Beyond Print
Bringing Your Vision to Life
An Introduction to Final Cut Pro
For a designer, making the jump into the motion-based world has never been easier. Final Cut Pro is a great design tool that can help you take your existing graphic designs in new and exciting visual directions. While best known for its video and film editing capabilities, Final Cut Pro also contains powerful design features that allow you to add movement to your projects quickly and creatively.
A Quick Tour of the Final Cut Pro Interface
The Final Cut Pro interface is arranged to give you easy access to everything you will need to begin designing your project. You can also customize the workspace to best fit the way you work. For now, let’s look at the default layout of the interface.
The Browser is where all of your project elements are organized. When you import a file into Final Cut Pro it will show up in the left column of the Browser. Other useful information, such as file type, appear in the columns to the right. It’s important to remember that when you import a file into the browser, you are not actually copying it into the application. Final Cut Pro creates a link to the file stored on your hard drive. This helps to save hard drive space by not making multiple copies of the same file.
The Timeline represents the elements of your project over time. It is made up of audio and video tracks which are similar to layers in Photoshop. When you add audio and video clips to the timeline you are creating a Sequence. A Sequence is a record of all of the choices you make in the Timeline. You can save multiple versions of the same Sequence allowing you to experiment with your project without losing any previous work.
The Viewer can be used for many different things. Most often, it will be the place where you preview and prepare clips to be added to your sequence. By double-clicking on a file in the browser, it will open in the viewer where you can make choices about how it will appear in your sequence. Here you can add filters, or adjust parameters such as scale or opacity.
The Canvas is where you view your edited sequence. What you see in the Canvas represents how your final sequence will appear. It functions much like print preview in graphics applications.
Importing Materials
In order to get started in Final Cut Pro, you will need to import the materials that you want to work with. You can import many different types of files including graphics, photos, audio and, of course, video.
Once imported, your files can be organized to make it easy for you to find them. Getting your files into Final Cut Pro is as easy as following these steps:
- Step 1. Right-click in the Browser
- Step 2. Choose Import > Files.
- Step 3. Locate the file you would like to import.
- Step 4. Click on Choose
- Step 5. Your file will now appear in the Browser.
You can import images into the browser by right-clicking in the browser window and selecting the file to import.
Importing Photoshop Files
When importing Photoshop files, there are two file types to consider, flattened and layered. For most of your work, you will probably rely on flattened files. A flattened file appears as a clip in the browser when imported. Flattened files are easier to work with but don’t offer the flexibility and options of a layered file.
When you import a layered Photoshop file into Final Cut Pro, a new composition is created. This composition contains all of the layers in the same order as the PSD. All of the layers opacity settings, layer modes and visibility are preserved. Alpha Channels will also be recognized.
Layered Photoshop files appear as a sequence in the browser. When the sequence is opened in the Timeline, the original Photoshop layers appear as separate video tracks.
Adding Elements to the Timeline
The timeline is where the choices you have made previously appear on the screen. You can add elements in any order you like to create a sequence. When you play back your sequence, the images appear in the order in which you placed them in the Timeline.
Add elements to the Timeline by dragging them from the Browser to one of the video tracks. Your element now appears as a clip in the Timeline. Keep adding elements one after another. Don’t worry too much about the timing. When all of your clips have been placed in the Timeline you will have what is known as a rough cut.
One of the great things about working in Final Cut Pro is that it is a non-linear editing application. You don’t have to start at the beginning and work towards the end. You can start editing wherever your creativity strikes you. You can even save multiple versions of your sequences allowing you to try different approaches while saving valuable work as you go.
