This is an article in the Real World Editing series.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the setup and preferences in Final Cut Pro.  “Boooring”, you might be thinking. “When do we get to start editing?” This is a very important step in the understanding of Final Cut Pro. It is a beast of a program, and it is invaluable to know what’s going on under the hood.

Let’s start from the top. We’ll check out the user preferences from the Final Cut Pro menu. On the general tab, we’ll set up some “general” but important prefs. Here are what I think are the most important ones:

Levels of undo
I don’t know about you, but I’d use infinite undo if I could. The ability to step back through a large amount of changes or edits in a project has come in handy for me over time. The maximum is 99, I usually set this to 50 actions. That should suffice.

Real Time Audio Mixing
Underneath, you can adjust the amount of real time audio mixing that Final Cut Pro will do. Adjusting this number down will increase performance, though, for example, if you set this to 4 audio tracks, if you exceed that on your timeline, you’d have to stop and render. I usually leave my Audio Playback Quality set to “low” for faster performance. Don’t be confused by this; your audio won’t sound bad, Final Cut Pro just renders audio at a slightly lower quality to aid in real-time playback. If you’re doing critical audio work, set this to Medium or High. Remember, though, Final Cut Pro always uses the highest quality settings when printing to video, editing to tape or exporting.

Autosave
Next are the autosave functions. This is another feature that can save you if everything goes wrong. I usually set this to save every 10 minutes, keeping at most 50 copies of the project and a maximum of 100 projects. I can’t tell you how many times this autosave function has saved me after strange crashes & unexplainable corruptions.

New Project and New Sequence settings
The next check boxes will allow you to have Final Cut Pro bug you for New Project and New Sequence settings everytime you create one or the other. I tend to leave these unchecked, since I tend to stay with one setting for a while — such as DVC ProHD 1080P or Apple Intermediate Codec 720P.

Dropping and Breaking
I usually uncheck the “Report dropped frames during playback” because, it happens . . . frames get dropped occasionally, and I don’t need everything to stop and warn me.

The timecode break dropdown menu tells Final Cut Pro what to do when this happens — whether you’d like it to keep on capturing and make a new clip, abort capture altogether, or just bug you about it later.

Auto Render
Finally you can have Final Cut Pro “auto render” if you leave it sitting idle for a certain amount of time. Check this if you think it will help; uncheck it if, for some reason, you’re leaving sequences in the project unrendered on purpose – say, for Hard Drive space.

Editing Tab
On the Editing tab, there are a few settings worth noting — first is the Still / Freeze duration. This determines the default length of imported still pictures or freeze frames that you generate on the timeline. I tend to change this from the default 10 seconds to a smaller 5 seconds, but this is just a personal preference. Note that, once imported or generated, you can adjust the still frame duration as long or short as you like it in the Viewer.

Real World Tip: This setting is useful if you’d like to import an image sequence generated from another program — in this case you can adjust the still frame duration down to 1 frame each and drag a folder of images into your project.

Skipping down, “Always Reconnect Externally Modified Files” is checked by default — I like to leave this checked; it helps when working with other Final Cut Studio project files on the timeline, such as Motion or Livetype files. When you make a change and save in the other program and return to Final Cut Pro, it will automatically reconnect it and update your timeline. This is a great time saver.

Finally on this tab are the Auto-Conform and Scaling options. A great new feature of Final Cut Pro 6 is the mixed-format sequence that allows you to work, mostly seamlessly, with different codecs and file sizes on your timeline. This preference shows that, by default, Final Cut Pro will “ask” if you’d like to auto-conform a sequence to whatever you drag into it first — for example, if you add an HDV clip to a DV timeline, it’ll say “Hey, wouldn’t you rather work in HDV?”. Furthermore, the next box will make Final Cut Pro scale different-sized clips to your timeline’s size — for example, if you tried to add a DV clip to the HDV timeline you just made, it would scale that clip up to fit. This is a very nice addition to the latest version of Final Cut Pro and comes in handy in these days of HD, DV, and many different formats.

Labels
Next tab: Labels. Are you the type of person who likes to stick color-coded post it notes everywhere or label everything? Then this is for you. You can color-code any object in your project bin. Final Cut Pro defaults to the film-like “Good Take, Best Take, Alternate Shots, Interviews, Broll”, but here is where you can name the colors anything you’d like. How about “Draft, Pending, Proofed, Revision”, etc. Whatever serves your purpose or work is best.

Timeline Options
As you might have guessed, these are all of the attributes of the timeline. Here you can control all of the facets of any new or default timeline that is created– size of the tracks, the default number of audio & video tracks, etc. Below this are more detailed options — you can turn on and off different “extras” on the timeline, such as showing animated keyframes, audio waveforms, audio and video filters & speed.

Real World Tip: I should mention, though, that most any of these can be turned on and off with a keyboard shortcut while you’re editing on the timeline. My favorite is Control Option W, for toggling the audio waveforms on and off.

The last two tabs control further options of new sequences you create: Render Control adjusts how different things like effects or Motion Templates render or play back on a new sequence. And Audio Outputs is what it says — it makes adjustments for different audio outputs, such as basic Left / Right Stereo or 6 Channel Surround. Note that I said these tabs control the options of new sequences created — to change these options on an existing sequence, go to its specific sequence settings by right-clicking on it in the browser.

Next Up: Final Cut Pro System Settings | Scratch Discs

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Filed under: Tutorial, real world editing