QuickReference
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TUAW Bookshelf: Final Cut Pro 7 Quick-Reference Guide
When it comes to software reference books, there are three major varieties -- the detailed soup-to-nuts books that try to tell you everything and weigh about ten pounds, the "dummies" type that are usually so full of obvious information that they're relatively useless, and the small quick reference manuals that assume that you have some familiarity with your software and just focus on the things that you really need to know. Brendan Boykin's Final Cut Pro 7 Quick Reference Guide (US$29.99 for the printed text, $16.79 for the ebook version), part of the Peachpit Press Apple Pro Training Series, is one of the latter types. It's a small book when it comes to physical size; you can easily tuck it into a laptop bag with your MacBook Pro when you're heading out for location shooting and editing. The 212-page text is divided into sections roughly following the three-part Final Cut Pro workflow of ingest, edit, and output. Boykin, owner of Creek Mountain Media and an Apple Certified Master Trainer, definitely knows Final Cut Pro. Brendan not only teaches Pro Certification classes, but also works with Final Cut Pro and other Final Cut Studio applications to build digital video solutions for clients. The Quick-Reference Guide starts with an overview of Final Cut Pro's user interface. While this may seem like overkill for a text that is directed towards working professionals, this reviewer found the section useful as a memory jogger for such things as what the various colors in the render status bar mean, or what some of the many icons in the Tool Palette are used for.
