An Introduction to Final Cut Pro X

Last week during our media lesson we had our first experience on using Final Cut Pro X. This was an exciting experience as I had never used this software before and was looking forward to learning a new skill. At a first glance the software looks very confusing and as though it is going to be challenging to use due to all the different tools on offer, but upon reflection learning some of the basic tools that I will use all the way it suddenly felt alot less daunting, and I feel we made a great improvement with our knowledge of the software by the end of the lesson.

To set up Final Cut Pro X it has to be done in a specific way to ensure that your set up is correctly done. Firstly we had to attach or external hardrive into the side of the keyboard. We use an external hardrive  due to the storage needed to create a music video is extremely large and this is a safety pro caution to ensure that none of the film is lost.

  After connecting the external hard drive we then connected the memory card into the mac to receive our film from our day out in Brigg. After inserting the card we imported our film off of it onto Final Cut Pro X. We named our file 'Don't Stop Believing' and we did this for the rest of the files we had to save so we knew what everything was. We then waited for all of our files to be imported.

After all of our files imported they would appear like this. But to get them all to go to the side on the left we had to select 'Create optimised media', 'analyse for balanced colour',  'analyse and fix colour' and then 'import all'. The screen then changed and all the clips moved to the left. 

Before you do anything with your clips you have to wait until it says that its 100% done. After this has loaded you can then start watching the clips and putting the good ones onto your timeline like show below.

After the clips have loaded and you have added the ones you are wanting to use onto your timeline you can then do lots of extra things to the clip. For example you can add effects onto the clip with can completely change the look of your clip. Other things you can do is if your clip is to long you can you the razorblade tool. During our practice video we used the razor blade tool lots as it an easy method for shortening the length of your clip to make the video flow more smoothly. The icon that you use to select the razor tool is shown below.