The help manual crammed full of all kinds of information -- all of which is informative and useful.
Unfortunately, IMHO, -- sort of like FCPX, itself -- it leaves a lot of little things out.
For instance, it starts out by showing you a picture lableled "Events Browser", "Viewer", and "Timeline".
Then it points out on another photo that you can perform common tasks by click a button on the "toolbar", that the "main video track" is really now a "storyline" and that the "secondary tracks" are now "connected clips". Because Apple sez they are. But there's nothing about what the buttons on the "Toolbar" actually do. You have to muddle thru the manual until you run onto an explanation of how to do something, and with any luck, one of those buttons will be included.
Sure, you can mouse over them and get an idea (most of the time). But the rectangle under left side of the Viewer sez it "applies the transform effect to the selected clip". My first question was "What's a transform effect, and what did I just apply?"
In reality, it only brings up the "Transform" capability (What we know as the Motion window in FCP Classic) and put a stretchy frame around your clip with blue "draggy" handles and two dots in the middle of the clip so you can do a bunch of stuff, and then by pressing the blue "done" button in the upper right, THEN you "apply the transform effect to the selected clip."
So, yeah. Lots of good information, but with quite a few details missing. And the details that are there are easy to miss if you don't know the right search question to ask. For instance, searching for "clip length" tells me nothing about clicking and holding the cursor on a clip in the timeline (oooo. I mean, storyline) to see how long it is.
And yeah, Randall hits it on the nailhead: Apple should have put out a series of tutorials to get us started.
But I suppose that since they put out a whole pot full of tutorials for iMovie, they probably felt that doing the same for FCP X would make it look too much like iMovie Pro.
I found reference to some Ripple Training FCP X tutorials (rippletraining.com) for $40 that are doing the job for me. Didn't know about the other two suggestions, but I"m happy cuz I was able to get the iTunes version and load them on my iPad.
