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Recently I had the pleasure of working with some P2 footage in Final Cut Pro. It was a great experience and I learned a few tips along the way that I’d like to share with you. These tips are brought to you by HDvision Studio.

P2 Overview
First of all, in case you’re not that familiar with P2 technology, here’s a quick summary. P2 is Panasonic’s next-generation digital video recording system. It was developed to make production workflows more flexible and uses solid-state P2 memory cards that record video and audio data in the MXF file format.

Why is P2 a big deal? For one, it allows professional video cameras to free themselves of complicated and heavy tape drives with expensive recording heads and mechanisms. This means the cameras become smaller, lighter and more affordable. Secondly, it revolutionized the post-production industry by changing the way we captured material. Since P2 records data in digital file form, you can simply transfer and ingest the footage. As an Editor this is a time-saving feature that I love!
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By popular demand here is a list of the more useful keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro. These shortcuts will help you increase your editing speed and get more work done in less time. These tips are brought to you by HDvision Studio.

Even if you’re an expert with FCP this will be a good read for you because there are always one or two shortcuts we forget about over the years.

There are four main windows in FCP. The Browser, Viewer, Canvas and Timeline. We’ll take a look at the keyboard shortcuts for each window.

Remember that by using the keyboard shortcut layout, you can change these commands to something that better suits your needs or workflow.

Browser

Close Bins   â†
Close Tab   CTRL+W
Find   CMD+F
Find Next   F3
Import File   CMD+I
Item Properties   CMD+9
Logging Columns   OPTION+B
New Bin   CMD+B
New Project   SHIFT+CMD+N
New Sequence   CMD+N
Open Bins   â†’
Open Bin in New Tab   OPTION+ENTER
Select Next Item   â†“
Select Previous Item   â†‘
Sequence Settings   CMD+0
Show Browser   CMD+4
Show Effects   CMD+5
Show Favorites   CMD+6
Standard Columns   SHIFT+B
Toggle Browser View   SHIFT+H
View Item in Editor   OPTION+RETURN
View Item in New Window   SHIFT+RETURN

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What better way to start off my series of Featured Articles on Final Cut Pro Tips than to share with you how to configure your Mac OS X for Final Cut Pro to get the maximum performance. Get Tiger to really make FCP purr! These tips are brought to you by HDvision Studio.

Let’s get started. Open System Preferences, this is where all the action will take place, and begin with…

Dashboard & Exposé
OS X’s default keyboard shortcuts for Dashboard & Exposé conflict with certain FCP keyboard shortcuts.

• In System Preferences click on the Dashboard & Exposé icon.
• Change the keyboard shortcuts F9, F10, F11 and F12 to Option-F9, Option-F10, Option-F11 and Cmd-Option-F12. (Option-F12 is used by FCP.)
• Make sure that all Active Screen Corners are deactivated.

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If you work with Adobe After Effects you’re probably very familiar with the awesome Trapcode plugins. Recently all sales and support for Trapcode have been taken over by Red Giant Software and new versions of their Starglow, Shine and 3D Stroke plugins have just been released. The great news is that they now function in a variety of new apps like Final Cut Pro, Motion, Avid and Premiere Pro. Sadly their Particular plugin has yet to be updated for FCP and Motion. If you haven’t seen Particular in action check this out: Polar 2007.