2009

Stage 4: Finishing
After a program’s story has been edited and the project’s content is considered complete,
it’s time to give the program its final polish and tweaking, appropriately referred to as
finishing. The first part of finishing, if you’ve been working on your project using
offline-quality media, is to conform your edited sequence to the highest-quality version
of the original source media that’s available. The best way to do this depends on how
the original media was acquired, how you ingested the media, and how carefully you
managed the media during editorial development.
If your offline edit combines source media in several different formats, now may be the
time to convert any clips that don’t match the final sequence settings so that the entire
program is easy to output. Compressor has format-conversion capabilities that facilitate
this process.
This is also the time when all temporary elements like placeholder titles, offline effects,
and other placeholder media must be replaced with their final, online-quality versions.
As always, these elements can be created inside of Final Cut Pro or in conjunction with
Motion.
Lastly, once your sequence has been carefully reconformed and prepared, your program
is ready for color correction and the final sound mix. Final Cut Studio has dedicated
applications for each of these tasks, appropriately named Color and Soundtrack Pro.
For more information about using Final Cut Pro with Motion, Color, and Soundtrack Pro,
see “Finishing.”
Stage 5: Mastering
Mastering is the process of assembling everything your project needs into a single,
deliverable bundle for handoff.
In some cases, this process is as simple as making sure that the video and audio elements
are assembled into a final sequence for output to tape. In other cases, mastering may
involve assembling a much longer list of deliverable media files, including separate
versions of the program with and without titles (also called texted and textless versions),
format conversions, closed captioning and subtitle insertion, and alternative audio mixes
for different audiences.
For more information about which Final Cut Studio applications can help with these
potential mastering requirements, see “Mastering.”
Stage 6: Output and Delivery
Output and delivery is the last stage of the post-production process. As the name implies,
it’s the process of creating the final, playable media that you then hand off to the client
and audience. Output can take many forms: rendering a DPX image sequence for film
printing, outputting to an appropriately high-quality tape format, creating a DVD, or
compressing your program to a format suitable for web playback.
12 Chapter 1 Developing a Post-Production Strategy