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Ken Stone's FCP By Steve Martin

About this time every 2 years Ken petitions me for my written musings on the latest features of the new Final Cut Pro. By now you've most likely read about all the money shot features such as the new Speed Tools, expanded ProRes family, iChat Theater, etc. My goal is not to regurgitate these features, but rather show you why it's the little improvements that often make the biggest wake in the editorial world's collective conscious. So if you please, below are my top ten most memorable and life-changing enhancements to the new Final Cut Pro 7.

1. Segment Freeze Frames

Of all the features getting the most attention are the new speed tools. The Apple engineers have greatly simplified the approach to creating constant and variable speed changes to your clips. I covered these tools in much detail in our free final cut studio tutorials found on my website, so I won't cover them again here. What I want to show you is how to use the new speed segment dialogue to create freeze frames that are much simpler and less time consuming than in previous version of Final Cut Pro. In version 6 and earlier, if you wanted to create a freeze frame, you would park your playhead over the frame you wanted to freeze, press Shift-N to create the freeze, set the duration in the Viewer, then insert edit the freeze into the timeline at the playhead location. The problem with this method is that if there were any audio tracks directly below the inserted clip, they would be split and moved later in time to accommodate the freeze. As you can see in the image below, a yawning gap in your audio tracks would be created by the insert edit.  read  more...