2009

There’s one key decision that you make during ingest that affects editorial development,
and later, finishing. This is whether to ingest your program’s media at an offline resolution,
where visual quality is lower but the media is easier to work with, or at an online resolution,
where the visual quality is superior but the media requires more processing power to
work with and more storage space.
For more information about using Final Cut Pro, Cinema Tools, and Color for different
ingest strategies, see “Ingesting and Organizing Your Media.”
Stage 2: Editorial Development
Editorial development is when your project is put together. Sometimes referred to as the
offline edit or the story edit, this is where the raw media that you ingested in stage 1 is
turned into an edited program.
Some programs are assembled entirely within Final Cut Pro, where you can create all the
titles and effects you need and do any necessary sound design right in your sequence
while you edit. However, don’t forget that there are other applications in Final Cut Studio
that you can turn to for specialized tasks. For example, you can create master templates
in Motion for use as generators from within Final Cut Pro, or you can use Motion to create
broadcast graphics and composites that you can then edit into the Final Cut Pro Timeline.
As you work, you can also send specific audio clips from the Final Cut Pro Timeline directly
to Soundtrack Pro to do things like eliminate noise, create ambient noise to patch holes,
and do equalization matching on a clip-by-clip basis.
Whether you use one application or many, all of a program’s elements come together in
your edited sequence, helping to guide your editorial decisions as you work to complete
the program’s content.
For more information about how Final Cut Pro works with other Final Cut Studio
applications at this stage of the process, see “Integration During Editorial Development.”
Stage 3: Client Review
If you’re working on a project for a client, frequent and specific feedback is an absolute
requirement. If you’re working in a supervised session, you can simply play your project
from the Final Cut Pro Timeline. However, there are times when you may be working
unsupervised, with clients who are remotely located, or when you want to provide a
version of the program that can be screened at another location. Final Cut Studio provides
many ways of delivering individual clips or entire sequences to clients for remote viewing,
such as via a QuickTime movie or DVD, on the web, or even interactively in iChat.
For more information about using Final Cut Pro, Compressor, and DVD Studio Pro to
deliver a program for review, see “Client Review.”
11Chapter 1 Developing a Post-Production Strategy