Final Cut Pro & Me.

Week seven of film school brings our journey to the editing/computer lab where I will be spending copious amounts of time over the next three weeks. At the beginning of the week we spent the first night going over three modules with Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro or FCP is a digital non-linear editing system. Modules are training exercises for FCP. These modules take quite a bit of time and can be a little on the dry side. FCP is relatively easy to get started on but the program is just amazingly massive, overwhelmingly so actually, and will take years to master.

After learning some basics the first night, our second night we had a capturing lab where we took our raw footage and converted it to digital then uploaded it to our hard-drives and then imported it to FCP. Speaking of hard drives, we are required to have both a flash drive (at least 256 MB) and a hard drive (at least 250 GB with a 800 & 400 FireWire interface). I went with a LaCie hard drive. Capturing lab was great as this was my first opportunity to really look at my footage. I went through it all and made notes on each scene and labeled each scene in FCP then grouped them in bins for easy access. That alone took quite a long time.

The rest of the week was modules and editing. I spent a lot of time reviewing the footage before I put the first piece of footage in the timeline.

We did have a lecture on the last class of the week that I found both helpful and invigorating. The lecture was titled "Editing:Cinematic Language" and was taught by Stephen. We watched some great clips and dissected them. My favorite of the batch was a chase scene from Road Warrior, one of the Mad Max movies. It was just a badass scene and it was put together beautifully. The use of audio was impressive... it all tied into the lecture. At the end of the class he talked to us about having patience and staying motivated during the editing process. This was great to hear... as it is tough to keep working on the same footage for hours and hours.