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Apple Final Cut Pro X: In-Depth

Lesson 2 of 42

Key Terms


Apple Final Cut Pro X: In-Depth

Lesson 2 of 42

Key Terms


Lesson Info

Key Terms

Let's define some key terms because we're going to use this constantly. The first is a library ah, library is the master container for media events and projects in computer terms. It's called a bundle all programmed elements are tracked by the library. You're gonna have multiple libraries open at once. You can open and close libraries inside the application as you need, you can copy media events in projects between libraries and there's. No limit to the number of libraries you can create library's can be stored anywhere they could be named anything they can contain a single clip, they can contain thousands of clips they could contain a single project. They can contain hundreds of projects. Libraries are the master container inside which everything lives. This is a key concept. Everything is stored in the library you open libraries, you close libraries when you're tryingto find a project, you don't open the project, you opened the library that contains the project. Now inside the librar...

y you're going to find media media is to find us audio video and still elements which are not created by final cut that are incorporated into your project clip that you shoot with a camera is media ah photoshopped document is media on audiophile sound effect music is media media khun b managed or referenced internal or external will talk more about that in just a couple minutes also there's media, which is created by final cut this would include titles and generators, titles or text generators are special kinds of media, which is say a solid block of color or a checkerboard pattern which is created by final media is audio, video and still elements that are incorporated into your project now there's three types of media that final cut will process you'll hear all three terms cameron native optimized and proxy cameron native is what your camera shoots so philip when you're out shooting with the camera you're shooting pro wrestler your shooting abc hd or your shooting extra cam e x or your shooting a vc entra or your shooting dvc pro age devi's are all formats that the camera shoots then you're shooting within that format your shooting ah particular image size or a particular frame right? We'll talk more about that, but whatever the camera shoots is to find this camera native media optimized is a form of media which is created by final cut optimized takes whatever your camera shoots and converts it called trans coating or optimizing all means convert it optimizes it into a single format called progress for two two pro rest for two two is a video format it's a code deck which was invented by apple, which even people that don't like apple think progress is a really wonderful kodak for editing will talk about code action a minute so optimized always means that it takes your media and converts it from whatever you shoot into pro rest for two two third form of media that we work with inside final cuts called proxy files a proxy file is a really small version of your camera native format proxy files are useful when you're doing four k editing or two k editing or multi cam editing where you've got such massively large pieces of media that you need to make them smaller proxy files allow us to make our media smaller without materially damaging quality and we use it to make editing mohr efficient most of the time under most situations I recommend that you read it using optimized files optimized files we're going to take more space than cameron native on one of these will discover his storage becomes critical to you but optimized files are the easiest most efficient highest quality way of working with all the different media types that we have to work with so camera native what your camera shoots optimized converted into progress for two two and proxy files smaller format version smaller file size smaller bit right versions which are useful from multi cam and high rez medium most of the time for single camera shoots most the time for high definition or smaller formats you'll never use proxy files there they're easy to do but they're not worth the effort okay still with me libraries master containers that hold everything media things that are held inside the library which gets me to an event now events changed from the initial release of final cut ten to the current release in the current release and event is a folder think of ah ah libraries being a file cabinet the file cabinet scott drawers in it and in those stores we hold media well we can organize that media by storing it inside folders inside that file cabinet an event is a folder on event can hold media can hold projects could hold other stuff you can have one piece of meat you can have a thousand pieces of meat it could have won project could have one hundred projects we don't generally have a thousand projects in a single library but you could if it makes you feel better and event is a folder that holds stuff media and projects are stored in one or more events and I have a personal way of working but whatever way works the best for you is perfectly okay there must be one event per library additional events are optional and used is necessary for personal organization. You have to have one other than that it's up to you you can have everything stored in a single drawer in a file cabinet just sort of thrown in there and you just sort of root around until you find that what you want or you can be really organized and you've got seven hundred different folders he's carefully named and everything is stored in its own appropriate folder and haven't helped you something gets out place whatever works best for you is perfectly okay there's no limit to the number of clips that could be stored in an event there's actually an asterisk there there is a high end limit to the number of clips that final cup tan khun store and it's somewhere around three to five thousand clips so if you're doing something like a documentary that's got lots and lots and lots of clips in the thousands and thousands of clips you're best off splitting nose across multiple libraries the actual limit is dependent upon the amount of ram that you've got in your system the speed of your system and the type of clips that they are there's a number of variables but in general I recommend people keep two to three thousand clips per library and it just keeps your life simpler I got an email yesterday from a guy that had fifteen thousand clips and was warning why final cut was running a little slowly and he didn't have a lot of ram on his system he had a lot of clips so we just divide those up into five six libraries and then you access the library that you need because remember libraries could be stored anywhere they could be named anything and you can open close them at will. Events they're similar for those of you that no final cut seven they're similar bill bins and final cut seven or bins and adobe premiere similar also two folders in the finder now I've used this term a lot project ah project is a collection of edits similar to the final cut pro seven concept of sequences project files can contain camera native optimized proxy or generated media as well as render files clock about render files we talk about effects except to define render files is a calculator the vial that final cut calculates whenever you add a transition or add and effect it's automatically created by final cut projects like media like events are stored inside the library there's no limit to the number of projects that could be stored in a single library. Projects are now stored and accessed from the browser in final cut as opposed to the project window in the lower left corner of the interface and earlier versions of final cut ten and projects are easy to duplicate using project snapshots it's now a single keystroke, a shortcut that allows you to take a project and instantly duplicate it there's two kinds there's a duplicated project and it's a project snapshot we'll talk about both as we get into into editing a little bit later today library master file inside that master file our media files which were stored inside events which are folders which are edited into projects which contained the clips that tell the story that we're trying to tell. Now, if you remember, I said that there's two types of media there's managed media and there's external media managed media is media, which is copied into a library. Manage media is the best option when you're working as a solo editor and not sharing media with other editors or other libraries. For instance, the bernard was doing a documentary on eh on the space around the space needle and the conversion from what was there to what is there in a controversy involved, I was a single documentary being edited by a single editor about a single subject. He would be best served by taking the media, copying it into the library, and it makes backups a lot easier. It makes archiving a lot easier because everything is stored in one spot and by being stored in one spot, it makes the opportunity for media to go missing or become unlinked really, really small. Philip, on the other hand, was working on a ah shoot, and he was doing sports coverage will say the seahawks, and he had the license to do a behind the scenes of getting ready for a game se of practice of the seahawks. Well, this is going to be used by a lot of different editors one's going toe integrated into the open for the game, one is going to integrate it into behind the scenes documentary, a short two three minute documentary, another under all these guys are working on it the same time. If you store the media inside the library on ly, one editor can have access to that library at a time. If you need to have multiple editors all accessing the same media at the same time, you need to store that media in on external folder will call it seahawks practice footage now that seahawks practice what it could be linked into multiple library so that different editors can all have access to that same media at the same time because we can have multiple editors playing the same media, assuming your storage is fast enough without having to share the same library. External media is media, which is linked to the library using sim lynx, which is a very powerful form of an alias on the macintosh, but it's not copied into the library. And the cool thing is that it's a single button on import. When you import, you could say, move this into the library or keep it separate. You control this and it's a single click at the point that you import to media, you make this decision, I'll show you what that is in the next segment when we talk about importing external media is the best option for media, which is shared between libraries or shared with other editors because you don't have to duplicate the clips across multiple libraries. However, as the library only contains links to pointers to the media, this means that you need to be careful when you're modifying linked media not to break the link because that causes the media to go off line when ed was asking earlier about archiving, which is a nabs lutely perfect question archiving means that you're making a backup of all of the edits the project should making a back of the library well if the media is stored in the library backing up is easy, but if the media stored external to the library backing up means I've got to remember oh, I gotta back up the library, which has all of my data bases in it and I've got to back up that external file and if you don't remember that that file stored externally then you're going back up the everything except the median wonder what happens. We needed the media so storing media inside the library is the best option when you're not really comfortable doing backups because you just simply copy that library to another disk in the backup is made, but when you need to share media like your seahawks footers that I'm inventing or all three of you guys need to edit at the same time then you want to store that externally because all of you can each have access to the same media couple more terms to define one is video format this this one drives me completely nuts so just to keep me from from throwing shoes that my computer monitor I wanted to find this a video format is the technical specifications that to find a video clip these specs consist of four elements frame size frame rate scanning and kodak I get emails all the time saying larry, I'm having a problem with final cut I'm shooting hd what's the problem I can't answer that question I mean what is hd mean? What frame size of hd there's two sizes there's nineteen twenty by ten eighty there's another size which is twelve eighty seven twenty what frame rate are you shooting? Twenty three nine seven six, twenty four twenty five twenty nine nine, seven, thirty forty eight fifty, fifty nine ninety four sixty or some other bizarre frame rate that you're trying to shoot because you do in stop motion animation they didn't say are you shooting progressive or interlaced? Well, they didn't say and then what kodak are you using if you're shooting progress forty two h q on an airy alexei you're going to get an entirely different image than if you're shooting say, abc hd on the j v c camera two counters a shooting totally different codex totally different video formats so when people say I have a problem, the very first question I have to ask is what are you shooting? You need to be able to tell me I'm shooting this frame size I'm shooting this frame right? I'm shooting progressive or interlaced and I'm shooting this particular kodak now, philip I know you know this man was going to pick on you for just a second back in the old days when television is being invented in the nineteen thirties we had a problem television took a picture tube and it scanned a high voltage beam of electricity across the back of a curved picture tube which was painted with phosphorescent, and when that high voltage of electricity zapped up against the back of that picture too, if it was a really high voltage piece of electricity that photons that that that foster would glow white, and if it's a medium voltage it would glow gray if it was a low voltage, you wouldn't blow it all. So as this beam is scanning horizontally across the curved picture tube, the voltage is fluctuating toe turn nose little phosphors bright medium or not on it all well, the chemistry of the nineteen thirties was so poor that by the time that beam of electricity that high voltage beam got halfway down, the picture to the foster is at the top we're already fading to black so instead of watching a picture like we're used to now, we were watching a band of grade going up and down to screen people getting whiplash and suing for injuries because watching television was dangerous to their health. Well, they had two options. Option number one is they could go back to high school, and they could study chemistry better and develop a higher quality foster, which is out because nobody wanted take the tests, or they could turn it over to the engineers and say, solve this problem and what the engineers did, is they they said, well, let's scan every other line. So now when it's painting it paints line two, four, six, eight all the even lines, and then it paints all the odd lines and interweaves or inter laces those two lines together to form a single complete image. The problem is, those fields, even field in the odd field are a sixty of a second off set unless you're in europe, where their fiftieth of a second, which is another story, I'll share another time and see you get thin, the horizontal black lines radiating off all moving objects. Now we've been watching television for decades, which has had interlacing, innit? Nobody ever notices because tv sets of designed to hide the interlaced artifact, but as soon as you put it a lacing on a computer everybody has got jagged black lines flowing off all moving images, so if you want to have stuff looking on broadcast interlacing, it's fine cbs and nbc and pbs air all interlaced formats, but if you want to have it look good on the web, you want to shoot progressive. So instead of scanning every other line, it's scans every line and we put them all together, so we now see the entire image there's none of this interlacing because the entire pictures captured at once film captures the entire picture at once ah, progressive format covers the entire picture at once. Progressive is ideal for the web it's also used by abc and espn and fox because progressive is better for action than interlaced iss. So if you're shooting stuff that moves again, we'll come back to the pretend project philip, we've got you working on for the seahawks you've got men running in all directions you want to shoot a progressive format because it's easy to go from progressive too interlaced it's very, very difficult to go from interlaced too progressive without losing image quality, so if you're shooting for the web and you're given the option always, always, always shoot progressive, it'll look better if you're shooting for a particular say, cbs has hired you to do a news story for the loan cbs outlet well, they want an interlaced picture because that's what they've standardized for broadcast so shoot but the client requires but if you're shooting your own project always shoot progressive kodak kodak which scares most people is the mathematics used to convert analog light and analog sound into binary numbers that the computer can store and process. Jim, I want to repeat this because this is important and there will be a quiz the state pay attention codex are the mathematics used to convert analog light and analog sound into binary numbers the computer construe or and process okay, now I want you to take the computer that sitting on your desk there, jim, I want you to hold it up and just model it to the people they can see it at home. I want you to study this computer look at the other side. Look at the bottom of it. Okay, now, jimmy, I want you to stare attack computer very carefully. You got it. Do you see an ear on their anywhere? No, sir. No. How about how about para vise? Not really not really know. In fact, I have studied computer since the late nineteen seventies and not one computer has shipped with an ear or an I so obviously something has to happen to take the analog light that we see flowing around this room and the sound that we hear bouncing off the walls we've got to convert that into numbers that the computer can store the computer stores ones and zeros on a kodak is that conversion process a kodak by intercepting light through a lens or censor or sensing sound through a microphone takes that analog signal and converts it into ones and zeroes and it takes those ones and zeros and converts them back into images that we see on the computer screen now jim you have a career as a high quality high performance extremely well paid our director yes remember and you were one of three two out of three ain't bad and the uh and the tools that you use would include photoshopped and include illustrator do you remember some of the file formats in photo shopped that you would use to save an image sure I remember remember them all ok give me like one or two or three j peg tiff psd png every single one of those is a kodak now if I have a psd file is that the same as j peg? No, completely different they're both images sure but what's an advantage of a psd over a checked bag maur editing ability you have layers and layers no layers and so on both of them will show me an image but they have another lying difference technically, which allows me to do something different with psd, a photo shop document and with the shape and not only that when you're looking at them, you cannot see any difference just how about a tip versus a j peg? Is there a different shit tip supports layer so yeah there's a difference there which has got higher quality has the potential for higher quality come? It would be a tiff precisely justus, we have co ducks in images still images tiff j peg, png psd we also have codex for audio mp three a f wave mp for a m for a day we also have codex and video dvd htv abc hd extra camp pro resin, dmx hd, abc entra there's about four hundred different code action more coming every week a kodak justice it's used inside photoshopped a kodak is used to convert light and sound the media now there's a wide variety of codex, each designed for a specific task. There's no single perfect kodak as jim described there's no perfect kodak for photoshopped apex yield really, really small images like gifts. They're perfect for the web, but they're terrible for editing because you don't have as good a color and you don't have the layers that you need to be able to deconstruct an image same thing with video some codex generates small file sizes some high color fidelity, some high performance editing, others low data rates we pick different codex for different jobs some code actually used because they can record to very slow ss sd hd cards and camera cards. What I'm starting to say codex include devi a b, c h t h dot to sixty four mp three j peg progress raw will talk more about co ducks and storage in a few minutes because you'll discover codex are in trouble to video editing the more you understand about codex at least to a certain point the mohr efficiently you're going to be able to edit jim before I'm movinto system configuration are we doing okay for questions? I'm going to give these guys in studio a chance to think about it as well yeah, we definitely have a handful of questions and larry, we have a long three days, so do feel free to just say, hey jim, we're going to cover that later, but there are a handful of things in here let's see, I want to go with, um from rgb pixel what is the process of moving older f c p projects and events into the new library format? Any recommendations there we're going to cover that to start the next section and then workflow proxies coming up importing media hold that thought, okay and I'm just looking these over larry, I think you're good to go everything else is really you're going to be covering as we go through the morning so I'm gonna hold on to these and the's air all good questions, questions and fortunately I've got time to cover them great, so we'll be there I said question more about whether you do manage libraries or external libraries you're going to cover that more later or question okay, you were talking about like for like my project might be best to do manage library s o if it's a small amount of media and not too much you recommended manage library but what if you have a lot of media like terror by the media or where do you draw the line to go? The external media even if you're not working with other people that's a really good question the short answer is if I'm only going to be using that media in that project, then I'll manage it all copied into the library even if it's ten terabytes provided I've got storage space for it if I plan to use that media across multiple projects, I'll still put it into a single when I just put the projects inside the single library, but as you're going to see here with the training that I do, I use the same demo files in a lot of different environments by keeping the demo files, which I use multiple times across multiple projects over multiple days and weeks by keeping it separately, I don't duplicate the media so in your case with your space shuttle with your space needle project putting that all in a single library is going to make management a whole lot easier if, on the other hand, just go back to the seahawks footage, you're gonna probably want to pull that footage for different games and used up multiple times in different situations they're having that media externally because it's going to be referenced in multiple libraries, multi all projects, multiple editors keeping it separate it's when I'm need to re use it over and over and over in different, unrelated events that I haven't even thought about yet, then I'd want to keep it external. My recommendation is especially for people starting out managed the media put it all in the library because it simplifies backup. It simplifies media management keep stuff from getting broken as you get pushed into I need to have this media be here I need to have it be there then as the second step is, you would get more comfortable with the software moving into external media so makes sense. Thank you. Yes, sir jim question from up here, doc art bark would like to know can you define the actual word kodak where it comes from, yes, kodak is a contraction for ceo compressor d c d compressor. It is a compressor de compressor kodak, which is used to take the essentially limitless light and limitless sound and compress it in a form that can be stored in binary numbers on the computer. And then d compress it out of the computer's binary numbers into something that we can perceive with our eyes and our ears. Kodak compressor decompressing.

Class Description


  • Import media into Apple Final Cut Pro X
  • Use its media management tools to organize your files






Apple Final Cut Pro X




  1. Introduction


  2. Key Terms


  3. System Configuration and RAID Storage


  4. Q&A with Creating an Efficient Workflow


  5. Interface and Media Management


  6. Importing Media Part 1


  7. Importing Media Part 2


  8. Ratings and Keywords


  9. Reviewing Clips for Edit


  10. Importing Clips


  11. Editing an Interview Demo


  12. Replace Edit and Timeline Index


  13. Compound Clips and Auditions


  1. Editing Review


  2. Trimming Part 1


  3. Trimming Part 2


  4. How We Hear


  5. Audio Key Terms with Q&A


  6. Audio Basics, Meters, and Inspector


  7. Audio Q&A


  8. Dual System Sound and Audio Analysis


  9. Multicam Editing Part 1


  10. Multicam Editing Part 2


  11. Transitions Part 1


  12. Transitions Part 2


  13. Formatting and Animating Titles


  1. Additional Effects


  2. Editing and Trimming Review


  3. Changing Speed of a Clip


  4. Inspector Effects


  5. The Effects Browsers and Generators


  6. Blend Modes


  7. Effects Q&A


  8. Simple Effects


  9. Intro to Color Correction


  10. Video Scopes


  11. Color Correcting for Video


  12. Color Correcting Skintone


  13. Color Correction Q&A


  14. Audio Effects Part 1


  15. Audio Effects Part 2


  16. Exporting and Sharing



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