Don't get caught with egg on your interface - The top ten FCP newbie giveaways

fcp.co by Alex Snelling

It seems that everybody now can work Final Cut Pro. To say you can't risks being overlooked for a job, not being able to join in "What Codec" chats down the pub or more embarrassing, having to ask for help when you've messed up the screen trying. Fear no more, Pro Apps expert Alex Snelling has compiled his top ten FCP GUI errors from his years of teaching fresh new editors.

FCP is so intuitive that a lot of users teach themselves; often this works fine but there are hidden traps. Counting down from ten, these are those traps:

10. THE GREEN TICK

No it doesn’t mean you have received approval for your work of art from the internal FCP Gods.

It means you’ve been using a PC – you naughty person!! UNDO on a PC is control-Z and that is what you have pressed. In FCP it is the RANGE CHECK Excess Luma control, from the view menu.

This function tells you if your video contains any luminance over 100% (which is usually illegal for broadcast). In the picture below, we have luminance close to but not above 100%. If it goes over 100% you get the yellow warning triangle. Of course, you need to check the levels properly on external scopes for full confidence.

Just press CONTROL-Z again to make it go away.

9. ZOOM

In a lot of applications, the command key with the plus/minus symbols allows you to zoom. This includes FCP (in the view menu).

Unfortunately in FCP, if you have the canvas or the viewer selected when you press this shortcut, you will zoom in or out on those windows and not the timeline. In the vast majority of cases, you will want to zoom the timeline. And not the canvas. read more...