Sooner or later, we all have to do it. Yup, that's right, make the proverbial music video. Although we may never get to edit the next Britney Spears or Incubus video, in all likelihood, we will be faced with a "Smiling Faces" montage piece, or similar thing, sooner or later in our careers as video editors.

The question almost always arises, "How do I approach this? Is there some sort of methodology?" As most will tell you, there is, indeed, no right way or wrong way to edit, however, there are techniques to help you get pointed in the right direction while editing a musical piece. Hitting the musical beat of your choice with a video shot is a crucial thing you can do to help simplify your editing process while editing a music video.

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So you're fairly new to editing and things are going along fairly nicely. Maybe you've even got a few projects "in the can", yet you know that you can and should improve your editing skills. But how? How can you add some variety to your editing style? This article is written with the intention to help you approach this problem. Learning how to arrange pictures and sound in an esthetically pleasing way involves gathering not only the technical knowledge required, but also looking to the psychology behind the cut laid out for us by the pioneers of cinema.

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Chroma keying is a really useful skill to add to your effects creation toolset. The only trouble is that it is rather a black art. That is, keys are rarely achieved with precisely the same settings and it takes skill and practice to do it well. However, it helps to follow certain basic procedures to be successful at it on a consistent basis. As long as your image is shot and lit correctly, you're halfway there towards succeeding at a convincing chroma key effect. This article is written and designed for you to achieve predictable results in keying using the Chroma Keyer filter in Final Cut Pro HD.

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These days, just about everyone wants to experiment with video that appears more film like. One of the distinguishing "looks" of film is its widescreen aspect ratio. Can Final Cut editors deal with video shot in a widescreen format from a standard DV Camcorder? Of course! In fact, this article focuses on using common camcorders to do this. Let's now examine some of the eccentricities of 16:9 acquired video, so we can learn to shoot and edit with it successfully.

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This is the page where we've placed tutorials and links to tutorials that are written by fcpworld and Kevin Monahan.