Final Cut Basic Editing

 The image on the right is the viewer box, this is on the right hand side of the screen when Final Cut is running. It shows a preview of the final video with the added effects and transitions, this photo has the MTV Rocks logo, a song title box and a widescreen effect, which when played is black and not white. Having this preview screen is useful for when making a video as it allows the user to quickly view how the video will look with the effects, and therefore editing the video is easier with this tool as you can edit the video in stages.

Mark In/Out

This is the video upload section or browser on Final Cut. It shows a list of all footage captured and uploaded from the camera to Final Cut, so therefore the footage can be viewed in the left screen of the program. The list on the image is the different clips we had from filming with Glenn, and from there the user drags the clip to left hand screen so that particular shots can be selected for use in the video. Once the desired shot is on the left canvas, you then select the clip by clicking the letter 'I' (mark in) and 'O' (mark out) to choose where the shot starts and ends. The image above on the right's blue lines illustrate what footage is selected.

Once the desired shot has been selected by using the 'I' and 'O' keys the clip is then dragged to the main track with the rest of the video and audio track. This is then seen on the middle box on the screen, which is called the viewer, this is used to view the footage and select parts for the actual video. Once the desired clip has been selected it will look like the image on the right; a blue rectangle with a thumbnail image of the shot on the main track.

Audio Track

The music video also needed an audio clip of the actual song, the process of adding this to the video was simple. Matt simply opened the file of the song we wanted, then dragged it to the time line. The audio is noticed through the green bar, this makes it easy to differentiate between audio and video. Once the audio and video clips have been opened on Final Cut the screen will look like the image below, with both tracks being together on the timeline.

During the construction stages the editing had to be cut to a certain lyric or beat of the song, this meant detailed scaling of each clip so that it fitted the song. To make this easier we made the track a larger size, this was done by selecting a tab on the bottom left of the Final Cut screen, seen on the right. We simply selected a larger box out of the choices, which made the whole track larger so editing was easier as we could see the small gaps which had to be filled.