Pre-Editing a Rough Cut

In the first three chapters, we concentrated on discussing processes from a broad perspective rather than just the Final Cut Pro way of editing. This chapter focuses on Final Cut Pro and the actual steps you will use to pre-edit and create an initial assembly and then a rough cut. The initial assembly is added to a project in the timeline. Before you start the procedure of adding clips, it is important to know how to navigate the timeline and understand the terminology of a Final Cut Pro project.

This chapter and Chapter 5 will explain how to approach the assembly of the media that you have spent time categorizing and rating. Your personality is now coming to the fore, and even though there is a process defined for you, it’s more important that you do it your way.

You will see how the pre-edit is the process of preparing the best of the media to be added later to the initial assembly. The explanation of this early stage of the editing process is...