Final Cut Pro 4

What is it?

Final Cut Pro is a professional grade video editing software. You can use it to capture, edit, and export high quality movies. As this program is used by professionals, it is recommended for people who have some experience with video editing and would like to use the up and coming industry standard. If you are unfamiliar with video editing and are trying to compile a simple video slide show or add captions and title menus, then a better choice would be to use iMovie.

How do I get it?

Unfortunately, due to licensing Final Cut Pro 4 is only available in the Multimedia Lab located within ITB. Each computer in the multimedia lab has a VCR, TV, and DV tape deck already connected to it. Please do not change any of the connections from the computer to any of the other hardware. If you suspect that any of the connections are faulty, let somebody at the helpdesk know.

How do I use it?

For more information about Final Cut Pro, check out these other resources:

• Official Final Cut Pro webpage
• Unofficial Final Cut Pro and other Video techniques guide

Pomona specific "Things you should know"

Your userspace on the Pomona network is more often than not, not sufficient for creating and editing a film that is any longer than a few minutes long. For best results, save all of your work on the physical harddrive of that machine which should be labeled "Workfiles" 1 or 2. Note that these harddrives are fully accessible to all other students who will log onto that specific Multimedia lab machine.

Since each machine only has a limited amount of harddrive space on it, we periodically clear out the drives to make room for new projects. Please remove your project files after you are finished with your project.

If making films and video projects is something you plan on doing more than once, we recommend, for the sake of security and maintaining project files, that you purchase an external harddrive. In full uncompressed form, straight from either DV tapes or VHS, 1 minute of video footage takes up approximately 1 gigabyte of space, so buy your external harddrive accordingly. Remember, Ipods and most other larger MP3 players can be doubled up as an external harddrive, just in case you needed an extra reason to convince your parents of how much you NEED an Ipod :).