After 20 years of working as a reporter and anchor in both radio and TV, I just accepted a position as a "multimedia journalist" in the Atlanta market. That’s a fancy new term my company came up with for a "one man band" reporter for both radio & TV. What can I say? It’s the state of the business right now.

I will be using Final Cut Pro X to edit local news stories. I will be shooting and editing my own stories for both radio and television. I’ll also need to export soundbites from my timeline into .wav or .mp3 files so I can edit them in my DAW of choice (Adobe Audition 6.0) for radio. I figured out how to export (share) the audio files only.

But what I really want to know is what is the best way to edit in FCP X for TV news? I come from an era of tape to tape linear editing. I taught myself non-linear editing in FCP 6 & 7. I’ll admit, I am no expert, but I can hold my own in typical straight cut packages with maybe a few transitions, graphics and photos thrown in for good measure.

I will be shooting in standard definition (720×480 DV Anamorphic). My camera is the Sony HXR-NX5U. So, I can take the SDHC/SDXC cards I’ll be shooting on, slip them into my MacBook pro and import the raw footage directly into FCP X. What I need is a quick, reliable workflow that will allow me to log my VO and soundbites by timecode. I also need an editing style that will be consistently fast.

Having learned to edit on FCP, I am somewhat familiar with FCP X. It is a departure, but I kind of understand where the developers were going with this one. I really like the magnetic timeline and the background rendering. The built-in effects are also very useful for TV news.

What I am having trouble with is what seems to me to be the elimination of editing in the A-roll and B-roll style that is typical of TV News. I’m used to laying down a voice track, then sound bites, maybe a bridge standup and then other voice tracks and maybe another soundbite or two.

The problem is FCP X places the audio track and soundbites on the same timeline. If you try to drop voice tracks/soundbites below or raise them above the soundbites/voice track it snaps the two together — effectively locking them. This is very annoying. FCP X also makes editing in B-roll more difficult than I’m accustomed to.

Again, the magnetic timeline should make things easier and faster for editing projects with a quick turnaround like local news. But I have been frustrated trying to edit in FCP X. I did figure out how to right click a voice track in the timeline and prompt it to "Lift From Storyline" It drops it below the soundbite and inserts a generated gap in its place that is the same length of the voice track you lifted from the primary timeline. But this feels awkward.

Please help me. I have been working with a photographer and editor for the past week. But I’m told that most of my gear is here and the engineers are just waiting for a few other items to arrive. That means I will soon be on my own and expected to file stories for both radio & TV. Maybe I just don’t quite understand FCP X. I have been using it to edit little home movie projects of my 5-year-old. But nothing as potentially complex as a news story.

Any advice or help you can give me will be truly appreciated.

Regards,

Trey