Digital Media Tutorial:Environment, Part 2

In this tutorial you will learn about the timeline and canvas components of Final Cut Pro. 1. The Timeline is the stage onto which you drag your media in the order in which youd like it to appear.

2. The Canvas is the play box in the top right corner of the Final Cut Pro interface. It displays whatever youve put in the Timeline.

3. You can click the image of your clip in the Viewer and then drag that onto the timeline or you can drag the clip as it is listed in the Browser. If you drag it from the Viewer, a thumbnail image will appear attached to your cursor.

4. Make sure the arrow faces downward as you release the cursor after dropping a clip onto the timeline.

5. When the clip enters the track, you can see a blue line and two green lines. The blue line corresponds to the track label v1 and the green lines correspond to the track labels a1 and a2. Blue and v are for video and green and a are for audio. There are two audio tracks because you recorded in stereo sound - just imagine a stero system and think of these corresponding to the right and left speaker.

6. You can layer tracks by dropping clips onto different track lines, even if they arent yet visible on the screen. This way, you can play with which visuals line up with the audio clips. Dropping the clip onto a line where a track should be will automatically create a new track.

7. The small green buttons to the left of the track control the visibility of the tracks contents. When you deselect the green button with a film strip icon, you make the visual track invisible. When you deselect the green button with the sound wave icon, you make the audio track mute.

8. On the right side of the track labels are a series of lock icons, all of which are unlocked. These control which tracks you can edit. When you click to lock a track, diagonal gray lines appear over the track. These signify that you cant make any changes to the tracks contents.

9. The vertical line with attached yellow triangle is called a playhead and controls what is being played on the timeline. You can use your mouse to drag the playhead back and forth across the timeline. This is also called scrubbing.

10. At the top right corner of the Timeline are two selected green buttons, one called Snapping and one called Link Selection.

11. Normally, the audio and visual components of a video clip are locked together, but if you deselect the link button, you unlock the tracks from one another. Instead of the visual and audio tracks being tied and thus edited together, you can select and edit individual tracks within the same clip.

12. When you move discrete clips next to each other to unify them, Final Cut Pro automatically shores up the gaps, as evidenced by gray triangles that appear along the edges of the clips. This is referred to as snapping. The playhead also snaps to the end or beginning of a clip if you scrub it near the edges. To turn that off, you can deselect the snap button, which will allow you to move the playhead toward the end of a clip without snapping it to the end.

13. The Canvas window has play controls on it. You can use these to control the timeline playback, but the space bar is the easiest way to play and pause. Just hit once to play and then once more to pause. Here, you have: 1. Return to beginning 3. Play 5. Go to end 2. Rewind 4. Fast-forward

14. In the top left corner of the Canvas, theres a window that displays the duration of the timelines sequence. In the top right corner, another window displays the time and frame at which the playhead rests.

15. If at anytime you accidentally close one of your windows, you can reset the display by going to the Window drop down menu, then to Arrange and then to Standard.