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Apple Pro Training Series: Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System Review by Doug Luberts
A must-have FCP book for Editors, Assistants and Techdorks
I picked up a copy of this book just after Walter Murch and Sean Cullen's appearance at a LAFCPUG meeting last October. At the time I thought I was buying a techdork's guide to FCP that would help me optimize my system and get it flying, but it turned out to be so much more ...
Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System is a far more comprehensive book than its title would imply. It his a handbook of how-tos and valuable get-it-done information that make it a must-have for anyone assisting on a show using Final Cut Pro, or whose job involves supporting FCP and integrating FCP workstations into Networked environments.
That the book has the feel of an Assistant's reference should come as no real surprise. Sean Cullen, one of the lead authors of the book, has been Walter Murch's Assistant (now Associate Editor) for about a dozen years. During this time he has been responsible for convincing Murch to make the leap over to Final Cut Pro for Cold Mountain, and taking up the mantle of Final Cut Pro evangelist to the editing community at large. (The struggles and successes Murch, Cullen, and the rest of the Cold Mountain editorial team are chronicled in Charles Koppelman's book, Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple's Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema. An excellent read that is also available from Amazon.) This successful effort lead to the Murch and Cullen using FCP on the 2005 Sam Mendes film, Jarhead.
The first six chapters of the book are called "Using Final Cut Pro in Real World Workflows", which details offline and online workflows for both film and video projects including project setups, organization, and project distribution. This section is loaded with helpful bits of information that can help the assistant avoid many common project mishaps.
Chapter four has a very good, hands-on, Cinema Tools tutorial, which takes you through the process of importing a Flex file into the Cinema Tools Database, Importing Clips, Synching Media with the Cinema Tools database and cut list generation.
The rest of the book's eight hundred plus pages address topics ranging from system configuration and optimization to networking and Xsan Implementation, and concludes with over a hundred pages of information on troubleshooting your Final Cut Pro system.
Although I strongly endorse Peachpit's Apple Pro Training Series (having learned the fundamentals of DVD Studio Pro and Shake from other books in the series) in general, Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System is a must-have for any professional editor or engineer using FCP on the job.