Subtitles of the Movie

Another item that can be imported and used in any Final Cut sequence is a graphics file or a picture and it's very easy to do that. You can use some of the techniques that we've seen already. In other words, you can use the finder on your computer and you can grab a picture that lives on your hard drive somewhere or on any external drive, but probably an easier way to do it is to use the application of iPhoto. So you can import directly from iPhoto if you want to. So I've pulled up iPhoto and I've got a picture selected that I want to use. This one or this one and all I have to do is drag and drop it into the browser there and now that's the clip actually, but it has the same name as the actual file name. So this is also something that you are able to open in an image editor if you want to or reveal in finder as you can see here. So this is where it lives. To look at the actual directory, you can just click on that button there so it changes your view list in the finder. So that's the original file. It's this JPEG image there. And now if I change the name of it here, I can do so but it'll point back to that original file. That won't change anything. So we'll give a double click, bring it up in the viewer here and we'll call it dude pitching, something like that. So now it becomes the in and out points are marked as a ten-second clip and I've also got these rather long handles on either side. The overall clip is two minutes. It puts a minute before and a minute after, but the whole thing's a still photo and the in and out point are marked at, again ten seconds. That's set through your Final Cut preferences by the way. So if you want to add it into your timeline, you certainly can do so. And you can do it wherever you want to and it might have to be rendered for output in Final Cut. In other words, the pixels that are used by various picture formats don't necessarily match the pixels that are produced by Final Cut. Most of the ones that are used in graphics applications or picture file formats are square pixels and Final Cut Pro doesn't use square pixels. So be that as it may, I'll show you another trick for getting your pictures into Final Cut. Notice here in the canvas that the settings aren't exactly the same. So if I were going from like an interview segment, I mean, think Ken Burns here. Going from an interview segment to a picture and then I could of course configure some kind of an effect on this picture or zoom in to the elbow or to the face, there's lots of things I can do with a picture, but the picture doesn't match the settings that you see here. So that's some video footage like that, because it's having a hard time rendering it real time, you can see that it has these black bars above and below. Now, what can I do about that? Well, this tip goes for any graphics application, by the way. This one just happens to be iPhoto because it's pretty common. Where'd it go? Pretty common with the Macintosh that will have pictures somewhere, some picture at least in iPhoto. What you can do is you can select a picture here, you can duplicate it, which I'll do with just a quick, little control click and choose duplicate. And so now I've got that shot duplicated and there's the duplicate. Now what I'll do is I will go ahead and edit this thing. And I'm going to change the properties of this by cropping it and now I'm going to crop it to a format that is going to translate to Final Cut a whole lot better. And the format that I'm going to use or the resolution that I'm going to constrain this file to will be NTSC. So custom, and I'm going to choose, what am I going to choose there? I'm going to choose 720, hit the seven, 720 by 480 and now I'm going to apply. So now I have an image that is going to fill the sequence that I have preset. Now, if you've used a different present for your sequence, then of course you can make changes accordingly if you have a high-def sequence, you might choose a resolution of 1440 by 1080, but in this case, this is standard NTSC resolution, which again is 720 by 480, which is what I've constrained this photo to. So now I'm going to click on done and I could rename this if I wanted to. I could get the info and I think you know by now how to do that, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time renaming this file, but obviously that would be the logical next step and you might even want to store it on an external drive so you know you can have like a basket of photos that you're going to use in your sequence. But again, all I have to do is drag and drop this thing over into Final Cut and now I have the same thing so we'll say pitching underscore NTSC. Now let's see what happens when I double click on that. Notice that the dimension changed a little bit and let's just do a, what do we want? An overwrite? And edit? And there we go. So there's the non-NTSC picture that I've imported and there's the NTSC picture that I've imported. So this is something that you can be confident will appear without the black bars when it goes to actual broadcast and the way that I can do that, the way that I can be sure of that is that you can do your overlays, you can show title safe here and anything inside this box should display properly. So even though we see a little bit of a black bar above and below this, it's certainly not the same as this and the dimensions are now much more suited for broadcast than they were before.