Overview
Final Cut Express for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide by best-selling author and digital video expertLisa Brenneis is the first book on the market to cover Final Cut Express ($299), Apple's powerful new digital video editing application. Whether you use the book as a start-to-finish guide or a handy reference, you'll find the book's simple step-by-step tasks the easiest way to get up and running with Final Cut Express's comprehensive set of professional-level video editing tools. Brenneis relies on concise language and tons of screenshots to show you how to edit video, work with hundreds of effects and transitions, and master the program's compositing, titling, and audio tools as well as output your finished work, whether it's to DVD or the Web. If you're looking for the fastest way to get up to speed on Final Cut Express--you've found it.Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewSo you edit digital video on the Mac? Or intend to? What tool shall you use? Well, of course, there’s iMovie 3. It’s super easy, and the price is right. Free. But let’s face it: You could grow out of iMovie. (Plenty of small business users, educators, students, and advanced hobbyists already have.)
Then what? Well, there’s Final Cut Pro. Now we’re talking big-time sticker shock. Four figures, with tax or shipping. Ouch.
Thankfully, Apple’s noticed the huge market opportunity between iMovie and Final Cut Pro -- and created an insanely great product to fill it: Final Cut Express.
For just $299, FCE looks and feels just like its big sibling (so you get the same workflow that actually earned Final Cut Pro its very own Emmy Award.) This version’s been downsized, of course, but most nonprofessionals won’t miss the features Apple’s trimmed away.
You can’t output to film, for example -- but were you really intending to? There’s no three-way color correction, but did you even know what that was? You can’t use third-party plug-ins -- but there’s so much here, you probably won’t find yourself searching for more.
You will, however, find yourself searching for help. This ain’t iMovie. There’s a lot to learn. Learn it fast, with Final Cut Express for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide.
Author Lisa Brenneis has been writing Peachpit’s Visual QuickStart guides for Final Cut Pro for years. She knows Apple digital video editing inside out. As a longtime Visual QuickStart author, she also knows how to speak to beginners. (And, of course, the VQS format is ideal: task-focused, step-by-step instructions, loads of screen captures, clean layout, and super-careful editing.)
Part I covers “all the ‘first day of school’ business”: getting to know Final Cut Express’s interface, understanding your project’s “production pathway,” setting up hardware and software, and juggling your project’s elements -- sequences, clips, and so forth. (Also, making project backups and managing disk space -- crucial when you’re working with humongous media files.)
Next, you’ll bring your digital media and DV audio/video footage into Final Cut Express. You’ll walk through setting up for capture, logging, and entering clip information, naming files sanely for easy access, and troubleshooting capture problems. Brenneis covers importing audio, images, even iMovie 3 projects.
Once your content is “in,” you’ll organize it for effective work -- using the browser, viewer, FCE’s stripped-down timecode feature, and using “in and out points,” markers, and other meat-and-potatoes tools.
Now it’s time to get down to work. Brenneis covers every video-editing skill you’ll ever need: basic three-point editing, specifying target tracks, multiple-track editing, inserts, overwrites, replace edits, backtime edits, superimpose edits, transition edits, split edits, editing in the timeline and canvas, trims, and more.
Audio, transitions, compositing, effects, wireframes and keyframes, filters, titles: They’re all explained simply and quickly. Brenneis concludes with two chapters walking you through final rendering and outputting to tape, DVD, or Web.
This may be “semipro” editing, but with Brenneis’s help, it’s “totally” easy. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.