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"I'm a financial planner and need to prepare training videos for financial advisors, where I would cut back and forth between video clips and powerpoint slides, with (speaking) audio in the background.  Would you recommend FCP for this application, or something else?"

I would absolutely recommend Final Cut Pro for what you are trying to accomplish, but the big question is, do you need that much "fire power".  Remember, when it comes to purchasing Final Cut Pro...

"I'm just getting into the final cut world my self. (only owned a mac for about a year). in 2006 I bought studio 1. I have been working away practicing a few times a week. (though its always hard to find raw footage). I'm wondering what your take is on the differences between studio 1 & 2. Money aside, do the new features in studio 2 warrant the upgrade? I would love to start playing with HD footage, can a intel imac with 2 gigs of ram handle a feature film size HD project? Microsoft releases a...

Much like any other "final" project, we are going to render this out, but instead of rendering out a normal Quicktime or TGA sequence, what we are going to do is render it out as an Adobe Clip Note file. How you do that is simple. First, drag your comp into the render queue, and make sure that your "Render Settings" are set to your liking. Then, click on your "Output Module", and here is where we are going to set up a PDF file, so our client can approve the animation using Adobe's Clip...

I thought that for this article I would look at a hidden gem of After Effects, and it is an effect that you definitely need, and you don't even know it.....yet! The effect I'm talking about is "Offset". Let's take a look at how the Offset effect will save you alot of time and work!

Here is a situation that you probably experience on a semi-regular basis. You are creating a background "look", and want to have some text scrolling across the screen, and you want it to loop until the end of...

In a previous article entitled "Speed Up Your Workflow With These After Effects Quick Tips", I showed a quick technique to take layers from your NLE application and move them into After Effects. Once there, you can use the "Split Tracks" command (CMD+SHFT+D on Mac or CNTL+SHFT+D on Windows) to make your AE composition look like your NLE timeline. I had teased this before, but what if I told you that there was a much easier way to do the same job.

Well, there is! Automatic Duck's Pro Import...

One thing that I find myself using quite a lot these days is particles in After Effects.  In a lot of cases, I am having some kind of particle flying around the screen and/or interacting with an element in one of my comps.  I used to do things in what I call the "painful" way, which was to use the particle effects "position" cross hairs to create a path for the particle to fly around on, and I always ended up with the same result.  A very linear, boring path that seemed fake, as...

Shot selection in any piece you are editing is extremely important, and can either make your show dull and boring or eye catching and exciting.

When editors are working on shows, they have a lot more say in the final outcome than most people might think, and editors should not be afraid to tell the cameraman what they want/need, as at the end of the day, we are holding the ball at the end of the whole process, and you as the editor, should really have to do very little color correction as the footage should...

Overview:

The three point lighting setup is a standard lighting setup used in all forms of visual media such as tv, film, photography and computer animation.  This setup is simple yet the underlying setup in mostly all lighting situations. Once the concept and technique of the three point setup is understood you are well on your way to understanding all lighting.

This setup consists of three lights; the Key light, Fill light, and Back light. As the name implies, all three lights...

A question I'm asked on a fairly regular basis is "How do I become an editor in the TV business?", and in many cases people don't like the answer I give them, as they think that because they bought a computer with an "editing" program on it and edited some home movies, that they are qualified to jump right in and start editing hour long episodic shows.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  I thought that for this article I would take a look at the things that I think everyone should...