Yesterday I have been at the Final Cut Pro Workshop in the Mac Shop at Regent Street. These workshops really are a good opportunity of achieving basic knowledge of a particular field and I would suggest them to everybody interested in certain soft- or hardware.

Whenever I did video editing in the past I used Adobe Premiere. The last version I used was Adobe Premiere Pro, which is contained in the CS3. Honestly I have to admit that I didn’t have the chance yet to explore CS4, which was launched recently.

However, right now – after the work shop – I would like to change to Final Cut Pro. The software is available as suite containing:

• Final Cut Pro 6 for video and film editing
• Motion 3 for graphics and animation in 3D
• Soundtrack Pro 2 for professional audio post-production
• Color for professional color grading and finishing
• Compressor 3 and DVD Studio Pro 4 for digital delivery virtually

The very nice feature within this suite is that the programs are extremely compatible among each other. That means whenever you have a sequence on your timeline and would like to edit the sound, you can export it directly from te timline to Soundtrack Pro 2. As soon as you have finished the editing in Sound you can export it back to Final Cut Pro. The sequence will be at the exact same position on your timeline than it was before. Only difference: The sound now is edited.
There are also possiblities to edit sound and color directly in Final Cut Pro. Either way you should keep in mind, that whenever you plan to outsource the editing of sound or color, you should export the original file, without any changes you have done in Fial Cut Pro itself.

Within Final Cut Pro there are some features who could be especially intersting for covering Red Carpet Events and videos that are broadcasted on televison.
There is one filter wich reduces all the shaking of the camera. Therefore you simply set a startpoint and an endpoint at the special sequence and apply the filter. The calculation of this effect may take a few minutes, but it really is worth it. This filter could easily be applied on shoots that had to be done without a stand.
The second very nice feature is the the colour correction. It is possible to display all the parts of a sequence who are to bright to be shown on a television screen. Afterwards the programme will automatically convert this colors to save ones, which can be aired without a loss of quality.

Next there are many other nice features, which will surely help you saving a lot of time within the editing process.
For example you have the possiblity of draging special filter-settings to the favorites. So all the individual things are saved and you can easily use them for other clips.

All in all I really think that this piece of software is very handy and can help you to achieve a quick and satisfactory solution, whereas Final Cut pro offers lots of possiblities of being creative, experimenting and producing high quality videos.

Sources:
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MA887Z/A?mco=MTIxODk3Mw
workshop: mac store – regent street – london – 27/11/2008 – 15:00