Final Cut Pro comes with many default preference settings, but you may want to add or adjust them. Go to the Final Cut Pro menu and choose Preferences. The Preferences window will open. Let’s start by clicking on the General preferences. You can choose how time is displayed in your sequence timeline and in the duration box in the center of the interface. The default is Hours, Minutes, Seconds and Frames, but you can choose to display Hours, Minutes, Seconds, Frames and Sub Frames.

You can choose only Frames or only Seconds. If we click on the Editing Preferences, you can see that the two timeline preferences are already checked by default: “Show Detailed Trimming Feedback” and “Position Playhead after Edit Operation”, and we recommend that you keep those checked. The “Show Audio reference waveforms” is also checked by default and we recommend keeping that checked.

The default duration for Still image duration is four seconds, but you can change that to whatever length you’d prefer. And the default duration for transitions is 1 second, which you can adjust here as well. Under the Playback preferences, the Background render option is selected by default, but you can disable it by un-checking this box, and you can change the amount of time that Final Cut Pro will wait to render if you are inactive here.

By default, the playback option “Create Optimized Media for Multicam clips”, is already selected and we recommend that you keep that selected, by toyu can also check the box to stop playback if a frame is dropped and you can check the box to warn you after playback that a frame has been dropped due to disk performance. You can change the default Pre and Post-roll duration and whether your player background is black, white or checkerboard.

If an A/V device is hooked up to your computer for you to output your sequence, you’ll be able to select you device here. The Import preferences look just like the options that appear along the right side of the import window. While the options selected here are the default options, you can choose different ones each time you import. Finally the Destinations Preferences allow you to adjust the export parameters for each type of destination.

You can also add your own Destination preference by clicking on the Add Destination button, and then by double-clicking on the destination that you’d like to add.

© Michael Rosenblum & Lisa Lambden 2015