Final Cut Pro X Cookbook: Edit with style and ease using the latest editing technologies in Final Cut Pro X! with this book and ebook.

As video editors, we need to be flexible. Changing deadlines, various video file formats, backseat editors (a.k.a. directors and producers); they all make us have to constantly adapt our workflow. In turn, we need flexibility in our editing software. Luckily, Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) has plenty of tools to adjust to our needs and different working environments.

For Final Cut Pro 7 users, FCPX's one-window interface seems restrictive at first compared to FCP7's multiwindowed layout. This is misleading, however, as almost all the different areas of the interface can be hidden or resized easily based on our needs. Keyboard shortcuts have also changed, but we can alter those as well. And thanks to the 10.0.3 update that arrived in early 2012, we have much more flexibility in connecting to additional broadcast-quality hardware.

In addition, FCPX vastly exceeds FCP7's media management capabilities. Cross-referencing media is a piece of cake, thanks to the introduction of keywords and...

Before we truly get underway with learning the ins and outs of FCPX, we've got to learn to walk before we can run. FCPX is a very deep program with a huge palette of tools and features, and every user should have a basic idea of what's what and what's where before trying to edit their masterpiece. This recipe is not so much an exercise, as it is an overview that will walk you through the most commonly used pieces of the interface.

Final Cut Pro X's keyboard shortcuts are greatly revamped and remapped from Final Cut Pro 7. Or, if you're coming from a different editing suite, keyboard shortcuts are going to be very different anyway. Luckily, FCPX has an easy-to-use keyboard shortcut editor.

New to FCPX is a handy keyword system that allows for great cross-referencing and makes clips easy to find, even if you've got hundreds of them or more! Perhaps you are organizing footage you shot at a fair. You have a clip that is a crowd shot, but also features a performance artist. In FCP7, you would have to pick one bin or a folder for a clip to reside. Now, you can apply the keywords crowd and artist to a clip and make it show up in each keyword collection (more information on that in a moment).

In addition to keywording, you can mark clips simply as a Favorite or Rejected in order to further organize and reference your footage. The process for marking a clip or part of a clip is very similar to keywording. iMovie users will be very familiar with this process, as the feature was pulled straight from FCPX's little sibling.

Keywords, favorites, rejected clips, oh my! But wait, there's more—Smart Collections. This tool will satiate even the most organized editors out there. Perhaps you want to simply be able to click on one button and see all clips with the keywords exterior , interview , and actor simultaneously applied. Or perhaps you want to be able to see all clips marked as Favorites with the interior keyword applied. It gets much deeper than that, but let's take it easy at first and decide that we want to find the clips marked as Favorites with a particular set of keywords applied to them.

As the world continues its inevitable shift away from desktop computers to more portable options such as laptops and tablets, one repercussion is sometimes having to work with smaller monitors or displays. For many tasks, such as checking e-mail or browsing the Web, this isn't much of an issue. But for video editors, trying to edit or color correct high-definition material on a 15-inch MacBook Pro is far from ideal! Luckily, not only we can plug our laptops into larger displays, but Final Cut Pro X can use entire second screen to display your Viewer window on a full screen, which also frees up space to expand other windows such as Event Browser, Inspector, and more.

Regular computer displays and HDTVs aren't usually the most trustworthy devices when it comes to getting an accurate idea of the color of your image and how it will appear once broadcast out to the world. Industry pros and production houses almost always have broadcast monitors, which are hyper-accurate displays with numerous configurations and settings to make sure you're seeing the most accurate color possible. FCPX can connect to these monitors if the stars align and if you've got the right equipment to hand.

When people got a first look at FCPX when it arrived on the market, many quickly lamented that it looked too much like Apple's consumer-oriented counterpart, iMovie. Beyond FCPX's powerful feature set, its interface is also much more customizable than how it appears at first glance. The Event Library and Event Browser windows are a great example of this, giving users many different ways to view and organize their content.

We've all been there—you import 287 clips from your camera and the filenames show up as something cumbersome DSC_0042, or perhaps 2011-06-15 05:45:40 or ZOOM004. For our sanity, we need to label them better, and of course, it can help us speed up our workflow when skimming through hundreds or even thousands of clips.

It seems that there are almost as many video codecs and containers as there are actual spoken languages in the world—H.264, MPEG-2, AVCHD, and so on. Some are made for editing and some for delivery. Final Cut Pro works with some like a knife through butter, and with others like hammering through steel. Worse yet, sometimes as an editor you are handed a project that deals with multiple formats at once. While the multilingual Final Cut can handle such a task and mix formats in one project, it's far more efficient if it only has to focus on one, easy-to-understand language at a time. In turn, Apple has made it very simple to streamline this cumbersome issue and create edit-efficient versions of our media upon import (or after).