Preface

The old cliche “What an age we live in …” is one I never thought I’d find myself muttering, and yet here I stand today looking around at the video editing possibilities on the market. Never before in the history of video have the tools been within reach for so many individuals. Cheap, high-resolution digital video (DV) cameras and desktop computers have removed the dollar sign from the list of practical reasons for not “makin’ movies.” The tools aren’t free, but they aren’t ruinously expensive anymore, either.

It used to be that you had to be in school or working in the industry to get your hands on video cameras and editing stations. To a large degree, that meant you got the perspective of two select, though admittedly broad, groups of people: the artists and the artisans— or some strange, delightful mixture of the two. That is not to say that video and film production in the past century has been lacking in quality—far from it. There’s been lots of great stuff to watch, from the era of the Lumiere Brothers up to the present day. What there really hasn’t ever been is a truly wide range of perspective and subject matter in video and film. The reasons are pretty simple: If only a small section of society can afford the time and money to acquire equipment and technical skills, then we are doomed to watch that small section of society’s vision of the way things are.

We’ve had plenty of genre and documentary work about the Working Class and the Common Man, but not nearly enough Working Class- and Common Man-produced work. What a shame. And now it’s more possible than ever to change that scenario. I believe it has been said, “the means of production in the hands of the people ….” We can stop letting the establishment make our entertainment for us and start making it for each other. We can stop waiting for people to address subject matter that is important to us; we can make it ourselves. That is the style and substance of a revolution; it’s self-empowerment on a grand scale.

But with revolution and self-empowerment come responsibilities. If we intend to make our own video and film work, we owe it to ourselves, our viewers, and the medium to become skilled with the tools of the trade. Technically, digital video editing isn’t really all that difficult a task, but there are some skills and habits that make it a lot easier to concentrate on the editing rather than fighting with a computer to make it do what you want. Most people in the past picked up these skills in school or in the field while working in the broadcast or film industries. For those who did not (and for a few who did, but are new to Final Cut Express), this book is for you.

The purpose of this book is to introduce new editors to digital video, the Macintosh platform, and the Final Cut Express application. Since it is assumed that the user is new and very green, the book covers capturing, editing, special effects, and output-to-tape techniques. The aim is to get the user from square one, which may be a blank slate, to square whatever, which means setting up a project correctly, learning some editing and compositing techniques, and then putting it all back out safely to tape.

How should you use this book? There are a few different ways to attack it. If you’ve just dropped a lot of money on a new Macintosh and you can’t wait to get started, feel free to fly straight in with Chapter 1 and just work your way through the application. Periodically, you will be prompted to consult the appendixes at the back of the book for specialized information about particular topics. Don’t be afraid of these advanced topics; the appendixes are free of jargon and are designed to teach you all the technical information culled from thousands of late nights of living inside this technology. There is valuable knowledge there, and you can save yourself a lot of gray hairs by taking advantage of it!

For those in film and video production programs and those looking to add digital video skills and the Macintosh platform to your repertoire, you are encouraged to sit down one fine Saturday morning and read the appendixes in total. One cannot exercise the true versatility of a medium like video without getting a good grounding in the nuts and bolts of the technology. And I also believe (as my preceding semi-Marxist rhetoric reveals) that the greatest benefit of the Final Cut DV system is that you can put it together yourself. You don’t have to trust some middleman broker to make your editor work for you. Provided you do the homework, you can make a self-sustaining and self-sufficient editing station. Every penny you save by putting the thing together yourself is a penny you can add to funding the great video work you will no doubt produce. Viva la revolución!

No CD-ROM accompanies this book, because I want users to work with their own video materials from the get-go. If you do the exercises using your own video footage, you will be very confident after having completed all the chapters. Take the offered and suggested techniques as the hard-won wisdom of someone who has made most of the mistakes, some of them a few times. It’s always better to learn from the painful mistakes of others, and DV editing is no exception.

This book, while comprehensive in some respects, is not the last word in DV editing. There are many different ways of approaching editing tasks, and it would be impossible to include them all in one volume. It is also not a “quick reference” guide that covers every single drop-down menu item in the application. It is not a silver bullet, promising that you’ll be editing in Hollywood next week after you finish Chapter 2.

It is, however, a couple of things. It is honest, and intends to inform the reader as thoroughly as possible about the basic techniques of Final Cut Express and Firewire DV editing. It will establish a context for you to learn in, but it will not promise to learn for you. Like violin lessons, this book can’t make you better without practice. It assumes that you know nothing about video beyond the On switch of your television. My mother is the litmus test here, and to her a “cold boot” is a heavy shoe in the freezer. By the end of the book, you should not only be able to navigate around the Final Cut Express editor, but you should have become familiar with video itself. It will enable the new user to move on to the next step, which is the act of editing unencumbered by confusion about what is happening under the hood of their editor. Once you master the tools, you can forget about them and really get to work.

Acknowledgments

Biggest thanks of all to Ken Stone. I don’t know why you put up with the workload. Wait, yes I do; you are the best, man. And to Jeffu and Ellen Warmouth, for not going on a honeymoon this year. So, about that Studio Pro book …

Thanks to Dan “Big Dig” Berube of BossyPug, the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group, and Michael “Headcutter” Horton of Lafcpug, the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group. What the heck am I saying? The whole danged FCPUGNet, Final Cut Pro User Group Network, kicked into gear by those two and Kevin “Telly” Monahan, and Sharon Franklin, and Gary Adcock, and Billy Sheahan, and Rick Young, and (I’m all out of breath) all those new user groups springing up across the face of the Earth. It is our grassroots organizations that helped make Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro such excellent tools, and it is my honor to know and work with you all. See you all at NAB and CreativePro NY, and MacWorld SF, and …

Thanks to my colleagues in the Fitchburg State College Communications Media Department in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for making our program so great to teach in. And, of course, the communications media students, who don’t take it personally when I get on their case about doing their preferences.

Finally, thanks to Elinor Actipis, who has been along for the entire crazy ride. “Hey, Elinor, new version!” Gotcha …