Opening a Project File in Final Cut Pro 5

Series Summary

As one of the most popular and extensively used software programs in video and film editing, Final Cut Pro can give a professional appearance to any film project, from basic digital video to HD material. Because it's relatively affordable and easy to use, Final Cut Pro has become extremely popular with broadcast stations and independent filmmakers. While a good working knowledge of Final Cut Pro is an essential skill for any video editor or filmmaker, you don’t have to shell out additional dollars for an instructional course. Expert Village is proud to offer this free online course to help you get familiar with the software, or just sharpen your proficiency with the program.

In this free Final Cut Pro tutorial you'll learn the basics of Final Cut Pro. This video series will focus on the basic editing features of the software. Expert video editor CJ South will show you step-by-step how to begin to put together clips by selecting and sequencing them in a timeline, gives you an overview of the various cut effects, and how to operate some of the basic tools you'll need to navigate around the program. 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 find your project files in the MAC OSX browser. Welcome to Volume 2 of the training tutorials. In Volume 1, we left off with capturing footage into your Final Cut Pro project. Now I am going to show you the relationship between your media files and the location on your hard drive. So let's go up here to the browser. Now if you notice that I have tape 1, tape 2, tape 5; these are all my captured files. Now each of these files is connected to media on your hard drive. So let's say for example that some of these get deleted or all of them get deleted, you need to find them on your hard drive to bring them back in your project. So go ahead and open up the finder from whatever hard drive you put your footage onto; for me it's my external here. Now if you notice there is a bunch of different folders in here because I keep lots of projects. One way for me to organize my projects to keep track of them, is I put these little color bars on them. You can do that by right clicking and going down to color label and you can change the color or have no color. It's up to you. Let's try and locate our project file. We named the project my project so this is our project file right here. There's the folder and there's our project file. Now if you notice there is no video or anything there. Okay, that's because Final Cut Pro logs it in a separate area. You log it into the capture scratch folder; it's this folder right here. .Now if you notice, let me pull this up larger for you. In the capture scratch folder I have different projects and here's my project. Basically when you capture footage into a saved project, it creates a folder with the name of your project so that it is easier for you to find. That's why naming is so important in organization. Let's go ahead and open that up and here are all our files chilling right in here. So let me go ahead and reselect them and I can just click drag them right into the Final Cut Pro browser or if you want you can also go up to file and import, files or folders. You could also right click and go to import files or folders. There are three different ways you could do it. Each way is just as effective. "