8 The Rough Cut There is an old saying that carving a statue out of rock is easy: just cut away all of the rock that doesn't look good. We teach our students to think of nonlinear editing in the same way. In both cases, the process is about refinement. When carving rock, you progress through a series of tools. You may begin with a large sledgehammer, good for knocking away large chunks of rock. When you have chipped away the largest chunks, you switch to a large but crude chisel, good for chiseling away to the next layer of detail--and so on through finer and finer tools, until you are using sandpaper and finally a polishing cloth. Nonlinear editing is really very similar. The rough-cut phase and the techniques discussed in this chapter are like your favorite large chisel. If the process is all about eliminating what you don't want, this really starts in the shooting phase, when the shooter is selective about the footage they capture. The next major cutting of material is in the ingest phase, when you decide what, out of all of your acquired material, needs to go into Final Cut Pro for editing. The ingest stage is something like the big sledgehammer--good for eliminating big chunks of unusable stuff, but not good for detailed work. This chapter picks up when you have all of your material nicely organized as clips in the FCP Browser, and it is time to start cutting. This is an exciting moment, because the initial goal is to string together for the first time the actual clips that will make up your program. Don't worry about the fine details and the polish when you are rough cutting. There will be time and different tools for that later. The idea at this stage is to take your statue from a blocky chunk of stone to something that begins to resemble