Final Cut Pro HD | H•O•T Hands-On Training [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

1.

Open Chapter 09 Lesson 1. You'll find it inside the Lessons folder on the FCP HDHOT DVD included with this book. Double-click Seq Ready to Title to load it into the Timeline. It should have all the graphics you've created so far during this chapter. If not, open, Seq Ready for lower third.

2.

Set an In on the Timeline at the start of Gov. Bush's statement. Set an Out just before the B-roll starts. (Remember, if you use the down arrow to find the start of the B-roll, you need to move back one frame to set the Out.)

3.

Click the Generator menu and choose Text > Lower 3rd.

4.

Add a new track (V3) by Ctrl+clicking in the gray area immediately above V2 and choosing Add Track from the shortcut menu.

5.

Because you want to edit this clip to the Timeline using the automated tools, connect the v1 Source in the patch panel to the V3 Destination by dragging up the patch connection.

6.

Edit the lower-third text into the Timeline by clicking the red Overwrite button in the bottom-left corner of the Canvas (or pressing F10). Because of the way the patch panel is set, the clip appears at the location of the playhead on V3.

7.

Because you want the lower-third super to dissolve in at the same rate that the title graphic is dissolving out, copy the transition at the end of the main title by Option+dragging it from the end of the main title to the beginning of the lower-third. (You don't need to worry about adding a transition at the end of the super because the super ends at a shot change.) Dragging the transition would simply move it. Option-dragging a transition makes a copy of the transition and moves it to the edit point you drop it on.

(If you can't Option-drag a transition, you probably have bad preferences files, which was a problem I ran into while writing this chapter. See Chapter 14, "Additional Resources," for instructions on how to delete and restore your preferences files.)

Now that the clip is in the Timeline, place the playhead in the middle of the clip and double-click it to load it into the Viewer.

[View full size image]

8.

Click the Controls tab.

This Controls window for a lower-third is different than the Controls window for full-screen text. This is a good example of how windows change to reflect different attributes of a clip, effect, or transition.

Essentially, this window has sets of controls for the first line of text, the second line, and a background effect.

9.

Enter Jeb Bush into Text 1. Set the Font to Arial Black and the Size to 40 point.

10.

Enter Governor, Florida into Text 2. Set the Font to Arial and the Size to 32 point.

11.

Change the color of the second line by clicking the color chip for the second line of text and selecting a rich yellow color. Pick something a little back from the edge of the color circle.

12.

You can save a color to reuse later, by dragging the color from the color bar at the top and dropping it into one of the color chips at the bottom. Since this color picker is a system-level utility, any application that opens this color selector is able to select the same color by clicking the small chip at the bottom.

The lower-third text clip has a background you can use to add additional visual variety to the clip. (Although I use this text format a lot, I sure wish it did more, truth be told.)

13.

Choose Bar from the Background pop-up menu, and change the background color to brick red. This adds a thin red line behind the title.

There's one more setting you need to adjust, which I use for all my text: a drop shadow. Drop shadows make text much more readable.

14.

To create a drop shadow click the Motion tab and check the Drop Shadow check box near the bottom of the window.

15.

Adjust your shadow settings to match mine. (I've found these settings make for the most readable text: Offset = 1.5,Angle = 135,Softness = 30, and Opacity = 90.)

Drop shadows are essential in video. The image on the left has no shadow, although the image on the right does. While it may be hard to see in print, in video, drop shadows are highly effective and essential for making text readable.

You have one more quick task in this exercise, which is to add an upper-corner super to the first B-roll shot to identify it as historical footage (often called file footage).

16.

Create a full-screen text clip, set its duration to 2 seconds, and edit it to the Timeline immediately after the lower-third super you just completed on V3. Double-click it in the Timeline to load it into the Viewer.

17.

Enter Florida, press Return to create a line break, and then enter 1999. Set the rest of the settings to match this screen. Use the same color yellow as the earlier super by clicking on the small yellow color chip at the bottom of the color picker. Then, drag it into position using the crosshairs or enter 285 for the horizontal position and 170 for the vertical.

See how it lands nicely against the Title Safe gridline? Add a drop shadow and you're done.

18.

Save your work. You'll be using this project again later. Quit Final Cut if you need to take a break. Otherwise, keep everything open for the next exercise.

NOTE | Graphic Math Anxiety, Part ISquare Pixels

Wouldn't it be nice if… video and computers displayed the same things the same way?

Well, they don't.

In fact, there are five principal ways computer video differs from television video. Some of these I have already discussed; the rest will be presented here:

Computer video is progressiveit displays every horizontal line of pixels in order from top to bottom. Television video is interlacedit displays all even-numbered lines, then all odd-numbered lines.

Computers display a full-range of grayscale from pure black to pure white. Television video displays a more limited range of grayscale from "almost black" to "almost white."

Computers display all colors as RGB values. Television video displays grayscale and color values using YUV, where Y is the grayscale value and U/V are the color values. YUV colors do not have the same range as RGB colors.

Computers display all colors uncompressed, that is, each pixel is uniquely described using discrete red, green, and blue values. Television video, in order to squeeze more information onto a tape, compresses the color values using a variety of different compression schemes: 4:2:2, 4:3:1, and 4:1:1. This color compression further restricts the amount of color information contained in a video clip.

And, finally, the key difference that drives editors the most nuts: computers display images using square pixels, whereas video displays images using rectangular pixels. This last point is the one I'll discuss first.

Computers display images as a series of square pixels. Video displays images as a series of rectangular pixels. This means that if you are creating graphics for video, you need to allow for this difference.

To make matters worse, Final Cut expects graphics in one size if they are a single layer, such as a scan of a photograph, and a different size if they are a multilayer Photoshop file (more on this later in this chapter). Rather than spend pages explaining this, here is a table you can use to make sure your graphics are the right size.

By the way, there used to be a big brouhaha about whether to create your images in Photoshop, and then alter the image size in Photoshop before importing into Final Cut. My experience indicates you get the same result either way. So, keep it simple: create your graphic in Photoshop at the size indicated in the following table, save it, import it into Final Cut, and let Final Cut do any necessary resizing. The quality is fine.

By the way (number 2), I use TIFFs as my preferred file format for single-layer images, and I use PSD (Photoshop documents) for multilayer images.

By the way (number 3), Final Cut Pro HD changed the way it calculates pixel aspect ratios. The old numbers used to be 720 x 534 x 72. The table below is correct for FCP HD.

DV NTSC

720x540x72

720x480x72

DV NTSC (16x9)

853x480x72

720x480x72

DV & SD PAL

768x576x72

720x576x72

DV & SD PAL (16x9)

1024x576x72

720x576x72

601 NTSC

720x547x72

720x486x72

601 NTSC (16x9)

853x486x72

720x486x72

720i/p High Definition

N/A

1280x720x72

1080i/p High Definition

N/A

1920x1080x72