Choosing an Easy Setup Preset

Customizing the Final Cut Pro interface is a personal choice, but choosing the audio/video settings is not. It's very important for FCP sequence settings to match the settings of the footage you will be editing. This will give you the best results throughout your editing process. Whether your project is NTSC or PAL, FCP has the flexibility to work with many different media formats in both standards and can also be connected to third-party hardware that expands those options even further.

FCP makes it easy to choose accurate audio/video settings by providing a list of default settings found in the Easy Setup window. These settings are organized as presets and include capture settings, sequence settings, device control settings, and output settings. By choosing an Easy Setup preset, you are simultaneously loading all these settings at one time. Keep in mind that Easy Setup presets change settings for all new sequences and are not attached to a specific project. A single project could contain sequences with different settings.

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Choose the correct Easy Setup preset before starting a new project. This will ensure that sequences automatically created in new projects will be set correctly.

1.	Choose Final Cut Pro > Easy Setup, or press Ctrl-Q. The Setup For pop-up menu displays the current or active preset. Beneath it is a summary of the settings that make up that preset.
2.	Click the Setup For pop-up menu. The presets in this list have already been created within FCP to facilitate an easier setup for you to get started. They represent many of the more standard presets, such as DV, HDV, Offline RT, and so on, in both PAL and NTSC.
3.	To see an expanded version of preset options, move the mouse off the pop-up menu and select the Show All check box. Click the Setup For pop-up menu again. You now see additional preset options, including Cinema Tools presets for film or HD projects, MPEG-IMX presets, as well as Anamorphic options for different formats. NOTE If you have loaded additional presets from a third-party company, such as AJA or Blackmagic, in order to capture and edit other formats, those presets will also appear in the Setup For pop-up menu.
4.	Deselect the Show All check box, and choose DV-NTSC from the Setup For pop-up menu. Click the Setup button to confirm this preset. This is the preset for most of the media in this book. In a later lesson, you will work with PAL footage.

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If you need to create a new Easy Setup preset, choose File > Audio/Video Settings, and click the Create Easy Setup button. Enter a new preset name, and follow the steps to choose the appropriate settings. Refer to the Final Cut Pro 5 user's manual for more details on this process.