Product Description

Final Cut Pro is the only nonlinear editing tool available that supports the entire range of editing formats. Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro is broken up into a collection of hands-on seminars that focus on teaching a specific aspect of Final Cut Pro. Dealing with version 4, each seminar begins with a lesson that covers the concepts and techniques contained in that seminar. Hofmann then guides the reader step-by-step by applying those concepts and techniques to edit an award winning short film, The Midnight Sun. With this book, users will learn to convert footage from many different sources, manage their footage, edit the content, adjust sound, and output to different sources. If the reader chooses to work through the book cover-to-cover, they will put together an entire short film that includes basic editing, audio, compositing, and various effects. However, if readers just wishes to learn a specific aspect of Final Cut Pro, they will be able to go right to the seminar that covers it, open the source files from the DVD, and pick it right up.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #892960 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 600 pages

From the Inside Flap

This is not only an attempt at teaching the software. To you it is also an attempt to teach you a technique for editing any project in such way that its goal is reached successfully. The same principles expressed during this tutorial apply to any project you might do, be it a narrative film (like we'll edit together here) or any other form of communication, entertainment, or even a commercial project, such as a television commercial or an industrial marketing video.

I've always felt that editing is very similar to creative writing. Editing is the final rewrite of the script. When editing a documentary, it is very common for the script to be written in the editorial stage. Certainly, when editing anything shot without a script, such as a wedding or other social event, it is in the editing bay where the story is written or rewritten from what actually happened. I believe there is story in every use of the medium. It's your job as an editor to write with pictures and sound the story that might or might not have been written before the shooting took place.

I've attempted to write not only for beginners, but for experienced users of Final Cut Pro as well. If you have some experience with Final Cut Pro or are coming from another editing application, you might find some of the material here familiar. I suggest, though, that you not skip areas of the tutorial you feel you know already. I've purposefully peppered this tutorial with techniques you might not have known Final Cut Pro can do, even in "basic" areas of the software. Just as important, the story-building techniques this book covers are cumulative. The technical editors of this book were amazed that there was still something to learn, even in areas of the software they thought they knew or had mastered. The text also includes a narrative on my cognitive process as I edited the film; hopefully the techniques I employed will help you with your projects when you make edit decisions. At the very least, I hope you gain the ability to know how to approach any project, by simply asking yourself the questions I asked and answered as I edited "The Midnight Sun." You'll not only get a solid foundation in how Final Cut Pro works, but you'll also see how to edit more successful programs. This is my hope for anyone who works with this book.

Having the basics down will serve you well as you learn to use the higher-end features of Final Cut Pro. This tutorial assumes that you've completed the earlier chapters. The first time you start using this tutorial, go through the entire tutorial from the beginning. If you get confused or don't understand an instruction, to check out how any edit or effect should look, simply open the finished sequence file that is included with the tutorial's project file to see how the finished step should look. When you have finished the tutorial, use the book as a reference in the future. Unlike a user's manual, this book is intended to serve as a way of learning the interface, because you need to learn it to finish editing the film.

I've included on the DVD all the available material that was used to edit "The Midnight Sun." Refreshingly, there wasn't a large shooting ratio. After you've finished the tutorial, I think it's a wonderful idea to reedit the program in the way you find most effective. Giving the same source material to different editors in my classrooms over past few years has opened my eyes to the fact there isn't a single way to edit a program or movie. The editor's personality and expressions show through the edit decisions each editor makes. It's exciting to see a different point of view, especially when it's expressed with the same source material. So by all means, play with the material, use different shots or shot order, and experiment with the footage to teach yourself how edit decisions affect the story's emotional impact. Enjoy yourself; let your imagination take you places in your mind you didn't know existed. I hope you surprise yourself.

I hope you learn to look at your work from a fresh perspective each time you start another editing session.

What Is Nonlinear Editing?

I think everyone knows the difference between typing on a typewriter and working with a word processor. Many of the differences between these two tasks are the same differences you find with editing with linear and nonlinear editing systems. Like using a typewriter (typing words in the order they must appear on the finished page), when you are editing in a linear editing system, you need to record from a source tape to an edited master tape each shot as it comes in the program and for the duration it lasts. If you make a change to these shots after you have edited past them, you have to rerecord every shot past that change to move it either later or earlier on your edited master. Linear editing is constrained to this method. If you decide to delete one of the shots (or erase a word), you have to record over it with the next shot and rerecord all the following shots (just as you would do if you wanted to change a sentence on a typewriter).

Nonlinear editing is more like working on a word processor. If you delete a word, all the rest of the words move over next to the last word you typed before the deleted word. You can do the same thing with shots on your computer in a disk-based nonlinear video editing program such as Final Cut Pro. If you want to move any shot or even groups of shots, you can do so without any of the penalties associated with linear editing. No rerecording is involved. You just delete the offending shot and play back the new sequence without it.

How is this accomplished? Nonlinear editors don't rerecord anything until you export the edited sequence from the computer to the output medium of your choice. This is much like printing a document from a word processing program. Nothing is complete until you've printed the document. The same is true of nonlinear editing. You can make changes anywhere in your program until you are ready to show it to the world. You can do this because you are simply asking the computer to play back the shots or parts of shots in the order you have programmed them with your editing software.

A Little History on the Art of Filmmaking

In the old days—about 1989—video editing was a matter of rerecording a source shot (from a camera master) onto a different tape (edited master) in position next to its previous shot, following that with another, and so on. As I have mentioned, this was called linear editing. The editor needed to think about the order and length of shots in the finished program before committing to an edit.

All of this was time-consuming and artistically limiting. The broadcast-quality video editing systems of this era could cost upward of $1 million at the high end and at least $250,000 to do much of anything other than a series of cuts. It was an endeavor that few could afford. These limiting cost/time factors made post production difficult and expensive. Post production drove up the cost of finished production, decreased the number of productions made in the first place, and basically left the option of communication through moving pictures only in the hands of producers with a lot of resources. Only companies with a large budget would even consider communicating this way, be it for an industrial program or a feature film.

To be precise, nonlinear editing started before linear editing. Film editing has always been a nonlinear process. If you wanted to take out the 50th shot, you just physically cut it out and added the remaining shots to the first 49 shots. You did not have to add shots to the film in any particular order, so it was nonlinear. Editing was—and is—fast and relatively intuitive. But it remained daunting to trim just a frame or two from a shot. The editor needed to save these frames, so the edit room became full of little pieces of film all over the place. The invention of film bins came along to help organize the apparent chaos.

For years, this is how film editors worked. Editing was viewed as a painstaking process that few could imagine doing. We either lived with the limitations of linear editing in video or hired assistants to keep track of all those frames of costly celluloid. If you worked in television and your medium was video, you didn't have a choice.

The Emergence of Nonlinear Editing

Tape-based, nonlinear video editing changed all this. Instead of rerecording shots, the computer-controlled systems of yesteryear played back shots from a series of videotape machines in the order the editor programmed them via a sequence timeline. Because this timeline was not a rerecording, the editor could change any shot and see the sequence played back with the new edit decision almost immediately. After initiating a playback command to the system, the editor waited for a series of videotape machines to cue to the first series of shots in the timeline. Machine 1 would go to shot 1, machine 2 would cue up shot 2, and so on. The timeline's influence on the art and craft of editing cannot be minimized. Suddenly, the speed at which edit decisions could be previewed accelerated tremendously.

Early nonlinear video editing systems were based on videotape. You needed six or eight source video machines loaded with identical copies of source footage— controlled by a computer to access shots in the programmed order—and you simply played them back as the editor intended. While one machine played back a shot, the other machines searched for the incoming shots. Shots could be dropped or added with relative ease, but the high cost of these systems still kept them away from lower-budget producers.

Other nonlinear video-based edit systems were based in videodisk source machines. To be fast enough to let you view a playback of a series of shots, the system had to have copies of the same material pressed onto multiple videodisks; that way, access time to each shot could be accomplished much like the aforementioned videotape-based systems. These videodisk-based systems were used mainly in Hollywood to edit high-end projects, and they were relatively expensive. Cutting with quality video pictures in a nonlinear fashion was accomplished, but the cost of editing didn't decrease much. The TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation was edited this way for a number of seasons.

In 1988, a company called EMC2 released the first nonlinear computer disk-based video editing station, based on a PC. A year later, Avid Technology came out with a more attractive one, based on a Macintosh computer. Both stations addressed the issues of not having to rerecord all the shots past a change in a sequence. In addition, they did not require a series of duplicated source material played back on multiple video players. Instead, the editor digitized footage from a videotape machine and "copied" this footage to a hard disk drive. This was cost-effective, but the quality of these early, digitized pictures playing back from hard disk drives was so poor that these pictures could be used only to make edit decisions. This process was called offline editing. The editor was free to make changes as often as he wished, making the decision-making process faster, easier, and less costly. As a result, lower-budget programs became better edited.

Video and film editors suddenly had extra time to try what-ifs. What if I tried it this way? What if I tried it that way? No longer worried about how long it might take to see a change, people tried more changes, and the art of program editing took a quantum leap in quality if for no other reason than the time savings involved. These first computer disk-based edit systems cost about $65,000 and could be used to create only edit decision lists, not finished programs. The editor still had to take his computer-generated edit decision list to those million-dollar rooms to create a finished program in a linear editing format. This was called an online edit session.

Nothing short of an editing revolution began to take place. Even though you couldn't really finish anything with these early computer disk-based nonlinear editors, you could spend the allotted time given a project to come up with a much better edit. And notably, the cost of these systems made them accessible to more projects. I bought the first Avid product delivered to Los Angeles that year. I saw video playing back on computer monitors at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Atlanta in April 1989 and was bowled over by the technology. I wasn't the only one, either. Avid's booth was about 25 feet by 25 feet, and I think the entire company was there hawking the product—all 12 of them. By 1995, Avid had the largest booth at the NAB convention. It was an amazing accomplishment.

Avid became the standard-issue equipment for many years. Thousands of editors everywhere started using Avid's equipment. Along the way, notable contenders such as Media 100 popped up, but never did the bulk of the industry really stray far from Avid's Media Composers and Film Composers. Costs went up as the resolution went up, but by 1994, with the advent of Avid's "high-enough resolution," finishing on these systems became commonplace. Yet, to really do it right, an editor needed to work with a system that ran about $125,000, plus video monitors and source video machines—still out of reach for the masses. Overall post costs went down a bit, but not enough to really cause a revolution in communication through motion pictures.

DV Cameras and Digital Editing Systems

The revolution in production really began with the introduction of digital video (DV) cameras and editing systems such as Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro, released in 1999, opened the doors to cost-effective, intuitively accomplished video editing for the masses. Quickly embraced by many professionals, Final Cut Pro's acceptance by thousands has been nothing short of a phenomenon. It is now possible to produce programming with broadcast-quality pictures shot with cameras that cost less than a new luxury car. For as little as $7,000 or less, communicators, educators, entertainers, and even just excited amateurs can produce feature-length programs on their desktops with broadcast-quality pictures.

The Benefits of Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro's intuitive interface led me to forsake far more expensive edit stations when I realized it let me accomplish the vast percentage of the work I needed to do with speed and efficiency. Final Cut Pro is a mature program whose widespread acceptance by editors, directors, and producers everywhere has made it a hit in the nonlinear editor (NLE) world. It can feel as comfortable as an old shoe after the first and only learning curve is past. Most importantly, Final Cut Pro is not tied to proprietary hardware other than Macintosh. It's both hardware- and resolution-independent. With off-the-shelf hardware additions, not only can you finish an uncompressed 4:3 top-of-the-line National Television System Committee (NTSC) or Phase Alternating Line (PAL) video project, you can even finish an HDTV-quality program. An HDTV editing station for less than half the cost of that first Avid. Amazing.

One thing that's happened to me is that I no longer have to maintain an office with an expensive NLE in it. For the first time in more than 25 years, I work completely from home. Final Cut Pro has made this possible. I always felt it best to have my own offline editing equipment. Loving the freedom and creativity offered by nonlinear editing, I owned systems that required that I keep them in an office outside my home. These systems' expensive upkeep and payments required that they had to be shared with other editors. Or they were just too large to keep at home. My whole lifestyle changed when I bought my first Final Cut Pro system. My wife is no longer an "editor's widow," and I've become better acquainted with my children. Dad no longer comes home late after everyone has gone to bed. I'm sure my story isn't unique.

The Future of Filmmaking

What might the future hold? What will we do with all this super low-cost, high- quality equipment? Whenever someone tells me the future will be this way or that way, I'm skeptical. But one thing is for sure. I doubt that anyone would disagree that a picture is worth a thousand words, and moving pictures tell you even more. With generations having been weaned on moving images transmitted via television, it's become more than just entertainment. Never forget that more than 80% of interpersonal communication is nonverbal. What we see communicates more than what we read or hear. It's become the most successful and reliable medium of information gathering and dissemination.

With that point in mind, think of the future possibilities that information, education, marketing, and entertainment hold. Videophones are a given (witness the live coverage of the Iraqi war), but the advent of the Internet is already revealing new and exciting pathways for video programs to be distributed. Whether these productions are commercial, educational, or entertaining, not only has the cost of production come down, but extremely low-cost worldwide distribution is already taking place. What will change the most is not what we produce as much as how many people produce. I can't imagine what some folks are thinking up, but no doubt they wouldn't even consider it without the recent cost savings represented by products such as Final Cut Pro.

With more production comes more distribution and more use of the medium in general. In fact, I see the largest growth in information sharing via video than at any time in its history. How about birthday greetings transmitted via wireless Internet to Dick Tracy-style watches? It's all accessible; it's all possible.

No one doubts that the Internet is the most important communication advancement since the printing press. People are viewing video production with it now. With the Internet's broadband capabilities, streaming content created by desktop video production systems is becoming an everyday event. Production is begetting more production. For example, if one company puts a marketing video on the Internet, its competitor might put one up too, if for no other reason than to stay competitive. I've seen this happen.

All this new distribution of video content is being accomplished with equipment at the lowest cost-to-quality ratio in the history of video production. Better stated, all this is being made possible and, in fact, is happening because of these new and inexpensive production and distribution systems. Final Cut Pro is leading the way. Editing on a laptop computer anywhere on the planet is possible at a cost less than yesteryear's basic professional videotape machine.

Files Created and Used by Final Cut Pro

Three basic files are created by editing with Final Cut Pro. The first is the project file. This is where all your logging and editing decisions are stored. The project file is best kept on your startup disk as opposed to your media disk so that you can have the benefit of more than one disk drive working for you. With only this file, you can recapture/digitize all the footage again some other time, on some other machine, or in a higher resolution. It is a database of your clips' time code, logging information such as reel or tape names, and your edit decisions.

The second major type of file created by Final Cut Pro is a media file. It contains the pictures and sound files you edit your program from. These files are created when you capture or digitize footage with Final Cut Pro. They are QuickTime movies for the most part. Media files can be quite large, and for best performance, they should be kept on a disk separate from your startup disk. You will learn more about this in Chapter 1, "Essential Equipment."

The last major type of file created by Final Cut Pro is a render file. This file is a composite of some sort. A composite is two or more images combined into one. This type of file is similar to a media file. Render files are large because they are picture or sound files. These files, too, should be kept on your media drive because they are media files, and you need to have a fast and dedicated drive to play them back.

The Overall Process of Editing in Final Cut Pro

When you use Final Cut Pro to edit a program, the first file you create is the project file. It contains references to media files and provides the interface to control video machines from which you capture or digitize source material for use in your program. These media files are represented as clips within the project file. A clip in Final Cut Pro is a "pointer" file to the actual QuickTime movie or other computer-generated file, like a Photoshop file. It's not the file itself; it's a reference to it, stored as reference information within your project file.

After deciding which video resolution you will work with, the project file is where you work until you are finished editing. Think of the process like this:

1. Create a project.

2. Copy your footage into your computer.

3. Import footage to your project file by means of reference files (clips). Most of the time, this is part of the logging and capturing process.

4. Cut and paste your clips much like a word processor does with words (keeping this edit decision information in your project file as well).

5. Record it back out to your master tape, or export it as a movie file for use on DVDs, CDs, or the web.

6. Delete the large media files (so that you free up disk space to work with a new project), keeping the project file as a backup in case you want to recapture footage later and restore your program to your computer.

This process is nondestructive in nature. This means that the captured footage on your computer is not modified in any way during the process. For example, if you changed the color characteristics of a given shot, the computer would not alter your original file in any way. You might have to render this change, and the computer would create another media file, which is a copy of the original with the color corrections. Rest assured that if all is set up properly and you have a fast-enough Mac, you won't have to render every file or effect you decide to use in your program. When you play your edited sequence, Final Cut Pro plays this rendered file instead of the original media file only if you have programmed a change in that original file's appearance and your computer isn't fast enough to create this new effect without rendering it to a new media file. Thus, if you add a cross-dissolve from one shot to another, only the dissolve might need to be rendered.

What you create with Final Cut Pro is really a list of commands instructing the computer to play back specific files in a specific order, whether they are the original media files or the newer, modified rendered files. This is why it's best to keep your project files on a physically different disk drive than the one your media files are played back on. You get the benefit of more than one disk drive accessing and playing your program.

After you've edited your program and you are satisfied, you go through a process of recording this finished program on a videotape, or you output compressed media files for use on the web, a DVD, or a CD (or even all of these for the same program). Final Cut Pro 4 adds a new program to its arsenal of tools called Compressor for the creation of these distribution files.

Different Macintoshes and Real-Time Effects

One thing holds true with most digital video editors. Faster computers make for a more satisfying editing experience. This is more relevant in Final Cut Pro 4 than in previous releases. With this release of Final Cut Pro, Apple has "loosened" the reigns on real-time effects. Real-time effects are any effect or set of effects that you don't have to render in order to see the effect's playback.

The faster and more powerful the CPU, disk drives, and video display card you have installed on your Macintosh, the more real-time effects you can experience. Not only can you see more in real time, but you render considerably faster, too. In a professional situation, this can become crucial.

You can use many combinations of real-time effects (those listed in bold type in Final Cut Pro) and still have real-time playback, depending on the speed and number of processors in your computer. Final Cut Pro 4's new rendering engine allows you to attempt to play back any number of layers of real-time video and audio effects. Computers with dual processors have a definite performance advantage over those with single processors. Each effects operation you apply to a clip or layers of clips makes more (or fewer) demands on your computer's processing capabilities, depending on the effect (some make more demands on your computer than others). When the total processing demands of all combined effects exceed your system's capabilities, you need to render before you can play back.

Each user needs to experiment to see where the threshold of his or her computer makes it necessary for a render to take place.

Learning OS X

You must run OS X to even install Final Cut Pro 4. In fact, you must be running system 10.2.5 or later. Apple's new operating system is no less than a triumph. It's easy to learn and far more stable than any of its predecessors. I highly recommend that you learn this OS and use it to run all your Macintosh applications. OS X is more intuitive, it manages your memory much better than earlier versions, and it's much easier on the eyes. I recommend that you buy a book on OS X and learn how to use it. You will be a better editor and technician for it. Because this is a highly technical field of endeavor, your skills as an editor will be greatly enhanced by your knowledge of your computer and how its operating system works.

Let me give you a scenario. You are working on an edit for a client who is sitting with you in your editing bay. Your computer acts up, or one of its settings is not allowing you to do the work at hand. Rather than wait for tech support, which might come too late, your knowledge of how your operating system works comes to the rescue. Your client is impressed. As desktop video editors proliferate (and they are by the thousands these days), editors who have a working technical knowledge of their systems will be in high demand. Clients will trust that you can get the work done on time, and within budget, if they also know that your computer skills are top-notch. This means repeat and referral business for you. Most of the business I've garnered over the past 25 years or so came to me from repeat and referrals. That's just how show business works.

About the Project

Throughout this book, we'll edit an entire dramatic short film together. Based on Robert W. Service's poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," "The Midnight Sun" is a 12-minute story. Shot entirely in Colorado on 16mm film, the story is one of those "wild-west ghost stories" that occupy the American literary tradition. I've always loved surprise endings, and this film has a good one. I also hope to give you some pointers on organizing your work in the most convenient and efficient way possible, which will carry over into your future projects for the rest of your editing experience on any nonlinear platform. I also hope to impart some editing aesthetics to help you learn to make your contribution to the storytelling process more valuable to you or your clients in your editorial future.

We'll tell our story with pictures, composites, voice-over, sound sync, dialog, wild sound, a Foley track, and, of course, music. This sounds like a lot of audio tracks, but in reality, the pictures tell the story in this movie. We'll use jump cuts, L cuts, matching action cuts, and transitional effects to aid this process. We even have to do some compositing to keep our producer's budget down. In short, you'll learn the mechanics of Final Cut Pro and how to use them most effectively with any project.

In all, there are about 300 edits to program. You'll work with all the major tools, including color correction, keys, titles, filters, audio filters, and more to make the finished movie.

I hope it's as entertaining for you to edit as it was for me.

Storytelling Without Much Dialog

Motion pictures are called that because the most important aspect of this medium is what we see. It's not that what we hear is unimportant—it is. However, what is shown visually has more impact on the viewer's emotions than what he hears. What the viewer hears should enhance what he sees. First and foremost, we'll edit the picture track for this reason. As an editor, your job is to perform the final rewrite of the script. It's the editor's responsibility to enhance what was originally written and what was originally shot.

Any film needs to be edited visually to the story's rhythm. This story-enhancing rhythm also is part of any video program. Even a documentary or marketing program needs to find its rhythm and never stray from its story. Pacing and timing are everything in storytelling with motion pictures, just as they are with a standup comedian, Shakespearian tragic actor, or great cellist or rock guitarist. What fascinates and engages us much of the time is not just what the story is about, but how it is told. This is really evident in the telling of a joke. We've all seen two people who tell the same joke, where one person is funny and the other person is not. It's all in the timing, the pacing, the rhythm of the delivery, and the emotion displayed.

The editor holds the keys to the timing of every event we see and hear in any motion picture. I will pass on some tips on achieving the critical knowledge of what, when, where, and how to make that cut.

I've always thought that moving pictures cut together with emphasis on story are an invaluable asset to a finished project, whether it's a feature film, instructional video, wedding video, TV spot, marketing video, or something else. The medium is one of pictures and sound, and it's the editor's province to pull all these elements together in a way that enhances the story. The editor has as much impact on the project's success as the writer's vision and the director's execution of it, because the editor has much to do with setting the project's pacing, timing, and rhythm. In this vein, the project hopefully will teach you not only which buttons to push, but when to make an effective and story-enhancing edit, whether it is a picture or a sound edit.

Who Is This Book For and How Do You Use It?

From reading literally thousands of posts, and directly teaching hundreds of people Final Cut Pro and editing esthetics over the past few years, I've come to a conclusion that learning by doing is the quickest way to master Final Cut Pro (and it's just plain more fun). After you've mastered the tool, it becomes much more enjoyable to express yourself through your edit decisions. Furthermore, there are consistent areas or concepts that seem to give new editors and even experienced editors problems grasping. So in response to this, I wrote this tutorial. It's really for any editor who would like to learn a logical way to make edit decisions, as well as expedient ways to perform them with Final Cut Pro. In many cases, I've talked about workflow that would apply to any editing application, as they are as similar as they are dissimilar.

Not only is this then an attempt at teaching the software to you, it is also an attempt to teach you a technique for editing any project in such way that its goal will be reached successfully. The same principles expressed during this tutorial will apply to any project you may do, be it a narrative film (like we'll edit together here) or any other form of communication, entertainment, or even a commercial project, like a television commercial or an industrial marketing video.

I've always felt that editing was very similar to creative writing. Editing is the final rewrite of the script. When editing a documentary, it is very common for editorial to be where the script is actually written. Certainly, when editing anything shot without a script such as a wedding or other social event of some kind, it is in the editing bay where the story is written. I believe there is story in every use of the medium. It's your job as an editor to write with pictures and sound the story that may or may not have been written before the shooting took place.

I've attempted to write not only for a beginner, but for experienced users of Final Cut Pro as well. If you've some experience with Final Cut Pro or are coming from another editing application, you may find some of the material here already familiar. I suggest though, that you don't skip areas of the tutorial that you feel you know already. I've purposefully peppered the entire tutorial with techniques that you may have not known that Final Cut Pro could do even in what would be considered "basic" areas of the software, and just as important, the discussion of the story-building techniques the book covers, are cumulative. The technical editors of this book were amazed that there was still something to learn even in areas of the software that they suspected that they had previously known or mastered. The text also includes a narrative on what my cognitive process was as I edited the film; hopefully the techniques that I employed will help you with your projects when making edit decisions. At the very least I hope you gain the ability to know how to approach any project you may ever do, by simply asking yourself the questions that I asked and answered to myself as I edited "The Midnight Sun." You'll not only get a solid foundation in how Final Cut Pro works, but how to edit more successful programs at the same time is my hope for anyone who works with this book.

Having the basics down will serve you well as you learn to use the higher end features of Final Cut Pro and this entire tutorial assumes that you've completed the earlier chapters. The first time you start using this tutorial, go through the entire tutorial from the beginning. If you get confused or don't understand an instruction, to check out the way any edit or effect should look, simply open the finished sequence file that is included with the tutorial's project file to see how the finished step should be. When you have finished the tutorial, use the book as a reference in the future. Unlike a user's manual, this book is intended to serve as a way of learning the interface as you need to learn it to finish editing the film.

I've included all of the available material that was used to edit "The Midnight Sun" on the DVD. Refreshingly, there wasn't a large shooting ratio Once you've finished the tutorial, I think it's a wonderful idea to re-edit the program the way that you find the most effective. Giving the same source material to different editors in my classrooms over past few years has opened my eyes to the fact there isn't a single way to edit a program or movie. The personality and expressions of the editor will show through the edit decisions each editor makes, and it's exciting to see a different point of view especially when expressed with the same source material. So by all means, play with the material, use different shots or shot order and experiment with the footage to teach yourself just how edit decisions affect the emotional impact of this story. Enjoy yourself; let your imagination take you places you simply didn't cognitively realize that existed in your mind. I hope you surprise yourself.

I hope you learn to look at your work from a fresh perspective each time you start another editing session.

What's on the DVD

The DVD contains all the pictures and sound files that you'll use to edit "The Midnight Sun." It also contains some goodies I've found to share with you. Be sure to look in the Goodies folder. Also included is the complete and finished sequence of the movie you'll edit step by step. It's always available to refer to or use when you get to any phase of the editing process.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

From the Back Cover

Final Cut Pro is the only nonlinear editing tool available that supports the entire range of editing formats. Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro is broken up into a collection of hands-on seminars that focus on teaching a specific aspect of Final Cut Pro. Dealing with version 4, each seminar begins with a lesson that covers the concepts and techniques contained in that seminar. Hofmann then guides the reader step-by-step by applying those concepts and techniques to edit an award winning short film, The Midnight Sun. With this book, users will learn to convert footage from many different sources, manage their footage, edit the content, adjust sound, and output to different sources. If the reader chooses to work through the book cover-to-cover, they will put together an entire short film that includes basic editing, audio, compositing, and various effects. However, if readers just wishes to learn a specific aspect of Final Cut Pro, they will be able to go right to the seminar that covers it, open the source files from the DVD, and pick it right up.

About the Author

During his 33-year show business career, Jerry Hofmann has become an award-winning theatrical actor, TV and film editor, writer, director, and producer.

His show business career began when he was 5. He was a singer, dancer, pianist, and actor. He was performing professionally by the time he was 18. For the next 10 years, he wrote, directed, and performed in more than 2,000 live sold-out theatrical performances that he coproduced with his wife of now 29 years.

In 1978, Hofmann and his wife moved from Colorado to Los Angeles. There, he began his odyssey in video production, selling equipment for the largest color broadcast equipment VAR in LA. His territory was Burbank and Hollywood. This experience gave him valuable insight into new methods of telling stories with mass communication technologies.

He founded his first television production company in Los Angeles in 1983. During the next eight years, he produced hundreds of TV commercials and industrial films. His clients ranged from Fortune 500 companies to Hollywood studios and advertising agencies.

In 1989, Hofmann obtained one of the first Avid nonlinear disk-based editors in Los Angeles and became a pioneer in the technology. He has been a beta tester for Avid Technology over the years, helping them develop one of the world's premier non- linear editing solutions.

In 1993, he relocated to Colorado to raise his growing family. He edited the only feature film shot there that year and freelanced as an Avid editor, director, and producer along the front range of the Rockies. He has produced and directed more than 600 projects and has edited many more.

In 1999, Hofmann started teaching part-time at the Colorado Film and Video Instructional Studios, a facility used by the University of Colorado and Aurora Community College. There are 18 Final Cut Pro bays in his classroom and another 24 nonlinear editing bays in the facility. At CFVI, he has post-supervised hundreds of short films produced by his students.

Currently, he has his own company, jlh productions, and he is a partner in Bat-Mann Productions, both located in Denver, Colorado.

Hofmann is a team leader in the Final Cut Pro forum at http://www.creativecow.net. He also is a designated helper in Apple Computer's Final Cut Pro discussion group and is a frequent visitor at 2-Pop's discussion groups.

He received a BA in theater and a BA in communications (with emphasis on TV and film production) from the University of Denver.

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Customer Reviews

Very Poorly Written
Hofmann does know editing, but he is an absolutely awful writer. Misplaced modifers and convolution abound. Six months after buying this, when I do try to refer to it, I find myself re-reading and re-reading and re-reading the same sentences in an effort to understand him - just like I did months ago when I finally gave up and put the book on a shelf. There are many better FCP books to buy.

EXCELLENT BOOK!!!
Jerry Hofmann truly is one of the world's leading experts on Final Cut Pro

His documentation of work is evident within the FCP User Group forums on apple.com (www.apple.com/support - Final Cut Pro Discussions)

I believe that he has been working upon the book for a while now, and it shows! The lessons are excellent and everything is clearly explained ----- if there is something that you have difficulty understanding, I'm sure he'll be happy to address your prob on the apple discussion boards

otherwise, I recommend the book to every type of FCP user! ---- beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc ----- the tips and lessons within the book are worth it alone! Everyone can take away a good lesson from this book, and knowning that it comes from the world's leading FCP genius, only makes it more worthwhile!

A great book from a masterful communicator
Jerry Hofmann is one of the most respected FCP experts in the world, both teaching at the University of Colorado at Denver and holding the distinction of being the top posting guru at both Creativecow.net and Apple.com's Final Cut Pro forums. This is the only book available in which you get to build a complete movie from start to finish. You get all the media files on the book's DVD-ROM disc and by working through the chapters, you will actually understand the process and rationale behind the editing process -- as well as learning the basics of how FCP works. This is unique among all the FCP books we've seen on the market. (You won't find this feature in any other NLE book that we know of for any other editing package.) You also end up creating a 21 layer composite by the end of the book, (the production company logo that ends the film) -- and to learn this type of information, you would have to buy both books 1 & 2 in the Apple Pro series books. Media Manager is also covered in this book, a powerful process that allows editors to both save time and work in the preferred methodology of major editing pros such as Walter Murch, editor of the FCP-edited 'Cold Mountain' film with Nicole Kidman. This is not just a basic entry-level book on how FCP works -- this book will teach you not only how FCP works and the various function keys, etc., but more importantly, how these processes work together to make you an editor. This is not just a 'How To' book but also includes the 'Why' of the editing process. This entire book is one inter-woven tutorial, broken up into topical sections, and is a rich 'Hands-On' experience yielding a finished film as your destination. A great piece of work, Jerry.

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net