11 More Final Cut Pro Tips

Digitalfilms by Oliver Peters

During the years with Final Cut, I’ve accumulated a number of workflow steps to eliminate some of the “gotchas” and bottlenecks. I’ll share a few in this post and hope you find them to be helpful.

1. Gamma setting

A couple of versions ago, FCP added a gamma settings preference (User Preferences / Editing). This lets you compensate for gamma differences in graphics created on other platforms. Ever since FCP7, I have found that the best setting to use is 2.2 (the native gamma of PCs). “Source” and other options don’t seem to yield the best results. As such, I now set all systems I use to 2.2 gamma.

This gamma preference applies to imported QuickTime movies as well, if they were created with an RGB codec, like Animation. Bring them in as “source” instead of 2.2 gamma and the level will be wrong. Like all other such settings, changes made to this setting only affect files imported after the change was made. read more...