The Focal Easy Guide to Final Cut Pro X

Organization

Getting Organized

Any film is literally built. Just as a novel will have chapters and subplots, each and every film has an underlying structure. The raw components needed to build the film are planned for in the scripting stage, gathered while filming, and structured during editing.

I liken the filmmaking process to making a set of chopsticks from a tree trunk. An entire tree can be whittled away to leave nothing remaining other than two small pieces of wood—these are the chopsticks. Film or video is the same. A mountain of footage is acquired and throughout the editing process this footage is chopped down to a fraction of its original size to leave a small, yet refined, remnant of the original content.

In simple terms, editing ...