I swear to God I just saw the same number of hands go up. Okay, that's just creeping me out. All right, so as I said in the first session, my demonstration today, including the last session, is one single project that I'm building. In the last session, which was introduction to Final Cut Pro, I touched on the basics and invariably went a little bit deeper than I probably needed to on a lot of those things just because there's a lot of interest in it.

This time, I'm working with the same project. I'm going to spend a lot more time focusing on the more advanced stuff, and I'm going to try and go through the more basic stuff much more quickly. Clearly, there's going to be a bit of overlap, potentially even a bit more overlap than I said the first time because there were so many advanced questions in the first session.

Hopefully, I won't put anybody to sleep here talking about some of the same stuff over again. But with that said, let's just go ahead and get going. So, advanced Final Cut Pro, that's me, Joseph Linaschke. I'm the technical marketing manager at Apple for the Pro Apps Marketing Group.

What that means is my team is responsible for all the demo content that goes out worldwide. We also do all the presentations, so if you go to NAB or Macworld and see a Pro Apps demonstration or the upcoming SIGGRAPH, that's us. So, that's my background and where I come from and why I might maybe potentially know what I'm talking about, although no promises.

All right, Apple, innovation. This is what obviously Apple is all about, and of course one of our most recent innovations is Final Cut Pro HD, high definition. Now, Final Cut Pro HD is the newest version. It's version 4.5, and it is the one that gives you access to the new HD format, DVC Pro HD. And I'll get into quite a bit more on that in just a moment. But just a very quick little introduction here. Over a quarter of a million Final Cut editors out there.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but how many people are using Final Cut Pro? Awesome. How many aren't? If I see the same number of hands, I quit. All right, so maybe we'll get a few converts out of this. So a quarter of a million editors out there, and a lot of them have actually paid for it, which is great.

So who's using it? Places like ABC, KTVX, and ABC affiliate. They use it for all their news broadcasts. Obviously this is just a tiny little sampling of where it's being used. But an example in the broadcast space, an example in Hollywood, Lady Killers, one of the more recent Coen Brothers films, was cut on Final Cut Pro. Also Cold Mountain, a massive one, a Cate Award nominee, didn't quite make it but almost there, beat out by Lord of the Rings, yeah couldn't compete with that, was edited with Final Cut Pro. That's Lady Killers and Cold Mountain.

Television show Nib Tuck is edited with Final Cut Pro. They have a format or a workflow format that starts from film. They actually shoot on 35mm film, telecine that to an uncompressed HD format, and then take that down to DigiBeta and then to DV for editing, and then they relink back to their DigiBeta for final broadcast. And that means that in the future, if they manage to get syndication for HD broadcast, they can go back and relink or recut to the original HD tapes and broadcast the same show in HD.

So that's one of the advantages of Final Cut Pro, giving the ability to go from format to format like that. It's the same app the whole way through. So let's take a quick look at a video, and then we will come back to slides this time. This video is something we produced for NAB this year. This is a sampling of what our customers are doing with all of the Pro products. So this is Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Logic, and this is the video that introduced Motion.

Let's go back to the slides, please. We absolutely love that piece. It was produced for us right before NAB, as I said, obviously highlighting all the Pro apps. One of the questions I get a lot is, was that produced entirely with Apple software, or was it all Final Cut and Shake and Motion and so on? And the answer is no.

No, we didn't. It was a lot of--it was Cut and Final Cut, and Motion was used, and Shake was used, and so on. But we also used a lot of third-party apps. The only reason I bring that up is to highlight to you guys, as our third-party developers, that this is really important. You know, we really need your guys' stuff.

After Effects is using this, Photoshop is some Illustrator work, and tons of stuff from Adobe, tons of other smaller third-party company filters and plug-ins and so on were used in there. So it really is spread throughout. So I say that just so that you don't look at something like that and think, "Well, what am I doing?" You are doing the stuff that allows us to do things like that. So that's awesome.

All right, so let's get into, on the topic of third-party, some of the third-party developers on the hardware side of Final Cut Pro. Companies like AJA, Aurora, Blackmagic Design, and Pinnacle Systems are all making third-party capture cards for Final Cut Pro. Now, Final Cut Pro on its own is, without anything else, up until recently, was DV only, right? You had to have some kind of third-party capture card to get other formats in there besides DV, whether it was standard definition uncompressed or high definition uncompressed, required a third-party capture card.

Now, with Final Cut Pro HD, things changed a little bit because now we have the ability to capture HD over FireWire, but that's a very specific format of HD, and I will talk about that a little bit more in a moment. That does not mean that all these third-party cards are no longer relevant. In fact, they're extremely relevant.

If you're doing standard definition, first of all, you still require a standard definition card. If you want to capture standard definition uncompressed, AJA makes a couple of options. They have the Kona SD card, SD for standard def. They also have the IO, which is a great FireWire box that allows you to capture standard definition, 8 and 10 bit uncompressed over FireWire, which is just awesome, and that's something that we released at NAB, I guess that must have been last year.

Aurora makes a card that specifically designed to handle 24 frame per second editing. So if you're doing a film edit at 24 frames per second, this will allow you to view your film edit on an NTSC monitor at 30 frames per second, and a true NTSC at true 30 frames, and it'll do that pull-up automatically so that you have that type of a preview on the NTSC monitor.

Blackmagic Design is making some very, very cost-effective capture cards, very simple, not a whole lot to them, simply SDI, that's a serial digital interface, in and out. Very low cost, and that's basically all it does is it gives you digital interface in and out. If you want analog interfaces, you need to add options onto it, but if you're just looking for serial digital, it's quite possibly the lowest cost way to go.

And then Pinnacle's kind of the other side of the game there. They have one of the more higher costing cards, but obviously with that you get a lot of features. So their standard definition card gives you a huge amount of real-time effects. They also have an HD option, where you have an HD breakout box that gives you the ability to capture uncompressed high definition.

Now someone had asked me beforehand, with the Final Cut Pro HD, does that mean they no longer need their Pinnacle HD card? Well no, because Final Cut Pro HD, the whole thing about HD in there is the Panasonic DVC Pro HD format. And again, I'll touch more on that in a moment, but what I want to mention here is that all of our current, well not all, but the current HD cards from Pinnacle and from AJA will allow you to convert HD cam footage on capture into DVC Pro HD, which means you can now edit it in real-time in Final Cut Pro software only. So these cards are still very viable. If you're not shooting with a Panasonic camera, you can still use the other HD formats, convert using these cards into the native DVC Pro HD format.

Some of the other stuff that goes on with Final Cut Pro, obviously things like QuickTime and FireWire, huge technologies in there. XML support, that's our big third-party link to get out to the outside world. XML is a way to export and import in Final Cut Pro, and just about anything can happen when you go down that road.

Discreet, obviously, does things like combustion, and we work with combustion via XML. Companies like the BBC using it. And then Grass Valley is one of our more recent partners, and back at NAB, we had this ad running all over the place. What's a file between friends? Once again, using the XML architecture, we're able to transfer files or projects from Final Cut Pro into the Grass Valley news edit system for immediate broadcast to air. So you now have an end-to-end solution that we give you editing in the field out to broadcast. So you now have an end-to-end solution that we give you editing in the field out to broadcast. all working together.

So HD, once again, is what Final Cut Pro HD is all about. Now just to clarify, Final Cut Pro HD does not lose any of the previous features. It still has DV editing, standard definition, uncompressed, and so on. In fact, Final Cut Pro has pretty much always done HD. The only reason we added HD under the name on this was to really bore home the fact that we are talking about this new real-time HD format.

Now let's talk for a moment about standard uncompressed HD editing, the way that you're used to working before Final Cut Pro HD. You shoot in a camera-native format that is either HD cam or DVC Pro HD. These are the two standard HD formats out there. HD cam is from Sony, DVC Pro HD is from Panasonic, and they are the makers of the two primary digital HD cameras in the world. You would then capture that into Final Cut Pro using one of the cards that we mentioned earlier, but you would capture it into an uncompressed space. Now that has made sense.

In that process, you're effectively decompressing the image, but you're not actually adding anything to it. So what happens is a lot of people missed out on the fact that HD tapes are not uncompressed. The footage that goes on the tapes is just like DV. DV is not uncompressed. It's a 4 or 5 to 1 compression. So you have a massive amount of compression that's happening in the camera before it ever goes to tape.

So if you take this HD cam or DVC Pro HD tape and you capture it into an uncompressed space, you're not gaining anything. You're actually taking that, moving it into an uncompressed space. And by the time you get back to tape, you will have suffered a generational loss.

So the next step in here, of course, is to go back to tape, so into your camera native HD, and that recompress, and there's where your generational loss is happening. Now that's just a silly way to go. We'll come back to kind of the new solution to that in a moment. While I'm talking about uncompressed, I want to talk about the hardware requirements.

Obviously, a very high-powered G5, a ton of storage, for example, the XServe RAID or any other RAID solution out there. You need a third-party capture card, the Kona card, the Pinnacle card, and so on. And you need a HD broadcast monitor. These things don't come cheap. They run about $40,000 to $60,000, depending on your options, if that's for a TV.

of expensive. I know, it's crazy. And this is what you need to do uncompressed high definition editing. Well, let's go back to the way that we were talking about it. And slide--oh, this is right. Okay. So, this is the way that it used to be, right? Uncompressing and going back to the native HD format, but what we've done is we've replaced that entire process with a FireWire cable. This is FireWire A, the standard default every single Mac ships with FireWire A type of a FireWire. Not B, not the really fast stuff, standard FireWire. It's unbelievable that we can actually do HD over FireWire.

Now, how in the heck does that work? Well, what it does mean before we get into how it works, it means that your hardware requirements change dramatically. G5, you can now capture and edit from an internal drive using FireWire and using the new DVI video out function, you can actually preview on an Apple Cinema display.

Now, this is not a color accurate display for broadcast. It's an RGB versus YUV, right? So, this means that you cannot do your final color correction on this. But it does mean that you can outfit a studio with ten HD editors and you can actually do your final color correction on this.

So, you can have a studio with ten HD editors, each with their own HD monitor and not break the bank. You can have just one of those $60,000 monitors in your color correction station and everybody else gets one of these monitors to be able to preview their HD at full screen.

So, that's some of the way we've saved on the cost on there. Let's go back to the native DVC-Pro-HD format and why this works over FireWire. So, first of all, it is camera native. There's no recompression. I touched on that. We're shooting in DVC-Pro-HD, capturing DVC-Pro-HD, editing DVC-Pro-HD. So, there's no recompression.

You can also use the same format. This is the same HD that you've been using since day one. 422, color space, YUV, it's a professional HD format. You also have multiple sizes and frame rate options with the Panasonic DVC-Pro-HD codec, including 1080i, which is 1920 by 1080, 720p, 720 by 1280, 24, 30 and 60 frames per second frame rates.

And actually, the Panasonic camera, something called the VariCam, allows you to alter that frame rate on the fly. Pretty cool feature of that. The data rates of this HD is a surprisingly low 5.8 to 5.9. So, that's, you know, a pretty good feature. So, you can actually use that. You can also use the Panasonic 5.8 to 14 megabytes per second. You're thinking, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense.

DV is only like 6 or 5 or something like that. How can this be HD? Again, it's a compressed format. Before you think, I don't want to compress my footage, remember what I was saying earlier. It's already compressed. That's how it was shot to tape. In fact, if you wanted to shoot true uncompressed HD, there is no tape format in the world for that. D5 is the traditionally highest quality HD tape format. A D5 is compressed 2 to 1.

Most people consider that to be the highest quality and it's actually compressed. The only way to shoot, well, let me back up for a second. There actually was a deck produced that was fully uncompressed. It's called a D6. There's like three of them in the world and George Lucas has all of them.

We don't even talk about that. If you want to shoot truly uncompressed HD, the only way to do it is to take a camera with an HD-SDI output and plug it straight into a G5 with two XRV raids striped together because you need that much bandwidth and you capture straight to disc. We've done it. It's really cool. It looks great, but at any for everybody and it sure as heck isn't portable. That is not the traditional way to go. You shoot to tape and off you go. All right.

Obviously, this is all a huge breakthrough in value. You have a HD editing system that essentially costs less than $5,000. That including the deck and the camera, but we're not talking about shooting, we're talking about editing. So under $5,000, you have everything you need to edit high-definition video.

The price of this thing, well, $9.99 for Final Cut Pro HD, and a $3.99 upgrade from the previous versions, but it is a free upgrade for Final Cut Pro 4 users. I had somebody ask me earlier, I just bought 4, now you have 4 HD. It's the same thing. Just run software update, it'll download, and off you go. Alright, enough of that. Let's get into the good stuff.

Any questions? Oh, by the way, question-wise, feel free to shout out questions while we're going here. We have a total of 75 minutes. I've got 55 minutes left in this demo. I can save time at the end for Q&A, which I'm going to at least save like five minutes, but we can save more than that.

But I encourage you to shout out questions as they come up. If you're close to the microphone and you can step up to it, great. If not, just shout it out at me and I'll repeat the question so that it can be recorded onto tape. But feel free to ask questions throughout this project.

Thanks. There's the actual reel that we played back in HD. Let's just go ahead and close this out. And here is the project that I'm going to be building. I'm going to go ahead and play this back to see the piece that we're going to be building. Again, as I mentioned in the beginning, this is the same project that I did in the last demo, but I'm going to this time focus on the more advanced features and less on the more basic stuff. So let's just go ahead and take a quick look at the final piece that we're creating here.

And if I want to isolate that search down or narrow the search down a little bit, I can go in here and command click on these various buttons to refine the search. Let's just say drums clean. Let's go for some clean drums. Now I have 568 drums that have been tagged as clean drums. If I want to refine that even more, clean intense drums down to 42. And you see where we're going here.

All right, so that's basically how you go about finding the pieces that you want. So regardless of whether you have an idea in your head of what you want to create or you're just going completely blind at this, you can just go in and start clicking around and just spend all day clicking on different samples, find something you like, and go, ooh, I like that vibe. Let's build off of that, and then start to stack the pieces.

Now, the way that you add pieces into the project is simply drag and drop. I take this little club beat here and just drag it onto the timeline like that. Or let's go ahead and scroll down in here a little bit.

You can see like this first upright bass, it dropped two levels there, dropped like a quarter octave or something like that. I don't know, I'm not a musician. Little tambourines in there.

If you're using the Pro HD, you can export this as a stack so that you can actually play the music. It's a standard stereo mix-down pair of all of this mixed down to a single stereo file. Bring that into Final Cut and edit. And that's what I've done and I'll show you that in a second.

Joseph Linaschke Or you could export this out as a stack so that you can actually give every individual file, every individual instrument rather, as a separate file off to your musician. Then the musician can reassemble those in Logic or Pro Tools, whatever they're using, and further enhance your work or throw it all away and start from scratch. Joseph Linaschke So what I've done in here is I've chosen export mix that exported out that mix as a single stereo file, which if I go back to Final Cut, I already have in here and there is that stereo file in there.

So I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on the basics, but I do want to fly through building some of these pieces. So I'm actually going to move really fast for a couple steps here. I want to build up the basics of this project. Again, being the advanced course, I'm assuming that people understand the basics of marking in and out points and doing stuff like that.

So I'm just going to go ahead and fly through it so you can see me building it. And of course, I'll talk through what I'm doing. But feel free, once again, to interrupt me if you want to go, wait, what did you just do? Feel free to interrupt me on there. So I'm going to start with a blank canvas on here.

Blank canvas on there. Take this double treble beat on here, and I'm going to find the pitch change that is somewhere in the first measure or second measure. There's the pitch change there, so let's just go ahead and zoom into that on the timeline, and I will mark that pitch change. By tapping the M key, I've just added a marker on there, and I know that that is a pitch change. And if I play this forward a little bit more, I'll find the second pitch change, which should be right about here.

There we go. So once again, zoom into that to make sure I have it accurate there, add a marker on that place on the timeline, and then take the entire audio track, drag it onto the timeline like so. Now I have this audio on the timeline with the two markers applied at the pitch change so that I know that if I want to edit to those pitch changes, those markers are already in place there.

So let's go ahead and get our first piece of media on there. I have this great indigo flower shot in here. I can mark in and outs manually on there by simply tapping the I and the O key on the keyboard to mark my in and outs, or let's go ahead and clear those out.

I can make a final duration by simply typing in a number up here. So in this case, I'll say two seconds and four frames. And I know I want two seconds and four frames because if I look down at the timeline here, the first beat is at four seconds and nine frames, and I want about half of that. So cut it in half, give or take, call it two seconds, four frames. There's a two second, four frame shot.

That I've now added to the timeline there. This golden wheat shot, I'm going to also mark an in and out point. This time I'll do it numerically in the sense that I know exactly where the in and the out should be. Someone's told me where they go. This little window up here shows me that readout. So let's just go up here and type in the time that I want, which is two hours, 15 minutes, 44 seconds and 20 frames. Hit return, and the playhead jumps to that point just like that.

Now you're thinking, why on earth is this clip listed as 15 hours long or whatever it was, or two hours and 15 minutes long? Well, this is a piece off of a tape. And generally when you're shooting in a professional environment, every new tape is going to have a new hour on it, so that you have no chance of duplicate time code.

So every single tape, if you're going to shoot 100 tapes, the hour is one through 100. And you will take that hour one tape and pop it in and start recording. And then when you are capturing your footage, if you see something that comes from hour two, 15 minutes, you know that that is on tape too. There's no question about it.

So that's why you have the long time code on there. So let's just go ahead and mark an in point right there. And I'm going to put my out point at a specific point as well, which let's just rearrange this so I can see my notes in here.

This is a nice little function in here, by the way, the ability to resize and readjust your interface by simply dragging on any point between the interface windows in there, which is kind of cool. Let's shrink that down a little bit. When you're on a small working space like this is here, that becomes very, very handy, because otherwise you'll just always be lost.

All right, let's go ahead and type in the new time there, 215, 48, 23, hit return. It brings me to that point on that clip, mark an out point, and then just drag and drop that directly onto the timeline as well. So now I have these two shots on here. And let's go ahead and take this last shot, the Japanese lanterns, drop that on there as well.

Notice this last shot here has a cool focus shift in it. Now I want to take advantage of that focus shift to line it up to an event, in this case an audio pitch change, a musical pitch change. Let's go ahead and open this clip into the viewer here, scrub through it, and I'll look for that focus change.

It's right about there. Now the focus change obviously happens over time, and the musical beat is happening on an instant. So we're going to have a little bit of slop in here, but let's just go ahead and put that marker, let's say, right about there, just partway into that change. I'll add a marker on the timeline there.

And if I want to edit that marker by simply tapping the M key a second time, I open up my edit marker, and I can add in here text, for example, focus shift, and now I know that that's where my focus shift occurs. Going back to the timeline here, you'll notice that I have on here my clip with that marker that I applied, and then this marker on the audio track showing me where that pitch shift was. I want to line up those two instances, so to do that I will use the slip tool, which I simply grab from here, click on that marker, and drag the two markers to line up.

Now the slip tool very briefly allows me to essentially reach in through a window of time. If I've got a five second long clip, and I've marked one second of that, I'm reaching into that one second and changing the content of that one second without changing the duration.

By doing that, I'm effectively changing the in point and the out point simultaneously, but all I'm seeing is the final output, the final in and out, and I don't have to deal with the stuff in the background. So if I look at this now playing back, it should line up on the beat somewhat.

There we go. All right, so now I have those clips in there. I think that works out pretty well. Let's go ahead and move on to the next piece. Next thing I want to do is talk about transitions. Obviously, transitions, you've all seen them in Final Cut Pro.

You have your basic default cross-resolve transition in here that I can add, or I can go into my effects tab, open up my transitions folder, and get through any of these other transitions. Notice in here, I actually have quite a few third-party ones. I think Joe is in the audience this time. Sorry, Joe, I don't have yours installed on this one, but there's a lot of third-party filters out there, third-party plugins for Final Cut Pro, which is just great.

Absolutely great. Actually, some of my favorite ones are from third-party. Let's just quickly take a look at how these work. I can go ahead and change any of these out. For example, try Diamond Iris. Just drag and drop that on and play that back. I want to try a channel map on here. Let's see what that looks like. Drop that on.

This is a G5 2.0, right? These aren't 2.5s, right? It's 2.0? 2.0. 2.0, yeah. This is a 2.0. All running off the internal hard drive. I threatened to bring my RAID up here, but frankly, my back couldn't take it, so I decided not to. I'm doing this entire demonstration off of a single internal drive, not even a stripe drive, just one internal drive.

Alright, so there's basic transitions in there. Let's go ahead and take a look quickly at some basic compositing. The shots that I'm going to work with are this shot here of the Golden Gate Bridge and that one. I'm going to go ahead and take this first one and add it onto the timeline. And of course if I play this through, it's just playing back normally.

What I want to do is composite this shot on top of it. Now if I take this shot and I just drag it on top of the timeline like that, you'll see that it's actually bigger than the shot underneath. So I can trim this back manually, but that's a multiple step way to do it.

So instead of doing that, I'll go back up here with the playhead above the clip that I'm working with, take this shot, drag it on, and choose superimpose. That automatically trims the shot to match the one underneath it. So now I have the top shot exactly the same size as the bottom one. And if I want to go in here and change the end point, I can simply click and drag like that. And find a position to put that. Let's just go ahead and line it up with this next bead in here. I think that's where I want it.

So what we've just done here is effectively like any other edit. It doesn't look like there's any good reason to have multiple clips on here, but this is where we're going to get into the compositing side of things. What I want to do is have both of these images on screen at the same time.

So to do this, I need to get into some basic compositing, cropping, repositioning, and so on. Now if I crop and reposition this bottom clip here, it's going to affect the entire clip. I don't want the entire clip affected. I want the first part of the shot to be normal, so I need to use my razor blade tool. Tap B on the keyboard to bring up my razor blade. Simply add a little slice right there, and I now have this shot.

I don't want that behaving as a separate piece. So if I go in here and I start editing these, I can edit them separately from the first part. So let's go ahead and take this top shot on here, and I'm going to go into wireframe plus image mode by tapping the W key on the keyboard.

That means I can see both my image and the wireframe simultaneously. If I wanted to go in here and reposition this, I could do that. I can scale it however I like on here. If I want to go in here and grab, for example, the distortion tool, I can do that and distort that image.

And this is all going to play back in real time. Let's just go ahead and take a quick look. Let's get that in there. Distort like so, and I can play all this back in real time. So that's pretty good. Now, motion allows you to actually make those kind of changes while it's playing back.

Motion's unbelievable. But obviously, motion is all about motion graphics. So this is a video editor, so we don't quite go into that realm in here. But you're going to see that I actually have a considerable amount of motion graphics and compositing tools built right into Final Cut Pro.

So let's just go ahead and reset these two because I've kind of messed them up there. And a way to reset your functions in here, instead of having to go into the motion tab and reset, reset, reset, I can simply take a clip, control click on it, and choose, oh, where is it? I know the keyboard shortcut. Here it is. Remove attributes.

Remove attributes brings up a dialog that says remove X, Y, and Z. And in this case, I can remove basic motion and distortion. I don't have filters or speed effects or anything else applied to it, so you can see that they're grayed out. Let's just go ahead and say remove basic motion and distortion, and it'll set that back to normal. And I'm also going to do the same thing to the clip underneath. Hit the keyboard shortcut to remove basic motion on there.

All right, so both these shots are back to normal. Let's go ahead and take that shot, bring up my crop tool by tapping the C key, and I'm just going to crop that image in like so. Now, I can, of course, do this manually as I'm doing here. I can go in here and just adjust these like that.

Or if I want to get a little bit more control over it, over here in the viewer, if I click on the motion tab, you'll see that I have access to my cropping, basic motion controls, and so on. So I like to work with solid numbers when I'm doing this sort of thing because it makes it easier if I'm going to calculate changes later for me to do the math in my head.

So I'm just going to go in here and punch in some solid numbers. I'm going to go ahead and crop the left side just down to three, and I'll bring the right side up to N52, and then I'm going to crop the top and bottom both down three. So there you can see I've got exactly the right crop. It's exactly cropped on the top and bottom the same amount.

I know exactly where I'm headed here. Let's go ahead and take the shot underneath and do the same thing. I can, once again, go in here and do these numerically, or I can just drag them. Let's just go ahead and grab that crop tool again, drag these shots.

Now, you can see here that I'm going to need to reposition this shot. So let's go ahead and crop in this side, reposition that shot over like that, crop it in about like so, and bring that down and this one up to match. And once again, I do actually want the tops and bottoms to match on here.

So let's just go ahead and open that up into the viewer, into the motion tab, and under the crop controls on the top and bottom, I'll put in exactly three and three. So now I have exactly the right numbers in there. All right, so that looks pretty good. It's fairly well centered in here. And if I play this back now, you'll see that we're obviously going from the one shot to the two up in a basic composite.

So now on to the next step. I really like the effect that I've got on here. What if I want to replicate that effect? I want to have it go to those two squares, and I want to have it go to four squares, or eight squares, or 16 squares, and just keep on repeating down. And I want to have that happen on the beat. This is a fairly complex amount of compositing that we're about to do here, but as you'll see, it's really quite easy to do inside of Final Cut.

I'm not going to affect my first stack here. I really like the way those are playing, so I'm going to leave them alone, but I'm going to copy, just hit Command-C to copy, and then Command-V to paste. And what I've just done here is put a duplicate copy of that, so now I'm seeing the same thing playing back twice.

I'll then take this new stack of clips, and I'm going to nest them. Nesting them allows me to take any number of clips, no matter how complex it is, and flatten it down to a single file. Now when I say flatten, it's only flattened in the visual sense, because you can double-click on that new nest on your timeline.

And it will open up into a new project and show you the entire sequence that you had built before, no matter how complex it was, it's all there. Which means you can go back in and edit that at any time. Now there's other solutions out there that do a similar effect where they collapse everything, but once you've collapsed it, you're toast.

There's no going back and making changes. So what we've done is allowed you to simply take a stack, now obviously this is very simple, just two clips. But I'll take that, and I'll say nest items, and I'm going to call that just Golden Gate Nest. And I hit OK.

And it adds a new stack. It adds that nest to the timeline, so now there's a single clip on the timeline, and if I double-click on it, there is the nest that I just created. There's those two clips. If I want to make a change to it, I can.

Let's go ahead and close the nest, go back to the main shot on here. There we go. And once again, it's a duplicate. Nothing's changed visually in here. I simply have one shot on here. But the reason that I did this is because now that it's a nest, I can apply a filter to an entire nest, to an entire series of images at once. So let's just take a look at this from a really simple perspective for a second here. So let's just say I'm doing color correction.

I've got a huge stack of images that haven't been color corrected. They're composites, and there's all kinds of text effects, and just all kinds of stuff going on. And the client looks at it and says, "That's really great, but I want the whole thing to be bluer." Thanks.

So that means you've got a thousand clips in here. You have to go individually color correct each one. Well, with the nesting function, I can take all those clips, nest them into a single clip, and apply a color correction to the nest itself. And then any change that I make will be applied to that nest.

So that's basically what I'm going to do here. But I'm not going to do color correction. I'm going to use a replicate filter. So let's go ahead and find the replicate filter. I've got it saved off here as a favorite. Here it is, my replicate filter. And by the way, all your effects are stored over here, of course, in the effects tab. And they're stored somewhere here in video filters. And if I couldn't find the one that I'm looking for, I'd say, "Oh, I know there's a replicate filter somewhere, but I don't know where it is." The find function inside Final Cut Pro will also find filters and effects.

So I can go in here and type in replicate, hit return, and it shows me that I have a replicate in my CGM effects. And I have another one in my stylized effects. So I've got two replicate filters in here to choose from. Kind of nice. All right, so let's go back over here. I've already saved out the replicate filter. I'm just going to drag this onto the nest itself. And as you can see, it's immediately applied its default setting, and it's replicated that.

Now, this is a little tip in here. If you're used to doing filters and effects in Final Cut, you're used to adding an effect to a clip. And then you can double-click that clip into the viewer and access the filters and effects tabs, right? So if I double-click on the CG nest in here, it's simply going to open the nest. Well, where's my filter? If I open these up, you'll see the filter's not applied here because it hasn't applied it individually. So what happened to it? Well, let's go back to the timeline.

And what you need to do is actually open this object into the viewer itself. Now, I can do that multiple ways. I can simply drag this up into the viewer, and it opens it into the viewer. And now I have access to the filter that I just added. Or I can control-click on here and say open in viewer. And the shortcut for that is to simply hit Option-Return, and it will-- That's the wrong one. Maybe it's Command-Return.

You know, you think you know everything. Command, return, option, option, double click. That was it. I knew it was something like that. Option, double click. We'll open that up. But this is a perfect segue. I meant to do that. This is a perfect segue into one of the great new functions of Final Cut Pro, and that's the mappable keyboard. I obviously don't remember what the keyboard shortcut is for that, and maybe there isn't one. Let's find out. I'll hit option H, because I do remember that keyboard shortcut, to bring up my mappable keyboard. This was introduced in 4.0, Final Cut Pro 4.0.

This allows me to remap any keyboard function. Basically, anything that's in the menus, I can change the keyboard shortcut, or apply a new one, or put one where there didn't used to be one. I want to find open in viewer, so I'll just type in open in viewer, and apparently there is no keyboard shortcut available for that. Sweet. That's why you have to control-click on it. We knew that. There we go.

Anyway, in here, if you wanted to change the keyboard shortcut for anything else, since I'm in here, let's say you wanted to change the keyboard shortcut for something as simple as open. You see on here it's listed as command-O. That's your standard default keyboard shortcut. If I look over here at my modifying tabs, there's the command, there's O, there's the open command. Let's say that I want to change that. I want to make it command-option F9.

I don't know why, but you do. I can take this open command, let's unlock the keyboard here, take that open command, drag that onto here, and now you see command-O and command-option F9 are available with keyboard shortcuts. If you change your mind, you can simply take that and drag it off, and off it goes. You've changed the keyboard shortcut again.

You can save keyboard shortcut layouts if you want to, which means if you're working with multiple editors, you can have different layouts for different editors. Also, this means that if you are coming from an alternate editing system, for example, you're coming from Premiere or you're coming from the Avid, and you want to use the same keyboard shortcuts that you've been using for the last 10 years, you don't have to learn everything anew. You can reprogram this, or actually, if you look around on the net a little bit, you'll find pre-built custom keyboard layouts that people have created and shared on the net, and you can just download those, load one in, and then off you go. All right.

Let's go ahead back on to the edit here. We're back to having this nest open in the viewer by simply saying open in viewer. There she is, and here's the filters tab. The filter, by default, this replicate filter, had applied a two-by-two replication. You can see I've got two instances horizontal and two instances vertical. What I want to have happen is, roughly on the beat, I want to have it go from two replications to three replications. This is key framing of filter effects.

Down here in my timeline inside of the viewer, because you always have a miniature timeline in the viewer, I can scrub the playhead. You'll notice as I do this, it's scrubbing on both the canvas and the timeline as well, so I always know exactly where I'm looking. I'm just going to split this roughly down the middle here, say right about there, and I'm going to add a keyframe. Simply click on these little nubs there to add keyframes to it.

Now, initially, nothing happens. The default setting was two and two, and I've locked a keyframe in there at two and two. But if I advance forward one frame, so with the keyboard, just the arrow key, advance forward one frame, I'm then going to go ahead and punch in three, and three. I'll just use little arrows there to punch that up a little bit, and I've now gone from two to two to three by three. Now, this could be anything, and this could be any number, and most of these filter effects you can gradually do over time.

Now, the replicate filter, there's nothing between two and three replications, so it's going to jump immediately from two to three, which is why I went ahead and just did that second keyframe one frame forward. But if, for example, you're doing a Gaussian blur from one pixel blur to a ten pixel blur, if you put that out with 100 frames in between, it's going to stretch that blur effect out over 100 frames.

If you put in one frame after the other, it's going to effectively go instantly from that low blur to the high blur. All right, so there I have that low blur, I'm sorry, the two by two replicate followed by the three by three. Let's go ahead and play that back and see what it looks like now.

"Okay, that didn't work. What happened? Did it work or just didn't play? I think I may be exceeding my real-time capabilities of playing off the internal drive, so I'm just going to drop the quality here from high to medium just to play this back. Let's see what There we go. Did it do that the first time and I just missed it? Yes, I'm a pro. Can you tell? All right, so there we go.

Back to high quality. That's much better. OK, so there's your basic-- sorry? He asked about the timeline. Why did it just turn orange up there? This color bar up here is representative of your real-time status in here. Real-time in earlier versions of Final Cut Pro, from version 2 and version 3, you either had a green bar, which meant it was real-time, or a red bar, which meant it had to be rendered, or a dark blue bar that said it was already rendered.

Joseph Linaschke He asked about the timeline. Why did it just turn orange up there? Why did it just turn orange up there? Real-time in earlier versions of Final Cut Pro HD, you either had a green bar, which meant it had to be rendered, or a red bar that said it was already rendered. So those are your three choices.

Then we went into real-time extreme, RT Extreme with Final Cut Pro 4. RT Extreme, as I mentioned earlier, allows you to change the quality of your image playback and gain or lose real-time capabilities. So green bar still means it's a real-time effect. If you have a dark green bar, that means it's a guaranteed, full-quality real-time effect. Full-quality meaning that it doesn't even have to render before it goes out to tape. Now, there's not a whole lot you get there on today's machines.

The next generation of machines will give you more, and so you'll have to make sure that you have a real-time effect. So, for example, now I can do things on a G5, like take high-definition footage, apply color correction to two clips, and it crosses all between them, and never have to render, not even before it goes back to tape. So this isn't real-time preview. This is full-quality real-time. Once it goes to that bright green bar, that means it's real-time, but does require rendering before output to tape. The orange bar means that you're in RT Extreme land.

This is saying, whoa, ain't promising nothing here. You may drop a frame, your quality may be a little bit shoddy, but we're going to do our job. So, for example, if I go back to this effect here, you'll notice that it went orange in there. It is saying that it's going to do its best to play back in real-time, and in this case, it's no problem. It's doing it fine. It may have actually skipped a frame in there. Who knows? It doesn't matter. We're seeing it play back. It's keeping up-to-date the whole time in there, and I know because it's an orange bar. Now, I could keep applying effects to this.

That bar will effectively never change colors as long as I'm adding real-time effects to it. I could add 30 filters on here, and it'll still try to play back. Now, clearly, you're going to hit a threshold where it's no longer going to be able to play back. It's going to stutter really bad, but it's going to keep on trying, and again, the faster your machine, the more you're able to do. So, that's the significance of the colored render bars up there.

Does nesting affect performance? I'm not quite sure how you mean. If you take a nest and you render that, you can then apply filters and effects to that rendered nest. And so let's say that I take 50 effects and I apply them to a nest. That ain't going to put it back in real time. But I collapse the nest, render it, and then apply color correction to the nest.

I can do real-time color correction on that nest. So by using nests, you can improve performance of things that have just gotten so complex it's bogging the system down. Is that what you meant? You can nest nests. Yes, you can do multiple nests. There's unlimited nesting. Just go to your heart's content.

All right, so there's that effect applied on there. Let's see what's next in the list. All right, time remap. I did this one in the last demo, but since obviously some of you haven't been here, we'll do this one again. This is a fun effect in here. You may have remembered from the beginning when I first played back the shot, you saw the pool break hit twice, right, twice on the beat.

Here's the original shot in here. It's playing along, pool ball breaks, and off it goes. And what I want to do is apply this time remapping effect in here. So first thing I need to do is figure out where to put that break on the timeline. So let's have a listen to the music here.

Okay, there we go. So let's just go ahead and put a marker on the audio clip right there, and then take this shot, drag it onto the timeline. Now I can put this wherever I want. Obviously I want to line up those two markers like so, so now when I play it back... We're seeing that.

Now I said that I want to have that beat, the break happened twice, again on the second beat, so let's listen for the next round of that beat in there. Music

So off to a good start. I've got the break happening twice on the beat, but the ball, the cue ball, is not going back to the stick between those shots.

And I really want that to happen, so we're going to add one more key frame in here in between these two. So I've got the key frame there saying I want to make sure my balls go out that far. And then the key frame here saying that's the second break. Let's go ahead and put one in between.

Click and drag, and I will carefully drag that back to just about where the ball hits the cue. Let's go right about there. Perfect. Joseph Linaschke And once again, you can see it's going down steeper. It's going forward now, but not quite at full speed. And let's just see what it looks like.

Cool, huh? Question? Interpolation types. So you can do, what do you call it? What do you call that kind of interpolation? I forget. Time remapping tool. Frame blending. Yeah, you have frame blending that you can turn on or off, and an effect like this is absolutely critical. You have it on, it will look like rubbish.

Certain effects you'll find that you want to turn it off. It just depends on what you're doing and the speed of the speed change, whether you want frame blending on or off. The type of interpolation it uses, I have no idea. I'm not an engineer. I see it.

Oh, okay. So the question is, can I go ease in, ease out on here? Yes, I can. I can simply go down here and control click and choose smooth, and there it will ease in, ease out. Let's go ahead and smooth both of those points in there. And now as I play that back, it'll be a little...

The question is, is the time change adjusting being applied to all tracks? No, this is clip specific. So if I wanted to apply an effect like this to multiple clips, I would nest the clips and then apply the time change or the time remap to the nest itself.

All right, let's move on here. I wanted to spend a little bit of time on-- let's see here. Do I want to do-- let's see here. Since we're-- how are we doing on time? We've got 20 minutes total. As I said in the beginning, I love to have the questions come flying at me throughout.

Is there a number-- can I see a show of hands how many people were holding questions off to the end?

All right, so back to this. Where were we? I wanted to apply something on this beat there. Let's make sure we get the beat lined up. So right about there. I'm going to go ahead and take this shot, and I'll just do an overwrite edit, applying that on the beat like so.

So as you can see there, that shot, it's the duration I like. I've preset the duration so I don't want to mess with that. But you'll see that I'm missing the whole part where he puts the cup back down again. He's holding the cup, he's having a drink, yada yada. We don't want to look at all that. We want to cut that out.

So let's go ahead and scrub using the keyboard, just the arrow keys. I'm going to scrub to the first frame where you can't see the cup. Tap the B key to get the razor blade tool. Cut that so that I've now trimmed that shot. Using the slip tool, tap the S key to bring up the slip tool.

I will click on this and drag backwards and backwards and backwards until I see the end point, the end frame, which is that top left inside the canvas. Once I see the cup on there, I'll know that I'm at the right spot. So let's keep dragging, dragging, dragging. There it is. Whoa, too fast.

Crap, come back here. Let's see here. There we go. Right about there. I want it just before that cup comes back in the picture. I let go of the mouse and once again with the slip tool, I have changed the end point and the out point simultaneously without affecting the overall duration. And now I've just created a jump cut.

The next thing I want to do is add some motion graphics effects to the end of this shot here. I'm going to add a few stills you may remember from the final playback. Let's actually just take a quick look at it so you can see ahead of time what I'm going to be building. I'm going to build this.

So let's just go ahead and shorten that up to about like so. So now I have that clip, that duration. So there's my first frame of the still in there of that cup. Let's go ahead and zoom back into these shots here. I'm going to open this up. I'm going to grab my second frame. Let's go about halfway down on the cup.

Shift N again makes the still frame. And this time I'm going to choose superimpose, which will superimpose that shot, the new one, on top of the original one. If I hide that using Control B, you can see the difference between the two. Obviously I can just delete that. And undo it to do the same thing.

Control B, by the way, is a very, very handy shortcut to very quickly hide any group or any number of things on the timeline. Someone asked me in the last demo if you can hide an entire track at once. Yes, that's what this little button right here does. It hides that entire track.

So if I want to hide all of track two, I can do that. And if I Option click on it, let's scale this down so you can see the whole thing at once. There we go. If I Option click on one of these, it hides everything but that track. So there's lots of little keyboard shortcuts like that nested away in here.

All

There we go. There's my little stepping stone. Now that's the first part of it. As you saw before, I need to crop these, so I'm seeing all three of them at once, and apply a color effect to it. So you saw me do cropping before. There's really nothing different in here. I can go in here, open up this shot, or just position the playhead over it on the timeline, and using the cropping tool, I can go in here and crop this and position it however I like.

Now let's just say that you're doing this sort of thing, but you're doing it over and over again for the same type of work. Basically, I'm going to create the same effect multiple times with a similar shot, and I really don't want to have to do the same cropping and repositioning and color effects over and over and over again.

So what I want to do is save the crops and save the motion effects as a preset. Well, you can do that in something called a motion favorite. So if I select this clip here, let's just say I want to save the settings that I've got right there.

I can go up here and say effects, make favorite effect, and that's going to save all the effects associated with that clip into a little file. In fact, let's just do that, and if I go back to my effects tab in here, up to the top, favorites, I've got quite a few in here, but where's the one I just created? I don't know which one it is. Oh, one cappuccino should be. Oh, that's favorite effects.

That's the wrong one. Where do we keep those? They're somewhere in here. I don't remember where they saved them. That's hysterical. I have no idea where that saved it to. Oh, well, anyway, they saved them somewhere in there. You'll find them. So once they've been saved, you can reposition them or put them wherever you like, and I've done that already. If I look under here, under my graphics effects, you'll see I have my motion favorites that I've already saved.

Saved off. So there's three different motion favorites that I've created for these three stills. If I drag this onto here, it's going to overwrite the effects that are on there and reposition it exactly as I had set up before. So since I don't want to go through repositioning all these over again, I'll simply take still two and drag it onto still two on there. So there's the second one applied, and let's go ahead and put the third one on there as well, like so. So now I'm seeing all three of these like that.

Just drag that right onto the timeline like so. And I want to add a color corrector to it. Now, I went through this very quickly before, but I want to spend a little bit more time on color correction. If I go into Video Filters-- Color Correction, Color Corrector Three-Way-- that applies that three-way color corrector to this clip.

And here we have my full color corrector. This gives me access to color values for the blacks, the mids, and the whites, and also the levels to the black, mids, and whites. I'll explain a little bit about the difference in here. Let's say that you have something that's supposed to be white-- a white shirt, a white wedding dress, whatever. It looks a little bit dingy and dark, and also looks a little bit yellow. Well, that's two different things that you need to correct for. You need to get rid of the yellow, and you need to brighten it up.

So two separate controls handled by two separate controls. You have over here your color adjuster, and then underneath that, the levels. So in this case, you can see the white is very yellowish dingy, and the blacks are a little bit kind of funny as well. So let's go ahead and work on changing this.

The easiest way to do it-- is to use the eyedropper here. Now, I can go in and change these by hand if I want to. I can simply drag this around and look for the right color space, or let's just reset that. By using the eyedropper here, I can say, these white waves there should be white. Let's just click on that and reset it to white. And if you notice up here, what's done-- what has just happened is the little color dot has pushed towards blue. We have added blue, which of course is the same as taking away yellow.

So by doing that, I have just fixed my whites. I need to fix my blacks as well. Let's go ahead and grab the eyedropper, and I'll click on something that should be black. Let's say that shadow right there. And it warms the image up a little bit. It was looking a little bit cool.

And I know that to be true because of my black levels. Now that they're accurate, my black is actually black. I can see that my image is a little bit too cool, and I'm now back to a more normal looking shot. Now, if I want to adjust the levels on here as well to make the white to actually white and the black to actually black, this requires a little bit more technical know-how to do it right.

Now, I can go in here and just drag these, right? And I can do that and go, oh, isn't that a pretty white? That white is definitely blown out. And I know that it's blown out if I go up here to my view and I turn on range checking. Let's take a look at excess luma.

I can see these little red lines on there showing me that I'm definitely blowing out this image. It's way too bright. So if I bring down the sliders a little bit, let's bring it down, you can see those changing from red to green, red to green. Let's get rid of all the red. And you'll also notice that little yellow exclamation point telling me that I'm definitely blown out.

So if I bring this down, keep bringing it down, that turns into a green check mark. The green check mark tells me that I'm OK. Green check mark with the little up arrow tells me that I'm within the top 10% of white, which is actually where you want to be for your pure whites. You want to make sure they're within that top 10%, and you'll be set.

So there I have perfect whites in there. Now I need to do the same thing for my blacks. Now if I do my blacks, we're not going to see any kind of a warning on there, because the blacks will just crush to black, and that's how they're going to broadcast.

But I do want to make sure that I'm not losing any data in here. This is where the scopes come in handy. Let's go ahead and rearrange my window layout here. Go to my color correction layout. And here I have my video scopes. I have four different things I can view at once.

A vector scope, a histogram, a waveform monitor, and an RGB parade, which is effectively a waveform monitor split out individually for the red, green, and blue channels. Now actually, all I'm going to concentrate on here is the waveform monitor. So let's just go ahead and view just the waveforms. It's a bit more visible. And if I look at this, I can see right here that I'm crushing my blacks.

Look at all that data that has been slammed down to the bottom, and you can see a whole bunch of junk down there, a bunch of pixels that have been pushed down to the bottom. And if I take my black levels up a little bit, I can spread those back out and restore all those blacks.

And if I go too far-- you can see that I'm now nowhere near black. My blacks are going to be gray. So what I want to do is make sure that this is set so that-- and I can do this by clicking the little arrow tool to go really accurately in there-- I want to make sure that my blacks are just touching the black levels on there.

Same thing with the whites. As you saw before, I can blow it out and see the warning up here. If I bring the whites up in here, it'll go beyond that space and shows me here that I'm blowing out. Now it doesn't crush the whites like blacks crush. They just get blown out. So you see a little bit of different feedback in there. Let's go ahead and bring that down. So now not only here am I seeing that I'm safe, I'm also seeing that right there.

So that's how you use your video scopes in a nutshell. There's clearly a lot more you can do with them, but that's a real quick overview of them. The frame viewer here allows me to do a before and after side by side of the shot. So there's your original and the color corrected one. And as you can see, it's quite a dramatic difference there. Let's open that up a bit. Quite a dramatic difference there of the before and after. This right here, by the way, is a really good example of why you definitely need a 30-inch display. .

I'll tell you what I told the last guys. What you really need is a 30-inch and then two 23s. I'm going to tell you why. So you've got your main workspace on your 30-inch. Your 30-inch display is wide enough that you can see two 720p images, 720p HD images at 100% side-by-side. Well, actually 99% because the UI gets in the way just a smidgen.

Technically, there's enough for 100%. I'm talking to the engineers about that. I'm going to see if we can get that changed a little bit. But you can see effectively the entire HD images, two of them side-by-side. You have a massive amount of space for your timeline. Your second HD monitor is where you put all your browsers.

Because no matter how much space you have on your main screen, you are always going to want the widest timeline possible. So this screen could be a mile wide, and I'm still not going to want to keep my browsers on here because I'm going to want this timeline to be really, really wide.

So I take my browser, shove that off onto the second monitor. And if it's as big as a 23-inch monitor, you've got a lot of space to have multiple browser windows open, view it in icon view and list view, and you can stretch them out so you can see all the metadata and so on.

And then the third monitor is for your video out. You saw what I talked about in the beginning with the slides, the HD preview of the video out. And that works, of course, with DV as well. You can do video out to your DVI monitor. And in this case, I had it playing full screen on this primary screen, but if you have a second screen, it plays out to there. So there's your 30-inch with all your workspace on it, your palettes over here, your video out over here. Doesn't that sound like a good way to go? We all need one.