Using the Tool Palette 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 second part of how to interact with the final cut pro layout. To the right of the timeline is the tool palette and the audio levels or audio meters. Now the tool palette it is just a collection of tools to help you create your project. So whether you want to click and drag or rotate or move around, you can also cut, there is a cutting tool, zooming, cropping, a lot of the tools that you will be using are basically right here in the palette. Then the audio meters are basically for monitoring your audio levels while you are doing your projects. Now all the windows, the great thing about these windows is that they are all floating windows, which means that you can just move them around where ever you want them to go. You can put them anywhere just by click dragging on top of them. At the bottom right, you can click drag to make the window larger or smaller in whichever way you choose. So it is really great. I mean you can move these around anywhere and you can make a wonderful block medley of project windows. So let's say that you totally F everything up though, and it is just going to be a pain in the butt to resize everything: that is fun. You can just go right up to window at the top of the screen. Go down to arrange and click standard and boom you are back to normal. Now going back to window again under arrange, now you can see that they have different presets here for you and you can just go ahead and play around with those, and they basically will just resize windows and move them around accordingly. So let's click two up for example. You now have larger viewers than you do on a timeline. It just depends on how you like to edit. Now if you have two screens, two separate monitors, which are really great, it is putting your timeline over in one monitor and then your viewer and your canvas and your browser on another one. It makes it so much easier when you are editing a much larger project, cause you just have all that space, all that nice space that you can see everything. Now let's just go ahead and go back to standard here. Now let's say that you where going around and oops, you accidentally delete a window; that is no problem, because the guys in final cut pro are so ridiculously smart that they thought of a way for you to bring that right back. You just go up to window, and hey there is viewer right there and it is unchecked. The ones that are checked are the ones that you are viewing right now. So let's go ahead and click viewer, and hey it comes back up. Also if you delete one, you can also go ahead and go back to standard and it will bring it back up again. Now you notice when you bring your cursor in between each of the windows, you get this icon with two arrows pointing to either side. Similar to resizing, by going to the bottom right corner, is you click drag and you can pull and you can stretch your windows accordingly. They will actually move in correlation with each other. So it is a nice way to kind of keep everything together when resizing. "