Final Cut Pro 7: Use free tools to make your own single-document manual

[Alan Okey]

I’ll get right to that, just as soon as I finish rearranging my stamp collection, chewing broken glass and dragging a rusty nail across the surface of my eye.

[Scott Sheriff]

Apple needs to wake up and smell the coffee. PDF’s are a must for those of us that take our work seriously. Being able to search efficiently is a real benefit.
A possible reason they (Apple) don’t seem to care about the manual is when they read the forums and see people ask ‘FCP 101’ questions, like how do I dissolve, key, matte, send…blah, blah, blah. These entry level questions that are quite easily found in the PDF (if anyone would take the time to look) might be giving the impression that good manuals are a low priority for a lot of users.
Besides giving the impression that manuals are not important, these questions are quite frankly, annoying. I’m glad to see that the ‘big guns’ on the forum have started to put their foot down regarding these types of questions. This forum, while not as bad as the Apple FCP forum, still has a lot of people that post questions because they are too lazy to read the book!

[Bouke Vahl]

Hey, cut him some slack.

Instead of bitching around, he’s doing something constructive, trying to make things better.

You gotta respect that.

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pro’s

[Alex Gollner]

This method uses TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software (the makers of BBedit), and the free version of Pages from Apple’s iWork suite.

Here’s a 15 minute screen recording of me making my own copy of the manual.

I deleted 4-5 minutes of waiting for content to be inserted and pasted (on my MacBook Pro), so it shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to finish.

@alex4d

[Andreas Kiel]

An addition to Alex’s excellent and great tutorial: from TextEdit you can print to PDF to get back all the great PDF search features.

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Scott Sheriff]

Great,
Sounds like Alex has got a handle on this.
How about ‘taking one for the team’ and just posting the working, searchable PDF version somewhere for download.

[Tom Wolsky]

He shouldn’t do that. It would be a copyright violation.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Dave Jenkins]

Alex, thanks for the info, very easy! I was able to do the whole process in Pages 09. I inserted the Preface as one insert, then the rest of the manual as second insert no need to go to Text Edit. Thanks again for posting the info on how to do this. Apple should have done this!!!

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
MacPro Two 2.8GHz Quad Core – AJA Kona LHe
FCP 6.0.4 OS X 10.5.5 QT 7.5.5

[Scott Sheriff]

“He shouldn’t do that. It would be a copyright violation.”

All the best,

Tom

IMHO
If Apple is offering it for free (in HTML), but all your doing is changing formats, then I think that would fall under ‘Fair Use’, and I would claim it as so. Lots of gray area in ‘Fair Use’ clause, especially when the material has been made available for free in a public forum by the CR holder.
If you believe that providing a PDF is a CR violation and isn’t ‘Fair Use’, then he has already violated the CR by providing the means (links to software) and instruction for use, with the intent to distribute CR protected material.
All the more reason for Apple to put out the PDF.

[Tom Wolsky]

You need to read up on fair use. This under no stretch of the imagination would fall under fair use, which also limits you to using no more than 10% of a work. Have you looked at the web page manual. There is a copyright notice on every single page separately. All web pages (unless on a secure site) are publicly available; reproducing any web page that you didn’t create is a copyright violation. It’s someone else’s intellectual property, and if you don’t think that Apple will come after anyone who does this, think again. Apple has shown itself to be extremely vigilant and ruthless in protecting its intellectual property.

There is no doubt Alex is very much skirting the law in doing what he has done, US law at least. Fortunately for him he is not in the United States, which might make it somewhat more difficult to prosecute. I don’t know what precedent there is in British law for what he has done. In the US you can certainly be prosecuted as happened to the Finnish(?) hacker who posted the workaround for circumventing DVD copy protection. Adobe pressed charges against him when he went to Las Vegas, and he was arrested. I don’t for a moment thing anything will happen to Alex because clearly the sentiment is that this is something Apple should have done. It would be PR disaster to prosecute him, but if you make a PDF of their material and posted it somewhere on the web I guarantee you will hear from the company’s lawyers.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”