Apple Pro Training Series. Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System. A Technical Guide to Real-World Post-Production

Lesson 8. Hardware and Interfaces

Now that you've waded through the abstract fundamentals in the previous lesson, let's review the types of hardware you'll need to configure and set up your system. As mentioned in other lessons, Final Cut Pro is scalable and can support a range of workflows. So, it's important to learn about the characteristics of different components and how to hook it all up.

We'll start with a look inside your system to review the anatomy of a Mac and the hardware that powers Final Cut Pro.

We'll follow that with the types of video signals you'll encounter and their characteristics and qualities. We'll explore video cabling and connectors in detail. We'll also cover audio signals and cabling in enough detail to get you started, and we'll discuss timecode and control protocols and the interfaces they use.

Next we'll review common video and audio formats a FCP editor is likely to see. We'll look at the context in which the formats are used and ways to get contents into FCP with minimal losses.

In addition, we'll look at waveform monitors, vectorscopes, and rasterizers, mention video and audio monitors, and consider offboard processors that expand the capabilities and flexibility of an FCP suite.

Finally, we'll review the different methods and hardware used for getting video and audio into FCP. FireWire suffices for many purposes, but there are multiple plug-in cards and break-out boxes that can be used to connect almost any type of video and audio to an FCP system.