparisons between, uh, final cut seven in particular, and final cut ten, so that you can move seamlessly from one program to the other if you were previously using a final cut seven. So we're going to do a lot of stuff like that that will help you, either from scratch, start to learn final cut or move over in transition from a different program. Yeah, which was meal, you know, a few short months ago, I was really just starting to get into final cut pro tennis. A matter of fact, the last time I appeared on the program, our creative live here, during my cinema course, I just started using it. I was just starting to get familiar with it and build a workflow with an I actually been buried in it for the last few months really honing it my craft and it really honing my skills in it and building a workflow that really allows my entire studio to be much more efficient than we were when we were using final couple of seven so now I'm glad to say my entire studio is using final cut for ten which is fantastic so we've made a complete switch and everybody I I think everybody enjoys it it does have its it's issues and we will talk about those and give you some some things to consider and things teo try to avoid when working with it but happy to say that we are using it full time is our primary editing program so I have a slide in here about you if you just want to kind of really quick talk with so I'm going to be here with you guys this is definitely of course that scared more towards video editing but there are a lot of photographers out there that are now learning video so I am here as your photography lingo um so that I can help translate some of the concepts that aren't quite the same in photography as they are with video to make it a little bit easier to understand easier for all of us tto learn no matter where we are so like I said I've been doing photography wedding photography since two thousand two and you'll find my work at vanessa joy dot com if you want to look at rob stuff and mine together um we were married in two thousand nine. Vanessa and rob dot com is where you can find all of that, um and vanessa's very instrumental in teaching our photo video fusion products and skills that we teach all over the country. So let's get started that's going to give you an overview of what this course is about on you know who this courses for him, but you can't expect to learn a lot a lot a lot. So we have, like, here in the studio we have a pretty good sampling. I think of what our mass audience is out on the internet because we have a wide range of skill level and expertise level here in the studio. Can I get a show of hands from our weekly guys? The peanut gallery from now on, just like that turn better than studio audience I sound like a game show host so show of hands. How many of you are working with final cut? Pretend now as we speak okay, so we have someone I went like this that one like this he's like, okay, so so I think that's a lot of people I'm assuming the rest of you have not even really gotten into it much at all okay, that's good, I think that's pretty representative of a lot of people that are watching. I know there's a lot of people watching who are also very adept at it. I'm hoping those people will come away with some nuggets from this course, but this course really is geared towards the beginning. Follow copper ten user. Okay, so I'm going to classify you as all beginning final couple, ten users and that's great, you're really gonna get a lot out of this course, it's a great course for new event cinematographers who are just now starting to do weddings were starting to build a business in that field and want to see a workflow done, you know, wedding work flow down in final cut, pretend this course is going to be so valuable to you. It will also be valuable to experience videographers that, or maybe moving over into the short form format, because a lot of what rob is going to teach it's not going to be what you typically see on youtube. Bennett's hears this button and here's how this function works, it's going to be very theoretical and it's going to show a lot of the editing, a theory that goes behind the films that rob produces. So even if you are experienced videographer and maybe you're transitioning into using dslr is in the short form for matt this is going to be very valuable course for you to really get inside the mind of editing and I really want to encourage those more experienced users in the chat room to answer any questions that may be popped in there from some of the beginning users because we're really gonna focus on my work flow on and I'm you know it's not going to be so detailed where every little keystroke is going to be covered so if you have a different way of doing things that you think works for you by all means share that information I'm sure the people in the chat rooms I really really appreciate that this course is also great for experienced editors who were working in final cut pro seven who are looking to transition into ten you're going to see I'm gonna make a parent comparisons between the way things used to be done in final cut to the way things are now done and how final cut pro ten and apple is completely revamp those methods and the functionality that we're going to you know explore with the program so those three main groups are the targets of this program but honestly anybody who's watching who's this curious about video editing and who are you know kind of interested in seeing how a video comes together in a program this is great as well I honestly think that final cut pro ten has something new for the entire video world. I think it's really reshaping and rethinking the way that editors are working in a non linear editing program. Traditional video editing programs are sort of all the same in the sense that if you know one, you sort of know them all sort of the layout in the design of the programs and the way you work with video clips is very similar. Final cut, pro tennis kind of veered off course and is now blazing its own path and really creating a new workflow that if you're if you come from that, I don't want to say old school it's not it's cool if you come from that traditional video editing mentality, really take some time to wrap your head around. It takes some time to kind of get a feeling in a sense for how this program works because it is completely different in some respects so you can carry over some of the knowledge, but other things, you kind of have to retrain your brain to go. Okay, well, it doesn't work this way anymore. How do I do you get the same result using a different method, so, uh, you know, this that's what this course is gonna be great for I am going to make some disclaimers right off the bat I really want to make these kind of clear this is not intended to be a keystroke program, okay? There are some great other resource is online that are great for like okay, well, what is command shift all two why right click that's all well and good I mean, I have my system of the way I do things and it works for me and makes me a very fast and efficient editor, especially when I compared to how I used to edit a much more efficient much more fast now on dh the way I do things I mean, well, let me put it this way there's six different ways to skin a cat this program, every command, every function has a different method of implementing that commander function, so I'm going to try I'm going to show you keystrokes for the things that I use keystrokes for and other things that are going to be mouse clicks, but because it's a visual medium that we're working with and people are watching this, we want to kind of show you with menus and where things are located throughout the program so it's not intended to be that detail we're not going to cover every little function that the program does, we would need more than three days to do that, so what we're going to really focus on is my work flow we're going to focus on how I build my videos in here the whole first day, we're going to really get a feel for the program and get a sense of where things are located and get comfortable. The one thing I really had it, too to do when I first started using phallic upper ten. Well, the first inclination, like the impulse was, give me some footage of me throw it in here, let me see what I can do, and that was wow, overwhelming. It was like, I have no idea what I'm doing, it just sort of threw me through a loop because I was trying to apply old or, you know, traditional video editing program functionality, and it didn't quite work out that way, so I spent about three or four days just in the program with no video clips going through menus and just familiarizing myself with where buttons were on keystrokes reading he stroke guides and just sort of getting a feel for okay, when it comes time for me to do this, you know, I have sort of this little reference in my brain of okay, yeah, I remember there's a keystroke for that, and that really helped me to when I started bringing in video clips, little by little, to feel a lot more comfortable. Because the key to learning this program quickly and overcoming the learning curve that's that's associated with it is to get comfortable with the interface and that'll really help you do just kind of not feel overwhelmed when that does happen yeah, please rob has on his guy thank you touch any buttons there, but it is actually one of my christmas presents to him greatly by each other work things their business but it's just a keypad cover um and this one is specifically for final cut pro ten and it has a bunch of the keyboard shortcuts on here. This is fantastic. However, you can customize your keyboard shortcuts to be like them to be so this may or may not be relevant to you this point if you've already customized them but it is really great learning tool if you are interested in learning more, the keystrokes grab one of these bad boys right on top. Yeah, they're really not that expensive you ordered right online. They're fantastic. So with that said, we are going to be focusing on the workflow, focusing on how I use the program and like you said, if anybody in the chat rooms is a better way to do something, by all means throw it out there that's fantastic that's great final cut pro ten is buggy it is by no means as stable as I think it will be in the coming years it runs on a completely new processing platform from previous versions of final cut pro ten it is not one hundred percent watertight and I don't think follow copper seven was ever really one hundred percent watertight but this program really does once in a while act up to say the least so in order to keep that from bringing the programme to a screeching halt everytime final cut pro crashes we're going to give away a price so you will now look a final cut crashing is it could think so we're hoping that won't happen and I've been really running this system that we have to work with here through its courses over the last two days and you know, it's stable it really is a pretty stable and I'm comfortable working with it I'm confident with it so I think when we talk about what it is because a lot of us are working on different platforms different computers and we could definitely give what we use so yeah, these are the tech specs for the system that we're actually using here and this was just kind of give you a sense of what we are using it is a beefed up system I'm not gonna lie I did ask creative live hooked me up andi I just wanted to make sure that was more for the sake of the program of the actual broadcast so we didn't have to run into technical problems but at home by the way I just use an eye mac I'm turning it off the twenty seven inch made two thousand eleven I mac on dit runs fine from what I'm pushing which is mostly ten a teepee video so I'm not pushing for k yet and when that time comes I will have to start using a new over system but we do have some four k five k and ultra high definition assets that were going to be working with throughout this program so we wanted teo we wanted to just have a system that was really fast so we're working with apple final cut pro ten version ten point oh point eight this version is a new update it was just released on march twenty eighth and I was so happy that I was in the planning version of planning stage of this program and I was hoping they would release this update before we came online. This update really addresses a lot of the issues that final cut pretend was having with plug ins you were having a lot of issues before with plug ins giving you bad renders and bad frames and plug ins were running a lot slower with this update it really has ironed out I don't want to all but a majority of those issues and has really helped speed up the workflow when working with plug ins it's also got some other stability improvements, which is great some other minor things in there that we're probably not going to really get teo but update the program if you haven't yet just do a software update on your mac and definitely try to do that we are running mac os x ten point seven point five lion at home I made the mistake of upgrading the mountain line or and then snow leopard I'm all that personal effort and I just find that the new operating system has flaws but I'm glad they have an older version of the operating system on this computer we are running two two point four gigahertz six core intel xeon processors if you don't know what that means don't worry it just means we're running basically twelve course of cpu processing which means it's fast powerful it's powerful okay were running pretty fast processors in this twelve course gives us a lot of aa lot of so speaks up that's good we are installed with twelve gigabytes of thirteen thirty three megahertz ddr three e c c ram again if you don't know what that means don't worry we have twelve gigs of ram okay we are lucky enough thank you creative live to have a red rocket card installed in this computer it's replacing our standard rate on graphics processing card this card is sick it's a wicked, expensive it's meant for processing red cinnamon systems, camera footage and it's going to help us to push our four k and five k red epic footage with no problem. We have footage from the cannon one d c we've got footage from c one hundred thirty three hundred so we have all these different formats that we needed to be able to push smoothly, and the red rocket cards definitely gonna help to accelerate the real time playback of those of those format. So we're grateful to have that card in here for media storage and os operation. We are running dual three terabytes seventy, two hundred rpm satya internal hard drives one is for our system, so one hard driving the computer is running our lar system applications and operating system and the other dr is solely for media, and as we're going to find out, you always want to keep your media on a separate drive in follow copper. Ted okay, you never want to have the media that you're working with an editing on the same drive as the application itself, okay? You'll just get performance issues. If you have a slower system, faster systems will probably handle it, but it's still a better idea to always have it on a separate drive. So what are we going to cover in three days? We have a lot of information to go over, and we've really segmented this programme down into the four segments per day, and each one of those four segments is going to break down a different part of the program in different work flow. So we're going to start this is an overall of the three days, of course, syllabus chock full, you'll notice that the text on these slides got small that's because you have a lot that we're going to cover. This is going to be one of those courses that you will continually reference for different things as you were editing and as you're continuing with the program, right? So the first thing we're gonna talk about is how to optimize your system for video editing, so this is great for your newbies who are just getting into the program. You're gonna want to set up your computer a certain way so you can have the best performance. We're going to talk about preparing an organizing your media for editing. I have an entire workflow that I go through with my footage before I even open a final cut pro ten, okay? And having that system in place makes organizing within final cut. Once we import all of our media so much easier and then final cut is so powerful with its tagging and filtering tools and clip renaming that we could even organize further once we're in the program and that's sixty percent of my battle right there. Once I'm organized, the actual building of the story goes so much faster, so we're going to spend a lot of time on organization because it's really gonna speed you up, not having a search for eclipse that you're trying to look for when when you should be focusing on building a story. So we're going to get into that in much depth. We're gonna talk about understanding the final cut pro ten file system, I'm sure you guys have heard like events and projects. Well, what the heck did what happened? What you know, I used to be able to open up adobe premiere or final cut pro and I would just save my project and that was it, everything was in one place it's a little different and we're gonna get into the specifics in a few minutes, but that's really a key thing toe understand in order to really I have a full grasp of working and follicle pretend we're going to get familiar with the final cut pro ten window layout in basic features howto efficiently import media and organize it within the program how to learn we're going to learn about the background tasks functions of the program one of the great things about final cut pro ten is it's going to do a lot of mundane rendering on dh trans coding in the background so we can be importing media and while it's still being imported into the program working with media that has already populated so we're gonna talk about the background tasks at at length and in depth good to know we're learn basic editing and all video and audio editing functions okay, so we'll get into the basics of howto work with video unedited video audio in the program how to synchronize footage and build a story a couple different ways we're going to do that I will show you that how to edit correct and sweeten audio dialogue very important for event filmmaker's lot of us are working with audio dialogue we want to be able to work with it not even just work with them but make it sound the best that it can be we're going to talk about editing music and understand how music is used in general because music in this program can be a little tricky when we're dealing with this crazy magnetic timeline and we'll get into the house to make it work for you and fit into your workflow color correcting in grading we're going to spend a lot of time color correcting in grating footage on day three because final cut pro tem has some really powerful features to help you balance your footage, if you're working with multiple cameras, getting them all to match and then applying a look, giving it a very distinct, stylized look. So we're also gonna work with some plug ins. And thankfully, with the ten point appointed update, we won't have too many issues with plug in. So we're going to get into a lot of color grating on day three, and then finally had a finalized export and archive finished projects that once you're all done, okay, well, what do I do? I've got tons of media on this drive, and I've got these projects in events. How can I just get them all into a place where I can keep him for archiving purposes?

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Client Communication and Business Pack.zip
Discount Code.jpg
FCPX Day 1.pdf
FCPX Day 2.pdf
FCPX Day 3.pdf
Vendor Resource Guide.pdf
Video-Presets.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Crispino Dourado
 

I've been using FCP since 2013 or so I thought! Until I went through the lessons here and boy was I hooked on! I've learned a ton of stuff that I can use from this course! Really awesome course for beginners to professionals and a must for wedding cinematographers! I loved every bit of this course! Thank you.

Ryan Pierson
 

Rob Adams and Vanessa Joy are incredible speakers and thoughtful educators. In three days, they take you through the basics of editing theory and explain everything you need to know to dive into FCP X. Rob even details how to do advanced color grading at a pace that is clear and easy to understand. Without a doubt, this course has done more to improve my personal and professional use of FCP X than five years of experience working with video and audio. A+ great course.

a Creativelive Student
 

Thoroughly enjoying this course! I have seen all of Rob & Vanessa's creativelive workshops to date and am constantly and consistently learning something new. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I am really looking forward to working this into our company with our first cinematography wedding in May! Courtney Liske Photography

Student Work

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