Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro is the editing software we have been using for our production. Recently we saw a video on YouTube from a Sunday League Football channel, showing his viewers how he creates the player walk ons. This video was a great insight to Final Cut Pro showing us additional features we never knew existed which we can now use to improve our production.

The video went through lots of areas of the editing software as to how to crete these player walk ons. It looked at how to crop a scene, scale the scene, zoom in on specific areas of the scene, create key frames, look at video animation settings (distortion, composting opacity, colour, trim and transform), how to remove colours from a scene (green screen) and also how to paste attributes.

The scaling of a scene we used on a few of our stop start animations, as we were not able to keep the golliwog in place without our arm on the scene. This video meant that we didn't have to go onto Photoshop and crop each image individually. Once the image was scaled and cropped, we could then move the image left or right, up or down so it was positioned in the middle of the scene. This was far easier than cropping each image on Photoshop and then placing them back in on Final Cut Pro. What made it far quicker was pasting attributes. This tool allowed us to copy the attributes from one image to another so they were all scaled to the same size, and positioned in the exact same place so that the camera doesn't move for the shots.

The video animations part is going to be very useful to us, in particular the composting opacity. This allows us to make the scene fade in nicely from 0% opacity to 100% opacity. This is great for the beginning of new scenes, but also the end of scenes so they don't just cut. The small opacity fade makes the edit between scenes look much smoother and more professional. Final Cut Pro allows us to make small, precise details as to how quickly it fades in and fades out so we can match it up with our scene.

Another part of the video that was very useful was a keyframe. This is where you make certain parts of the scene move into a different position. This is done by selecting the starting position as a key frame. This position is where you want X to be at the beginning of the shot. You then need to set another key frame. This frame is where you want X to be at the end of the shot. The key frame allows you to mark which parts you want the key frame to use such as scale, position etc. Once the two key frames are completed, Final Cut will play the video so that it moves smoothly between the two positions. This is something we may use to create specific wipes between scenes as Final Cut Pro does not have too many wipes that are going to be useful to us. However, we will use key frames when adding rain to the scene. The football scene in our production we think will look better with rain. We will use the key framing so that we can start the rain as really heavy and the colours as dark and gloomy at the beginning of the scene, but towards the end of the scene we want the rain to be much more gentle and the colours to be brighter again. The key frame creates a gentle fade between the rain so that is slows down gently.

Another part of the video was how to remove colours from a scene. The edit was showing the tutorial on a green screen. This was done by using a keyer which takes green out of the footage. If we want another colour to be removed we need to locate it using the sample colour, which then takes away colours that were just highlighted. This is unlikely to be of use to us, but could be used if we want to remove a colour from a scene.