Overview

What's so good about it is it is uncompromisingly powerful. The most insanely powerful application for under a thousand bucks.

STEVE MARTIN
APPLE CERTIFIED TRAINER

Any film is literally built. Just as a novel will have chapters and subplots, each and every film has an underlying structure. The raw components needed to build the film are planned for in the scripting stage, gathered while filming and structured during editing.

I liken the filmmaking process to making a set of chopsticks from a tree-trunk. An entire tree can be whittled away to leave nothing remaining other than two small pieces of wood these are the chopsticks. Film or video is the same. A mountain of footage is acquired and throughout the editing process this footage is chopped down to a fraction of its original size to leave a small, yet refined, remnant of the original content.

In simple terms editing is nothing more than putting shots and sounds together. In reality it is much more than this. It is both a technical and a creative process it is also intuitive. Anyone can string words together, but not everyone is able to write a good story or a good book without a sound knowledge of language. Editing is similar.

There are several key methods of editing with Final Cut Pro. Of these the most important to understand are Insert and Overwrite Editing. While there are other methods available such as Replace Editing, Fit to Fill and Superimpose, provided you understand Insert and Overwrite...