Gadgetory

hey what's up guys it's Matt here with TechnoBuffalo and what I've got for you guys today is a tutorial on making the switch from being an iMovie user to a Final Cut user now all you PC guys out there don't get mad I'm also planning on doing one doing Windows Movie Maker to Sony Vegas or something along those lines but for today it's gonna be iMovie to Final Cut let's go ahead and get started so one of the biggest hurdles that I move a users face when they're switching the Final Cut is really just a mental one when you first get it open you see all these options and it's somewhat overwhelming but the good news is that for the vast majority of users 90% of the stuff you are never gonna need as it really meant more for the pro level users out there the other good news is that the interface your custom to an iMovie has direct correlations with the interface in Final Cut so what we're gonna learn is how you can translate the moves you already known how to do an iMovie into Final Cut so what's the first thing you do in iMovie you import your footage into an event right where a similar thing happens in Final Cut except it's just named differently you have what's called bins and the way to think of these is as your events are in iMovie and it's just a collection of raw video clips and what you can do is you can make a new bin in Final Cut and then just go ahead and drag all your footage into it for easy organization you'll notice it comes up as a list view instead of as thumbnails well it's easy to change that so you can get to the clip that you want simply by right-clicking inside the bin and selecting icons your next step is to find the clip that you want and bring it into what's called the viewer now the way to think of the viewer is is a space for you to edit the clip before bringing it into your final product which is shown in the screen next to it the canvas now in iMovie these are all combined into one screen but Final Cut simply splits them into two most people's next step in iMovie is to select they're in and out points of their clips and then drag them into their project window where they want them well you do something similar in Final Cut so here in the viewer I'm gonna scrub through and find where I want my clip to begin and end in my final product then I'm gonna set the in and out points either by selecting the buttons here on the screen or using the eye in Okies now once that's done I have a couple options I can drag it to the canvas to insert it or drag it down to my main timeline now once I have it inserted you'll notice in the canvas window what my clip is gonna look like in the final product then just like in iMovie I'm gonna repeat those steps until my video is sequenced how I want it's easy to make changes as well just go into the timeline and click and drag or double click on the clip and make the adjustments in the viewer one of the things people really love about iMovie is the ease with which you can add transitions and effects well you can do the same thing in Final Cut it's just laid out a little differently here in the browser window if you look at the top you see an effects tab and that's where you'll see all the built-in filters and transitions so for this I'm just going to go ahead and pick the cross dissolve transition and place that into my timeline and now the clip is gonna have a nice fade to it in the finished product you can fine-tune those filters and effects by double-clicking on a clip to bring it into the viewer and clicking on the filters our motion tab at the top of the viewer window so this is a good time to talk about something you will not encounter in iMovie and that is rendering for example let's take this effect and drag it to the timeline now you notice the top of the timeline window there's a little red bar appearing up there and that indicates that this part of my sequence is not rendered and you can see when I hit play it actually comes up as unrendered in the canvas so what you want to do is is go ahead and go to the top of Final Cut under sequence and then render that selection now that's gonna allow you to see the video play in real time keep in mind that you'll encounter unrenewed selections not just for effects and transitions but also for certain video for as well okay guys final step and that is exporting and iMovie this is pretty easy you go to the share menu and Final Cut you get two different options really you can go ahead and export the QuickTime and pick a format you want to use and I would recommend this if you don't really care about file size your second option is to export using Quicktime conversion now what this is going to do is give you some presets specifically for certain situations then you can of course go to the options for all these different presets and then tweak them to fit your specific needs there you guys have it the basics of switching from iMovie to Final Cut a good question to ask yourself though is do you actually need to make the switch iMovie is a very capable program on its own and can do some really great things well either way hopefully this was helpful for you and I'll see you in the next video