New to Final Cut Pro

[Boyd Mccollum]

If possible take an Intro to FCP course with an instructor. If that’s not possible in your location or for expense, I highly recommend getting the Diana Weynand Final Cut Pro 5 book. It’ll take around 20 hours or so to go through everything, but you will know FCP – though the first few chapters are enough to get you going. The investment in time will pay huge dividends in time savings in the future (probably 10-fold). It’s also an excellent reference guide to go back and review how to do certain things (each of the APTS books are great this way).

Larry Jordan and Jerry Hoffman both have excellent books as well. Lynda.com is a great place for online tutorials (taught by the aforementioned Larry Jordan). With their premium subscription, you can also download project files to work on with the lessons. Hands-on is always a great way to go. The nice thing about Lynda.com is that they also cover all the different FCP Stuido apps, Adobe CS apps, and much more. You can go there without signing on and try out the first few chapters in the lessons to get a flavor of how it works.

I’ve heard good things about Ripple Training but have no direct knowledge (I do with all of the ones I mentioned above.). Of course, the search function here on the Cow is priceless and has saved me a whole lot of stress, not to mention time.

[Tom Wolsky]

I’m partially to my own book

https://www.fcpbook.com/FCP5%20Editing%20Essentials.html

If you prefer DVD-based instruction try

https://www.fcpbook.com/Complete%20FCP%205%20Training.html

All the best,

Tom

Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs

[Walter Biscardi]

If you go into the Cow’s Dairy Store and follow the links to the Cow’s Amazon Book Store, you’ll find a book by Jerry Hofmann that’s a great introduction to Final Cut Pro. You essentially cut a film along with Jerry.

It was made for Final Cut Pro 4, but it’s still very relevant and I like his style. Also, the books by Diana Weyland are very good as well and are the authorized Apple training books.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[13]

There are some free tutorials that are included with FCP. Check those out first, its a good way to get started.

[Ron James]

My 2 cents…

The most important thing you can do is learn proper FCP workflow. It’s the little things that catch up with you later on. I’m not sure what background you have, but the number one thing I do when training Avid editors on FCP is break their habits. FCP is a much more elegant piece of software (IMO, so relax Avid fanboys) but it still has its own quirks and sore spots. The main weak point is the database, meaning a bad workflow can really bloat an FCP project which only leads to problems. You want to be organized in your media management and sequence building. I’d recommend using one project for capturing all your media (if we’re talking a lot of media) then do all your selects, etc, then take what you need (selects sequences and source files) into a new project, then all over again when you’re arriving at your Fine Cut.

This might be too much information, but workflow is the most important thing, IMO.

Good Luck! One great thing about Final Cut Pro is the community. A very generous bunch of people, from my experience.

[Steven Gonzales]

Start with a simple tutorial to get a basic idea.

Then read the manual. Not the whole thing: read the table of contents, and the intro paragraph from each chapter. Then play with the program for a while. Then pull down each menu, and see what in the submenus, and look up the things that sound interesting, and look up everything else later.

If you buy a book, look for one that isn’t a rewrite of the manual (because you could just read that for free, right?).

I haven’t looked in years, but I believe I remember Tom Wolsky’s book having comments about which audio filters were more useful than others. Look for this type of thing: something that indicates the book is giving you something the manual doesn’t. Opinionated is good — you’re looking for a perspective, since the original manual give mostly equal weight to everything.

[David Kirlew]

I want to thank you guys for the book and tutorials and othe recommendations. I’ve got my first big project for a college class cooming up. So I will be reading up on many of the threads on Creative Cow for any possible problems that may arise.

David Kirlew

Reflection Pictures