Teaching Final Cut class, and need to know how to set up lab.

[Tom Wolsky]

I have to ask: are you an Apple certified trainer? Did you do the T3 training? If you feel you’ll have trouble filling a three day training you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Scott Sheriff]

I’m amazed that you have condensed what amounts to a lifetime of work for many of us into a three day class, and are having a hard time trying to fill the third day.
Sounds like you have covered it all to me.
If I sound a bit pithy, imagine if I were to produce a few hours of classes on DVD called “How to be a High School Teacher, in three easy lessons”.

Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

I have a system, it has stuff in it, and stuff hooked to it. I have a camera, it can record stuff. I read the manuals, and know how to use this stuff and lots of other stuff too.
You should be suitably impressed…

[Kent Stipp]

WOW Ambitious you are LOL
I agree with both Tom and Scott. IF you have not done the training don’t teach.
Now that I said that. IF you are confident with your FInal cut skills as you say, and you are teaching a friend how to do basics that is one thing we have all done that. But if you are doing an official class and getting some pay out of it leave it to the trained and qualified instructors, Don’t you agree?

Kent Stipp
Life Begins at 155mph
Ki PRO Lens to Post
3am Studios llc.
3amstudios.org
Sharedsummitsfever.com

[Morgan Schenk]

Wow you guys are a big help. How bout this instead of taking a certified apple final cut pro 3 day training course for 1400 dollars, you take my class where you dont have to pay anything? Any takers? I was asked to do this by a friend and I know I can pull it off. It would be nice if i could ask questions on a community forum and get ONE sliver of constructive advice. Seriously. Can one of you answer my first question about prepping the lab at least? I REALLY didn’t mean to offend you. Thats sweet you were fortunate enough to make media your career. Some of us still learning and trying to get our foot in the door. This will def be a learning experience for me, and a little help would be appreciated. If you want to turn this into a pointless thread please continue with your pithy comments. Seriously please just spare me comments on how silly i am for even trying. Im sorry about this little rant but that was straight up offensive. Is it possible for us to be constructive with this? I think we can. Share some of your knowledge you’ve obtained.

Lets be friends?

Morgan

[Paul Belanger]

Morgan

You should start off with a nice slow demonstration of each step
followed by the students doing their own practice multiple times.
This will gobble up time and you’ll wish you had more time.

You can keep your demonstration media small. You don’t need hours of footage for them to practice with.
Just five minutes maybe. With that amount you can copy over media to all the workstations relatively quick.
You can also have the students bring in their own raw footage to work with.

This is a forum that is always filled with bitter old people who never answer direct questions.

Paul

[Tom Wolsky]

Don’t teach this class. You are not doing these teachers a service by trying to impart your limited knowledge to them. They will use it as a basis for their insteuction and it will not serve them or their students well. The best thing you can do is load up the tutorial media from the Diana Weynand book and walk them through it. At least then you have a step-by-step insteuction set that covers the basics in a systematic fashion. Even then you really shouldn’t do this. This is not like taking on a job to edit someone’s video. Whether you screw it up or not has limited impact, this has much wider ripples that can effect a great many people’s lives.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Scott Sheriff]

[Paul Belanger] “This is a forum that is always filled with bitter old people who never answer direct questions.”

So whats your point?
When you don’t get your question answered, or it gets answered with a snarky remark, that should be the first clue that you have crossed the line, or it’s time to RTFM.

What’s to be bitter about?
Someone that thinks he is qualified to teach others a skill which through his own writing he has demonstrated that he knows very little about. Oh, yeah. But he’s doing it for free. Like that somehow makes it better…
Or should I be bitter because he has so little respect for the rest of us that have put in the seat time to learn the craft.

And for the record, this is a professional help forum, and I feel absolutely no obligation to help ‘non-professionals’ that haven’t put in the effort to become a working professional. And there is a big difference between “answering a direct question”, and training someone to be an editor via the forum. Even at that, I would be more that happy to answer a question. But I think answering a half dozen questions and helping create a training syllabus for someone to then use to pretend to be qualified, and teach a class with is asking a lot.

This should have gotten bounced to the basics forum where it belongs. That way it could sit and languish for days unanswered.

I’m really looking forward for the release of FCP X, and the ten-fold increase in these types of posts that will accompany it.

How’s that for being a bitter old guy skippy?

Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

I have a system, it has stuff in it, and stuff hooked to it. I have a camera, it can record stuff. I read the manuals, and know how to use this stuff and lots of other stuff too.
You should be suitably impressed…

[Gary Askham]

I’m with the others.

How can you teach a class (doesn’t matter if it’s paid or not) when you don’t seem to know the first thing about setting up a project? I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life learning this stuff and I still would think twice about taking on a teaching class.

I have done a little bit of film lighting in my time – short films, the odd interview. If someone asked me to do a class on film lighting I would say no. I wouldn’t go on a web forum and ask how I should put the class together.

————————
FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Stephan Walfridsson]

[Morgan Schenk] “Obviously this is my first time teaching and while im confident with my final cut ability, teaching a class is another thing. Am I missing anything important? Any suggestions are much appreciated.”

I’ve taught Final Cut (and Avid) editing on some occasions and the first thing I realized was that it doesn’t matter how good I am at FCP (and I’m pretty darn good). The question is how experienced are your students? Do they know editing at all? And are they all at the same level?

Assuming that you will be teaching a fairly varied group of more or less beginners I can tell you that you’ll have to go really slow and keep everything at a very basic level. When you start talking about selecting codecs and “using easy setup” to match their footage at least 80% of them will stare at you with a confused look, not understanding a single word of what you are saying.

I seriously doubt that you will be able to go through 25% of what you aim for if you expect them to have learnt anything. Sure you will have told them how to send to motion and back again. But for many, if not all of them, the only thing they will remember is that there was this thing you could do to enter another completely incomprehensible program to do some fancy stuff.

What you need to do is find out what level your students is at and prepare your lessons accordingly. Realizing that things will take a lot more time that you imagine. The old trick of imagining that you are teaching 5 year old children is not a bad idea.

Regarding your material, make any demo projects as streamlined and small as possible. They don’t need hours worth of material. Three or four different shots that somehow belong together (like a wideshot, a medium and a closeup of the same action) is everything they’ll need.

Letting them work on their own projects is a good idea as it will force them to solve real life problems and eventually they will be able to help each other out.

So, good luck. (You’ll need it, trust me.)

Stephan

[Craig Alan]

Here’s my guess. Correct me if I’m wrong. The school bought a bunch of Macs and a site license (hopefully) for FCP thinking that was what all it took to get teachers and, therefore, students up and running with video projects.

If they are Imacs the system drive will get corrupted unless you add external drives. If they are Mac Pros, did they buy extra internal drives? Is there enough ram?

So, Morgan, you are being asked to help some teachers get up and running. There is no way to try to cover professional level editing in three days. Have them bring in footage on tape or card if they have some. Ask them to bring in the camera that it was shot with and the power cord for the camera. Make sure to have firewire cables ready.

You’ll need an admin account. Explain to school admin that this is needed. Teach them how to set up user accounts so they can log in and their work won’t be trashed by students. Don’t do it for them. They’ll need to do this as they teach their students.

Help them log in the footage. Don’t do it for them! Show them how. If there are no media drives then limit the project to 5 minutes. Explain to the school that extra drives are needed or their investment is a waste of money.

Teach them to name and store their projects on the system drive and the media externally or on a media drive internally on a tower. Teach them to label their tapes or cards. Teach them how to back up card based footage on hard drives and how to reformat cards after they know their footage is copied in at least two places. Show them how to back up their project files on a flash drive.

Show them the four basic windows and how they interact. Show them how to: add a sequence to the timeline, set in and out points, insert and ripple, transitions and handles, use an extra track of audio so they can add music and/or a V.O., auto-color correct in 3 way, add titles and sub-titles in Boris – just very basic, adjust sound levels.

Show them how to export a self-contained QT and bring it in to compressor and then how to burn the DVD in DVD studio pro as an auto-play DVD.

This is all most classes will need for student projects. If they really want to become editors recommend the fcp certification training book or anything by Wolsky or the other teachers here on the cow. I like Wolsky’s clarity but that’s personal choice.

Leave them detailed step by step review of each of the lessons you’ve taught them. My guess is you’ll run out of time. But if a percentage of them can learn enough so their students can produce simple videos with titles, subtitles, a sound track, and adjust exposure and sound levels and get the DVD burned and/or posted on the web it will be a huge success.

As far as professional courses that charge $1500 for 3 day workshops … I highly recommend that anyone taking them have their own system and training manuals at home and study before during and after the course to keep up. You don’t learn this stuff in three days! And you forget it if you don’t practice.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz
; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.