Apple 7 Learning About Ingesting Media and Setting Up Projects, Bringing Media into Your System

Learning About Ingesting Media and Setting Up Projects

When you capture or transfer footage from a camcorder, the media files are stored on your scratch disk, a disk location that you tell Final Cut Pro to use. You can configure Final Cut Pro to store different types of media files in different locations. For example, you can have Final Cut Pro store audio media files in one location and video media files in another. Because media files can take up considerable space, you can assign several hard disks as scratch disks to hold your media.

Choosing an Easy Setup is a quick way to configure Final Cut Pro to match the settings of your camcorder and video format. It’s an important first step in setting up a new project. Choosing an Easy Setup sets the Final Cut Pro capture settings and configures the sequence settings to allow you to play back and edit your footage. The Easy Setup also specifies output settings for when you output the final video to tape or another media format.

You can place clips of different video formats in the Timeline. For example, even though the majority of your clips might be DV, you can place DVCPRO 50 or HD clips in the same sequence. If Final Cut Pro is unable to play back a clip in real time without dropping frames, a red bar appears above the clip in the Timeline. This red bar indicates that the clip must be rendered in order to play correctly. You can select the clip and choose a command to have Final Cut Pro render that clip. Final Cut Pro then processes the clip to work with the current sequence and places the rendered files on your scratch disk. The downside is that rendering such clips becomes an extra step in editing. For example, if you change a rendered clip, you may need to render it again.

Chapter 2    Bringing Media into Your System

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