Final Cut Pro Workflows

8 The Rough Cut

There is an old saying that carving a statue out of rock is easy: just cut away all of the rock that doesn't look good.

We teach our students to think of nonlinear editing in the same way. In both cases, the process is about refinement. When carving rock, you progress through a series of tools. You may begin with a large sledgehammer, good for knocking away large chunks of rock. When you have chipped away the largest chunks, you switch to a large but crude chisel, good for chiseling away to the next layer of detail—and so on through finer and finer tools, until you are using sandpaper and finally a polishing cloth.

Nonlinear editing is really very similar. The rough-cut phase and the techniques discussed in this chapter are ...