Interacting With Layout & Floating Windows in Final Cut Pro 5

Video Transcript

" Hi this is CJ South representing expertvillage.com, and in this clip I'm going to show you the final cut pro layout and I'm going to teach you how to interact with it. Now I will explain a little bit more in depth about the function of each of the separate windows on the layout, and I will also show you how you can interact with a separate windows. Let's first go up to the browser in the upper left corner. You should be pretty familiar with the browser by now. We went over this: you saved a project with it and in the browser is where all your media files are instantly going to be stored. Anything you import in the final cut pro is going to be right in this browser area. Then you will access it from the browser, whether it is dragging it to the timeline, dragging it to the viewer, or just double clicking it. Now on top of the browser you see my project tab; next to that is the effects tab. Go ahead and click on that. This is where we are going to access the effects from. So this just keep a note of that we will come back to that later on. Now to the right of the browser is the viewer, and the viewer is exactly that. It is use for viewing. Anything that you double click on, on the browser will come up in the viewer, and then from the viewer you'll choose a section of that footage that you want, and then you pull into the timeline. Now up on top of the viewer you also have tabs. These tabs are used to affect whatever media that you have. So lets say that you bring in an audio clip. You click stereo, you can change that levels of it, or even if you bring in a video clip, you can change the levels of the audio on that clip. Then you also have the filters tab which allows you to change parameters of the filters, and then you have motion which is basically your movement, the movement of the clips, of the graphics. You can change the scale, how large it is, you can rotate it, you can crop it, you can destroy it, whatever you want to do to it. This is just for the basic parameters. Now to the right of the viewer is the canvas. Now I have to talk about the canvas and the timeline together, because they are basically two sides of the same coin. When the canvas is up, the timeline is up. The canvas is a visual representation of what is in your timeline. The timeline is a graphical representation of your footage. So your footage will be in the timeline and it will just be basically blocks, which you will see later on. You are not actually seeing any moving video, and wherever you are in that footage, you can then see it up on the canvas. So now let's say that I close this time line; I can not even utilize this canvas or close the canvas; I can't utilize the timeline. But, if now if I go up to the browser and I double click on sequence, they both come up because they are connected to each other. "