Project bloat can happen so easily, making navigating the browser or archiving your project more difficult. Here’s a quick tip from Pixel Heads Network on how to find all your unused assets and do some “manual media management.

Watch the video tutorial here.

You’re on a deadline, of course, when Compressor decides to crap on you. Of course. What do you do? You launch Qmaster preferences, and there isn’t a button to restart it… or is there? Jim Geduldick over at FinalCutUser shows a couple ways of troubleshooting when Compressor goes south.

Watch the video tutorial here.

If you’ve tried tracking in Motion, you know it can be a real pain. Luckily, Mocha, which has been available for After Effects for awhile now, is now available for FCP/Motion. This tutorial takes you through the workaround workflow, as it’s kind of convuluted. But it looks easier with great results.

Watch the video tutorial here.

Metadata is very helpful in organizing the masses of media we have. And here’s a cool tip from Final Cut User on how to do that in Compressor. So you’re able to export your videos, and people opening it up in iTunes or another program will automatically have the author, title, keywords, etc., fields filled in.

Watch the video tutorial here.

A large portion of what you learn about Final Cut will come from experience- sitting in front of the program and actually editing. And in doing that, it can be easy to miss the simple things. Jeff from SuiteTake has this great list of “The Top-Ten Things I Wish I Knew About Final Cut Pro…Ten Years Ago.”

Watch the video tutorial here.

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.