How to Use This Book
At the core of this book are dozens of hands-on tutorials, provided so you can learn Final Cut by using Final Cut. I believe that the best way to learn is to dothough my students would probably tell you that I also have strong opinions on which ways are better than others. And throughout this book, I'll share those opinions with you as if you were in one of my Final Cut classes.As you will learn in the next chapter, there is a flow in editing from initial planning to final output and archiving. This book walks you through every step of this process and shows you what you need to know.All the examples in this book use NTSC video, running at 30 frames per second. If you are a PAL or film editor working with different image sizes or frame rates, you can still benefit from this book, because the techniques are the same, regardless of the media you are editing. This consistent interface is one of the great strengths of Final Cut.(Also, on a technical note for readers outside North America, you can edit the NTSC video included in this book on your computer with no problems. The only issue is that you can't display NTSC video to an external PAL monitor.)Final Cut has over 600 keyboard commands. (No, don't panic, you don't need to know all of them to use Final Cut. In fact, you can edit quite happily using only the mouse. The keyboard just makes you faster.) But, the last time I checked, my keyboard did not have 600 keys on it. In fact, it has 104. I just counted them. So, in order to access all 600 keyboard shortcuts, you need to use "modifier keys." These are keys you press and hold while typing other keys. There are, specifically, four: Shift Control Option Command
(And here's a note about this Command key. Some people, and I won't name names, call it an "Apple" key. I'm sorry, I don't "Apple" my computer. I "Command" my computer. That's because I'm in chargeat least, most of the time. Now, this may say more about me than it does about my computer, but for the rest of this book, I'll refer to this key as the Command key. You'll see these keyboard commands abbreviated like this: Cmd+S.)Andrew Balis once suggested a good way to think of the Option key is that it is the "opposite" key. If you are using a tool to perform some action, holding down the Option key will often, but not always, perform the opposite action. You'll learn more about this throughout the book.At the end of each chapter, I list helpful keyboard shortcuts that were either mentioned during that chapter or are relevant to the material covered in that chapter. I've found these lists to be handy in the books I read, and I wanted to provide the same service to you. Finally, Final Cut has a hidden treasure trove of shortcuts that you can find only with the mouse. They are called contextual menus, and you access them by either holding down the Control key and clicking, or, if you have a two-button mouse, clicking with the right mouse button.In this book, I will always refer to these using the term Ctrl+click. All Macintosh computers ship with a single-button mouse. This means that if you learn how to use the Ctrl+click to access a contextual menu, you can use Final Cut with any mouse; which is why I teach it this way. If you have a two-button mouse, you can either Ctrl+click or right-mouse-click. It's the same result, just a different procedure. |
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