Guide to setting up your iMac for editing with Final Cut Pro 7

For users new to editing with Final Cut, and especially for those who have only edited on PCs, and also for those of you new to editing in a networked environment, here are a few tips to get you Mac working for you.

Once your Mac is fired up and running your first port of call should be to access Finder/Preferences from the menu.

On the “General” tab, make sure that all of the following are checked; Hard disks, External disks, CDs, DVDs and iPods, and Connected servers. This will ensure that all of these connected devices can be seen on your desktop.

Next click on the “Sidebar” tab and ensure that all the boxes are checked under “Devices”, under “Shared”, under “Places” and under “Search For”. This, again, is so that we can see everything that we need to see and nothing is hidden from view.

Moving along to the “Advanced” tab, check the “show all filename extensions” box which is deselected by default. Apple seem to think that we don't want filename extensions but it can be very useful for us to see what type of files we are dealing with.

Then close the Finder Preferences window and go back to the menu bar. Under the Apple icon, scroll down to System Preferences.

The System Preferences window is the equivalent of Control Panel in Windows





If you are using an iMac, select the Mouse icon in System Preferences and select the pull down menu for the right-hand button. By default this, and the left-hand button, are each set to “Primary”, but we want our Mac to work like a PC. Changing this to “Secondary” will open up a whole range of right-click options that us old PC users prefer over the “Ctrl-click” Mac method.





While we are here, it is worth turning off the two side buttons to avoid that annoying accidental opening of expose/desktop/dashboard/mission control or other feature that gets in the way of editing. Next, by deselecting the “Move content in the direction of finger movement......” box for the scroll wheel, the scroll wheel will now behave the same way as our old PC scroll wheel, rather than in opposite fashion.

After this click on “Show All” to return to the System Preferences window.

For those of us using a Laptop without a mouse, you'll need to configure the track pad in a similar fashion. Under Trackpad, select :Secondary Click” and choose “Bottom Right Corner” from the pull down menu.

Laptop and iMac users may have noticed that our F keys, (Function keys), have been hi-jacked by the operating system to drive the screen and speakers etc.





To resolve this problem we need to select “Keyboard” from System Preferences.









Of the two tabs, “Keyboard” and “Keyboard Shortcuts”, select “Keyboard” and ensure that the “Use all F1, F2 etc. keys as standard function keys” is selected. This is needed because Final Cut Pro (and other software) needs access to these keys. If you need to tweek your speaker level or screen brightness, you are still able to do this by holding down the Fn key whilst pressing the relevant F key.

Back in System Preferences, click on “Dock” and reduce it's size so that it doesn't eat up quite so much real estate. Compared to “Task Bar” in Windows, the Dock always seems to get in the way wherever you put it, so the choice is yours as to where you put it and whether you choose to use any of the hide or magnify functions.

Then close System Preferences.

In Finder the default folder view on Macs diplays files as icons. Whilst this may look pretty, it's not much use for finding files, nor of much use for ensuring that we save our projects and media in the correct locations. To see our files in a more useful way, open finder from the dock. Amongst the icons along the top and to the right of the Applications icon we have a choice of four alternative views; icon view, list view, column view and cover flow view. Select column view as this is the most useful for navigating through all your folders.

The final step is to prepare a directory with some folders within which we can store all the various parts of our project. This applies equally to Adobe Premiere and Avid users as it does to FCP users. You can set these folders up from within the edit application but by preparing the ground before-hand, you get a better understanding of where all your material is being stored.

In a professional multi-user, server-based working environment, it is essential to follow the house rules that may differ in some way.

One over-riding basic principal is that the project is stored independently of the media and there is a historical reason for this that is still useful today. On a stand-alone edit suite you may usually have an internal hard drive that runs the application, and a second hard drive that stores the media that you capture or import. If you save the project on the sme drive as the media, and that drive fails, you risk losing weeks of work as well as all the media. With the project stored independently, and backed up regularly, it is possible to recapture all the media should the media drive fail. Not only that but you will be able to return to the last edit that you saved before the drive failure. Obviously, this only works if you have kept all your original tapes or cards full of camera-original media. The project file itself can be backed up to a small memory stick as it is only a few kbs in size.

In a professional server-based working environment, the media is stored on more robust computers using RAID 5 drive arrays. These drive arrays duplicate your media, spread it across several drives and use checksum error correction that allows for faulty drives to be replaced without losing any data.

So, for most practical purposes, when using FCP it is good practice to create a folder called Final Cut Pro Documents on your external drive or on your allocated server space, and next to this create a folder called fcp projects. When you open up FCP to create a new project, save the project in the fcp projects folder and store all your fcp projects here. Whenever you need to find an old project, you then only have one place to look for it. Make a point, also, of ONLY storing fcp project files here and nothing else.

Similarly, when you set up the scratch disks for each project, have fcp use the Final Cut Pro Documents folder for everything else associated with the project – Capture Scratch, Audio Scratch, Render files, Waveform Cache, Thumbnail Cache and Auto-save Vault.

Above all - Be tidy and methodical with your media management.