Our lab is setup to edit transfer to and from DV tape and burn DVD-Rs. You can either use iMovie which is very simple, or use Final Cut Pro which is more powerful but more complicated. Final Cut Pro has excellent online help for every feature. Consider doing the FCP tutorial lesson located on the Software drive document folder. Please first drag this entire folder of files to your Temporary Media drive and work there.

The following directions are for a FCP project. Editing in the multimedia lab is a 3 step process.

1. Transfer of DV tape footage
2. Logging, sub clipping, editing. and export
3. Authouring and burning to DVD-R discs

First choose a workstation. Clear and erase all documents in the Temporary Media Drive. Patch the DV deck to that workstation. Open up a new Final Cut Pro session. Save and name that session to the Temporary Media Drive Open up batch and capture. Cue your tape about 10 seconds before the video you want to capture. Put tape in play and push on capture "now" button. The tape will be captured in realtime until you hit the escape key. You will not hear audio at the workstation while capturing. You can plug headphones into the DV source deck to confirm that the audio sounds good. After capture save and name each new clip in the bin menu. You want to capture long sections of video and "sub cliip" after you capture. After you have finished capturing all your DV tape, save the session and quit.

Unhook the DV deck from your workstation from the patchbay. With no DV deck patched, open your Final Cut Pro session located on the "Temporary Media drive". The session will open with a dialog that says "can't locate external device". This is normal, proceed by pressing the continue button. You should no be able to click on any clip and see and hear video. Usiing the "sub clip" feature, break the clips into seperate shots with names. Be sure to use all of each shot including pre and post roll. With all shots "sub clipped" you can now trim each shot and drag them to the timeline in the order you perfer. There are several different ways to edit in FCP. The online help section will cover all methods. Holding your mouse over any control will pop up a discription of that control. After you have edited your video, you are ready to export as a DV Quicktime file. Go to "export" under "file" menu and select the top item "quictime movie". Name and choose the "Temporary Media" to store your final quicktime movie. This quicktime movie will be the orginal "camera quality" if you don't change any settings. Save and quit FCP.

You should transfer all your files on the Temporay Media drive to an external FireWire drive before leaving the worstation. Final Cut Pro has an excellent media managment feature that will allow you to reduce the amount of footage that you captured but, did not use for your final version.

If you want to make a DVD of your project you can open iDVD, select a theme, and the drag your exported quicktime movie you made in FCP and place in iDVD. iDVD is all drag and drop and is very easy to use. You can preview the DVD before you burn to check that it plays like you intended. When you finsh the authoring in DVD you just need to press the burn icon. It will ask for a DVD-R disc to be inserted and it will do the rest. (DVD-R only!)

If you need to go back to DV tape instead, the operation is the reverse of the capture. Select a workstation, patch the DV deck to it, and open up your FCP session. Turn on the monitor and select the DV deck. This will allow you to monitor video and audio at the DV deck. You will not hear audio at the workstation during playback. Manually start the DV recorder and then press play in FCP. This is a realtime transfer and will take as long as your edited video's length. The lab monitors are all familar with the basic operations of video editing. Please feel free to ask for their help.