Ken Stone offers another screenshot-rich tutorial opening up some intricacies of Final Cut Studio. This time it’s Compressor 3.5 Basics. I’m still using 3.0.5, and a cranky unreliable crash-prone beast it is, but I don’t want to upgrade with several projects still incomplete. I hope to upgrade by January though. (January! Only 38 days away! Yikes!)

Another clear, screenshot-packed tutorial from the fine Ken Stone Final Cut Pro site.

Final Cut Pro offers some very powerful tools in its video scopes, not only to ensure that our finished projects are ‘Broadcast Safe’, but they are also critical when ‘Color Grading’ our footage to give it a desired ‘look’. To the uninitiated, the scopes can be very intimidating, even the terms ‘Broadcast Safe’ and ‘Color Grading’ can send some into hiding. But I promise you that this does need to be the case. Once you understand how the scopes work you will find that you will use them on a regular basis and to great advantage.

Well, I am re-evaluting my opinion of the not-so-new “new” iMovie. I was so used to the older version, iMovie HD, which had been expanded but not fundamentally changed, since it was introduced in 1999 (Ten years? Yow).

Ken Stone, a source for so much great Final Cut information, posted the most complete one-page overview of iMovie I’ve ever seen. He loves it:

So why am I writing about iMovie 09 if I work in FCP? The answer is simple. At the demonstration I saw a number of features in iMovie 09, that I wished were in FCP and I wondered if there was a way to use iMovie 09 in conjunction with FCP, utilizing some of its features to supplement the FCP workflow, most importantly in the rough cut phase of editing, as ‘09’ has an amazing skimming/edit tool. iMovie also sports a new and modern tool for exact clip trimming, the Precision Editor, and it’s stunning. And, iMovie provides full Real Time playback, no rendering required, ever.
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iMovie is very intuitive and easy to use, despite the fact that it has some very advanced features, features that it would be nice to see incorporated into Apple’s other editing application, Final Cut Pro. iMovie is a very modern editing application and it works in a much more visual way than editing applications that were first created over a decade ago. This graphical aspect of iMovie is more persuasive and powerful than one might first suspect. And don’t let the fact that iMovie ships in the iLife package and comes free on new Macs fool you, this is an amazingly modern and capable editing application.

This is not only a detailed examination of iMovie but a great and generous example of technical writing

Studio Daily’s Lonzell Watson posts a very clear tutorial for editing a demo reel or music video timed to the beats of the music track. While it’s useful for those purposes, it’s also a terrific beginner’s intro to the Final Cut interface. Lonzell also introduces several essential keyboard shortcuts, as well as the Roll and Slip tools. Good stuff.

Lonzell Watson’s Edit to the Beat in Final Cut Pro, from Studio Daily.

There are so many types of HD compression it can be confusing, so thanks to Ken Stone for this listing of Sony’s formats wit links to drivers.

His latest has a head-slapping simple tip on quickly and easily finding keyboard shortcuts. In Final Cut, go to the Tools menu and choose Button List. The list comes up in a window with a disclosure triangle for each of the menus… so okay, you could go to the menus to find that. What’s excellent is the list is searchable. Type W to find all the shortcuts that use that letter; it’s a great way to make your editing go more quickly and learn the (daunting) FCP interface. Thanks, Larry!

Final Cut supports FXScript, a scripting language for adding or tweaking video filters and effects. Piero is but one of a number of scripters and programmers adding to the number of great resources for video editors using Final Cut. Thanks, Piero.

Thanks to Macintouch for pointing this morning to the update of Audacity, the terrific free audio editor and recorder. Podcasters, video producers, journalists, and independent musicians all over the world use it every day. It’s a great tool that keeps getting better. Put on your school’s computers for your students to play with. It’s free, useful, and fun.