Final Cut Pro 3 - Getting Started

Final Cut Pro 3 is powerful because of its versatility, it packs tons of popular/professional video editing tools into one software and organizes it so the interface is easy to operate. It allows you to tailor to your own needs. It offers multiple ways to do your work, so you can use it in a way that fits the way you think and edit.

80/20 rule

Final Cut Pro follows the 80/20 rule. You will use about 20 percent of it's features 80 percent of the time, and the other 80 percent only 20 percent of the time.

Think of it as a road map. It's like a world atlas but you don't need to memorize the whole thing to get directions from Tacoma to Ellensburg. Just use what you need.

Get well grounded in the basics first, then build on those skills as a foundation.

 

Setting Initial Preferences (just to get started)

Select Edit>Preferences

The first tab is the General Tab.

• Set up for 15 levels of Undo
• When you are rendering a complicated series of effects, turn off the Autosave Vault
  • otherwise it can cause the program to freeze or crash while rendering.

Click the Scratch Disks tab

• Ideally, you will have a separate hard drive or partition for your FCP media, so you will need to make sure the correct drive is sele4cted.
• Click the 'Set' button and choose your disk there.