Technical Audit: Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro is a program which is designed to edit footage. To open Final Cut Pro, a video hard drive must be inserted so that you can save your footage, music or text onto. This makes it easier to locate when looking for files when merging clips together. To start editing, a blank canvas is used to display and place your work where you can easily make changes onto the footage. A timeline is used in Final Cut Pro to position your clips where you can rearrange them to piece together how you would want the film to look like. This is positioned on the bottom central half of the page where you can make transitions between the clips. Pressing Command + T allows you to put a transition to swiftly move the audience onto the next scene. On the left hand side of the screen, this displays all your work on the hard drive so when inserting pieces onto the timeline, this saves time and is very easy to use.

To play footage, you can simply press the space bar and press again to stop it. On the top right-hand side of the page, a large screen is shown as a viewer to present the footage that you have edited so far. If the footage is right for the clips, it can be dragged onto the timeline and from this, you can re-arrange the positions on the timeline suited to your desire. A red icon beneath this highlights the ability to overwrite clips and the yellow icon placed near this is the ability to move clips out of the timeline and put the desired clip into place.

When editing footage, watching the clip is necessary to see improvements to be made and also allows you take and place that certain footage onto the place you want on the timeline. By pressing ‘I’ for In to mark out the start of the clip and ‘O’ for Out to mark the end of it and drag the footage onto the timeline. Drag the yellow marker key to the beginning of the footage to view it and it’s the same process if you want to insert more clips. If you want to delete a clip, pressing the delete button will do this. Razor blading is used to delete snippets which is good because it allows you to easily insert other clips into its place.