Apple Pro Training Series: Final Cut Pro 5

There are three sets of footage used throughout this book, each representing a very different type of project.

Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian: A Thousand Roads (NTSC) The first set of footage with which you will work is from the film, A Thousand Roads, the signature film of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. This film was brought to life by executive producer W. Richard West, Jr. (Southern Cheyenne), producers Barry Clark and Scott Garen, director Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), writers Scott Garen and Joy Harjo (Muscogee), director of photography Claudio Miranda, editor Harry Miller, III, and American Indian poet, activist, and performer John Trudell, who provided the voice-over narration.

This dramatic film was shot on super 35mm, transferred to HD, and then to DV for offline editing. The footage in this book is the original DV media that was used in the actual offline editing process. As with many film projects, you will see numbers burned into the offline images for reference. All editing decisions were then applied to the super 35mm film, and the final film was digitized. A Thousand Roads represents the first U.S. public exhibition of a motion picture that has been produced and displayed in accordance with the newly established guidelines of the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), a consortium of seven major Hollywood studios that established standards for the digital display of motion pictures.

Motocross Footage (NTSC) The second set of media is motocross racing footage, produced and directed by Michael Bryant and Perry Karidis of State of Mind Productions. This footage is being used for a behind-the-scenes documentary sports series on motocross racing.

The production crew followed the Yamaha of Troy racing team, based in Dayton, Ohio, to several motocross races and shot the action using Sony PDW-530 XDCAM cameras, which record to an optical disk rather than videotape. These cameras can record at different speeds, each yielding a different quality, such as DVCAM (25 megabits per second, or Mbps), and MPEG IMX quality at 30, 40, and 50 Mbps. For this project, the producers chose to shoot in the highest quality (50 Mbps), but did their preliminary editing in the DV format, which is the format included in this book. Final Cut Pro 5 captured the media directly from the Sony PDW-V1 optical disk player using the AJA Io capture card via the SDI input.

All Hours Music Video (PAL) The third set of media is from a music video of the song, "Box Office Stud," written by Gilly Leads and performed by his Los Angeles based band, All Hours. The song is from their premiere CD, In Flagrante Delicto (Hybrid Recordings), available from the iTunes Apple Music Store. This video was shot at The Viper Room in Los Angeles with band members Gilly Leads (lead singer and guitar), Dean Moore (bass), Nick Burns (drums), and Amit LeRon (lead guitar). The music video was shot using the HDV format by Perry Karidis and Mike Pescasio. It was directed by Diana Weynand and produced by Weynand Training International. For the purposes of this book, some of the footage was transferred to DV-PAL Anamorphic to be used in Lesson 14.