Digital Commons at Penn State

Using Final Cut Pro requires that you set the program to match the source from which you will be digitizing your footage. These are your Capture Settings. You can mix footage from several different sources in one project, but you must change your Capture Settings each time.

Before capturing footage Make sure that you Setup your Project Appropriately by following the steps detailed in the tutorial: Setting up a Project in Final Cut Pro

To set the device control presets, go up to Final Cut Pro and choose Audio/Video Settings

From there, follow either option below to achieve the setting needed for your desired media.

A. For MiniDV:

1. Device Control Preset: Change the pull down menu to FireWire NTSC or FireWire NTSC Basic from the Device Control.

This setting will allow you to log and capture and capture directly. You will have full control of your DV device from Final Cut Pro HD’s Capture window.

2. Click OK to save changes.

Always Setup your project in Final Cut Pro by using this Tutorial.

First import your footage and background (image or video to be the background) into Final Cut Pro.

Now lets bring our background down into the time line by dragging it in.

Now we want to create another video track for our other file, to do this click Sequence > Insert Tracks a dialogue box should pop up asking how many tracks and of what type. Type in the number 1 in the Video Tracks and click OK

This bottom track will be the background of your video, you can use still images or movies as a background. You should now have two video Tracks that look like this.

Now we want to add our green screen clip to the top Video track, the reason we want it on top of the other clip is because Final Cut Pro works in layers, the top most track is always the displayed or top layer.