Speed segment are created by pairs of speed keyframes. Create another speed keyframe at the playhead location with the pen tool. Press the shift key and tap your right arrow to move the playhead one second later. Let's say you wanted to create a 1 second freeze frame.

Move you mouse pointer into the speed tick zone - your pointer will become a pen icon. To create the freeze, make sure your playhead is parked over the frame you want to freeze.

The vertical lines below the clip are called speed ticks and are very helpful for evaluating how your speed effects are being applied and distributed throughout the clip. In order to see what's going on with the clip's speed, I recommend turning on the keyframe overlay. Using Final Cut Pro 7's new Speed Segment window, creating freezes is simple and your audio is never affected. Needless to say, there was not a simple, straightforward method of creating freezes without creating a ton of work. But this was not ideal either, because if there were linked clips to the right side of the inserted clip, these clips would become out of sync. To avoid this, the workaround for many editors was to lock the audio track by pressing Shift-F5, before inserting the freeze frame. As you can see in the image below, a yawning gap in your audio tracks would be created by the insert edit. The problem with this method is that if there were any audio tracks directly below the inserted clip, they would be split and moved later in time to accommodate the freeze. In version 6 and earlier, if you wanted to create a freeze frame, you would park your playhead over the frame you wanted to freeze, press Shift-N to create the freeze, set the duration in the Viewer, then insert edit the freeze into the timeline at the playhead location. What I want to show you is how to use the new speed segment dialogue to create freeze frames that are much simpler and less time consuming than in previous version of Final Cut Pro. I covered these tools in much detail in our free final cut studio tutorials found on my website, so I won't cover them again here.

The Apple engineers have greatly simplified the approach to creating constant and variable speed changes to your clips. Of all the features getting the most attention are the new speed tools.

So if you please, below are my top ten most memorable and life-changing enhancements to the new Final Cut Pro 7. My goal is not to regurgitate these features, but rather show you why it's the little improvements that often make the biggest wake in the editorial world's collective conscious. By now you've most likely read about all the money shot features such as the new Speed Tools, expanded ProRes family, iChat Theater, etc. Final Cut Pro 7 First Look - 10 Things I love about Final Cut Pro 7Ĭlick here to view Ripple Training's free tutorial moviesĪbout this time every 2 years Ken petitions me for my written musings on the latest features of the new Final Cut Pro.

Final cut pro 7 widescreen