The Editblog

Organization! That single word is one of the most important, yet under used and misunderstood, words in non-linear editing. You often take hours and hours and hours of footage that turn into gigs and gigs and gigs of media and combine that with many graphics files, hundreds of sounds effects and disc after disc of music to make one final edit. In the process you might have multiple Final Cut Pro projects, different sequence versions and bins galore. You may not be as organized as you want to be but on a large project, the organized editor has a leg up over one that isn’t ogranized. How do you get organized? Years of experience cutting different types of projects is one way … or you can get a copy of Shane Ross’ Getting Organized in Final Cut Pro. This DVD-ROM is part of the Creative Cow Master Series and is worth every penny for a new or aspiring editor who is strugging with how to keep things … well, organized.

Shane touches on and/or explains a lot of basic technical hurdles that are very often asked by newbies to Final Cut Pro or non-linear editing in general. Some of the first things one needs to learn like drive formatting, the autosave vault, why not to use USB 2.0 drives and how to avoid many different Capture Scratch folders on a volume are all addressed early on. Shane also goes into detail explaining 3 of the different types of capture techniques: log and capture, capture and subclip as well as capturing on the fly. It is important to note that all these techniques are addressed as you will see a lot of discussion on the Internet as to which of these techniques are best and why you should use one and never use the other. By addressing all three Shane gives the viewer the opportunity to learn them all and decide on their own. Which of these are really the best? Here’s the secret … all of them. It depends on your own workflow and which you are comfortable with. I use all three techniques at different times and on different projects. One purpose of a teaching tool is to allow the student to learn enough where they can and what they can and then learn even further on their own. That is exactly what this does.

More topics discussed include archiving, monitoring and bin usage. Do you ever have to string together a finished program from a lot of smaller edits? There are a lot of ways to accomplish this and Shane addresses many of them including copy/paste techniques and nesting. Nesting is an often misunderstood topic so seeing an example of using nesting can help understand the concept. There’s even a nod to the old CMX3600 tape-based linear editing world and why small tape names can be important when naming your reels. While a new editor might rarely ever be faced with this particular need it is good information to have in your head for that day when you hear someone ask for a “CMX3600 list.”

There is a point made in the disc that you can’t mix different formats in a Final Cut Pro timeline without having to render the odd format. This isn’t the case anymore so this disc was obviously made with an older version of FCP. Such is one of the perils of making teaching tools for software since software is always evolving. But with a disc like this which teaches general concepts and not all specific software features most all of the information will remain correct many versions into the future. Even when small things like software button placement or menu design changes you can usually adapt what is being taught to the software update as it usually doesn’t change that much.

One great thing that I learned was how Shane uses multiple Final Cut Pro project files for different elements of a long-form edit. By generating new projects for different elements of your project like b-roll, interviews, music, sound fx and things like that you can keep your media drive very organized. I haven’t always done this and often the FCP project file gets very large and sluggish weeks into a long-form edit. Not to mention you have a project folder inside the Capture Scratch folder of your media drive that is full of what can be thousands of files. By far not the most organized way to work.

Which brings us back full circle. Organization! That single word is one of the most important, yet under used and misunderstood, words in non-linear editing. Grab your own copy of Shane Ross’ Getting Organized in Final Cut Pro and you too can become more organized. I know I did.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Editing, Final Cut Pro, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.