Sat, 02 Sep 2006
Final Cut Pro
Rick Young, The Focal Easy Guide to
Final Cut Pro 5, Focal Press
Final Cut Pro is not much like iMovie. The
latter is fairly intuitive and the things it
does do are easily discoverable. Here at Mstation
we used iMovie to create some short promos
for the first Bleepfest. Recently we made some
for the second Bleepfest and
immediately ran into problems. How do you
cut to music beats with iMovie? With some
difficulty so we decided to try out hand with
Final Cut Pro. And that's when we learnt
we'd have to RTM.
The manual isn't that bad. It just a little
too much detail. We knew what we wanted to do
and needed some help. And by curious coincidence
we selected this book out of a great pile
as being closest to our needs.
The reasons why were that it is reasonably
compact and not much hassle to refer to
and it is also very good although the first tip
we got as to how to cut to beats came off the web.
What you do is play through and make markers as you
go on the soundtrack and then go from there.
This book first takes you through setting the program
up visually and also explains what the many
indeciferable GUI widgets do. From there it goes through
all the important things you need to know about
capture, editing, titles and the like and each
portion is well illustrated with screen shots and
explanatory asides.
[]
permanent link
| 
pre Dec 04 reviews are here