I was shooting an early morning rally, as the sun came up, on a pro camera with a grayscale viewfinder. Great for focusing, but when I got it back to the studio, I realized that the color temp had changed over those 3 hours as the sun rose, and I hadn’t white balanced. Richard Harrington over at Creative Cow has this tutorial that would have helped me a lot on fixing White Balance.

Watch the video tutorial here.

Transitions are a crucial tool for effective story telling (when used in moderation, and after you get those star wipes out of your system). This tutorial from FCPTips shows you how to apply transtions, change your default transition, and a very handy way to apply multiple transitions at once.

Watch the video tutorial here.

Shooting outdoors gives you a lot more light to work with, but can also create some pretty big problems. If your subjects are backlit, you could be in big trouble. However, Richard Harrington from Creative Cow has this tutorial on how to use the powerful Limit Effect part of the 3-way Color Corrector to fix this mistake.

Watch the video tutorial here.

Changing the speed of a clip is a very helpful or even cool thing that can be frustrating to actually pull off. This tutorial from FCPTips shows the basic ways to change the speed quickly and easily to a constant speed.

Watch the video tutorial here.

Over at Creative Cow, Richard Harrington shows you one of those little tricks that gave me a mixture of an “Ah-hah!” and a “D’oh!” moment the first time I saw it. You can easily keyframe the color correction, just like other parameters. Harrington also goes a little bit into the basics of keyframing if you haven’t done much yet.

Watch the video tutorial here.

From Creative Cow-

In this Final Cut video tutorial, Richard Harrington uses Compressor to teach how to compress a video clip for use on an iPod or in iTunes. This opens up video podcasting or the transferring of video files in a widely recognized portable format. Richard shows which settings to use and explains how to export from Final Cut Pro to get the file ready for Compressor

Watch the video tutorial here.

A very good use of the 3-way color corrector is to match skin tones between shots. It helps with scene continuity if the hero’s face doesn’t flicker between a reddish and a bluish without ever leaving a room. Richard Harrington at Creative Cow shows you how to easily match skin tones.

Watch the video tutorial here.