How to Import Still Images in Final Cut Pro 5

Series Summary

A working knowledge of Final Cut Pro is essential to any aspiring filmmaker. As the most widely used software program in video and film editing, Apple computer's Final Cut Pro can give a professional appearance to any film project from basic digital video to HD material. Because it is relatively affordable and easy to use, Final Cut Pro has become extremely popular with broadcast stations and independent filmmakers. It offers a wealth of effects and functions, like dissolve, iris, distortion, and ripple, rolling, slipping, sliding and other editing functions, as well as color correction filters and audio filters.

In this free Final Cut Pro tutorial learn the basics of Final Cut Pro. This video series will concentrate on adjusting the motion of your video. Expert video editor CJ South will show you step-by-step how to import still images, change the motion settings, adjust center values and anchor point; how to use the crop tool and adjust the scale and rotation in the viewer and in the canvas. Learn also how to animate a wipe effect, create a text window, animate drop shadows, and create a title fade in. Watch this free online tutorial with our others in this series and start working on your independent film today!

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is C.J. South representing expertvillage.com. In this clip I am going to show you how to import still images. So the first step of importing a still image is not actually bring it in to Final Cut Pro. The first step is we want to make sure that image whatever it may be, a picture, then you want to make sure that it is in the same hard drive that all of our other media files are in. So why don't you go to your finder, you find your picture. Here's my picture right here and I am just going to go ahead and put that into my external hard drive which is where I am keeping all my Final Cut Pro media files. Remember you want to keep everything together as best as possible. I am going to go ahead and drop it in my project here. Okay now it's in my project and to bring it into Final Cut Pro you can do a couple of different things. In Final Cut Pro in the browser you are going to right click, go to import, files and then you can just find it up here. You can also go up to file, import, files but then again my favorite way to do it is just to drag it in from your finder. So just drag that over and just plop it right there. Cool! Now we have our image. So go ahead and load that up by dragging it to the viewer and double clicking it. Okay, there's our image and just click drag it to time line. Now before I do that let me go ahead and change my duration because it is only 1 second. I want this to be 2 seconds and now I have; oops, I put that under video, put that on top or to the side there. Now I have my image and that is how you import. "